“I didn’t plan on making a follow-up to ‘Ghetto Gospel’”

Last year I did a show at the Roundhouse, which was Ghetto Gospel: Ten Years. That was an album I never got to perform at the time it was released; I’d only performed songs like ‘Top 3 Selected’ or ‘Stage Show Don’, what we class as bangers. Also, my show has always been high energy. When I performed that album, I did a lot of songs that people connected with emotionally. That was the first time I actually saw that. So when I went back to the studio, it happened naturally again. For the first time I never had the title name before the album – normally I have the name and then do the writing around that. So when I had whittled the album down to a respectable amount of songs, it felt like a new testament of Ghetto Gospel, so that’s what I called it.

“No one really knows what a traditional grime album is”

Considering that people are aware of maybe only four albums – ‘Konnichiwa’, one of JME’s, ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Boy In Da Corner’ – what you’re left with is people judging a hundred artists by four people’s work. What I do think is that people label everything grime. Until the rise of drill, people labelled everything grime, so in terms of sound, somebody that’s black that makes music will be labelled grime. So what’s grime now?

“I don’t feel like a pioneer”

I’m not part of that generation. What it is is that the lines are blurred because of the time that some people have been able to survive. But Wiley’s like two generations before me. I grew up listening to Wiley, I listened to Pay As You Go, I listened to Heartless, they were my heroes. I came in when things were already started; More Fire had already blown up. I came in late, so I already felt like there was a culture there. A lot of what I made has influenced the culture, but I don’t think I invented a sound. I know that I changed the dynamic of how people spit or the way they approach grime music, but I still don’t feel like I made this scene. I think I helped clarify what grime is.

“Having a daughter has changed how I write”

My daughter’s aware of who I am and what I do so I want her to be proud and not live a double standard. I need to be able to raise her in the correct way and also lead by example. It’s affected my music a lot. She listens to my music now, she’s six, she can sing along to everything. It’s very weird, but she is me.

“I wrote ‘Black Rose’ for my daughter”

One day I went in the booth and I never said, ‘this is what I’m going to talk about’. I started a line, I don’t write things down ever, I just went in the booth and said, ‘my daughter, she a princess, the world ain’t slaughtering her skin yet,’ and there you have it. Those two lines built the concept. My agenda behind ‘Black Rose’, in all honesty, and truth, I’m speaking for my daughter, first and foremost, so that in the future if she faces these things she’ll be strengthened by what her dad did with his platform at a certain time when nobody else did. That’s why I did that. Other women have been able to relate, which is beautiful.

“But I don’t feel like I need to speak on other people’s behalf”

Now I’ve made ‘Black Rose’ people are, like, coming at me, like, ‘what’s next’, but to me, it’s a concept, it’s one instalment. Tomorrow I’m going to make another tune about something else. I still believe it, but it’s not something I’m gravitating towards because people have taken a like to that. That’s not who I am; I can talk about so many different things because that’s how I live my life.