On a Sunday evening last November, that time of year when you can feel the cold grip of winter tighten every day, I found out the brother of a boy I mentor had been stabbed to death. During the same week, another boy I mentor was robbed at knifepoint whilst walking through the wrong part of Brixton, South London—punished for disregarding the fickle code of the roads.



The following Friday evening after leaving work, I was beelining across the busy, regenerated Elephant & Castle roundabout. But my path was intercepted by a young man in front of me pulling out a black kershaw knife from his tracksuit bottoms. He swung it at another man near him, who dodged the attack and flicked out his own blade. For a few seconds the pair swiped at one another, so I shouted at them to stop and they looked up, self-conscious, before dispersing into the crowds of commuters. We were surrounded by hundreds of people, yet nobody seemed to notice what had happened; it was as if I’d imagined the whole entire thing. I walked home tearful, feeling helpless.

“They Say Drill Music Is Why All The kids Are dying today Iyt Kool But I Was In Primary School When I Saw Someone Gushing With Blood What Was The Influence Then [sic]?” tweeted Dimzy from 67 earlier this month, in response to the media frenzy blaming drill music for London’s youth violence epidemic. I keep reading his words because, unlike most commentary on this topic, the question he asks is sharpened by first-hand experience. It answers itself: violence begets violence.

Over the last three years I have held hundreds of discussion workshops and conversations with teenagers in South London. I’ve heard them talk about brothers or cousins or uncles who have been stabbed. I’ve heard them recount stories of witnessing a knife being brandished in the street, or finding a balaclava on their sibling’s bedroom floor, or hearing gunshots echo across their housing estate. After a desperate attempt to feel protected on his journey home, one boy on my programme was excluded from school for carrying dismantled scissors in his blazer pocket. “I feel like I’m living in a war,” another boy, who couldn’t last a day without being sent out of a lesson, once told me. “He’s too easily distracted!” his teachers would rant. You don’t say.

It just so happens that over the period of time in which Brixton has become my home, the wildfire of drill music has caught aflame. On any evening at Marcus Lipton Community Centre in northeast Brixton, where I volunteer and where several local drill artists hang out, as food bubbles on the stove and people play Fifa, you can always count on a rumbling drill beat to provide the soundtrack. For many young people, it is more than music to be consumed: it’s a way of life and a ‘voice of the streets’, as gatekeeper Kenny Allstar self-describes. If you zoom outwards, I would argue it is a war report on life in the urban trenches of austerity Britain.

In 2016, I noticed that the more I could talk about drill music, the more depth I could achieve in conversations with young people. Driven by my lifelong interest in London music, combined with the determination to be effective at my job as a youth worker, I started documenting the genre’s rise through my writing. For months I would sit down to run workshops with my mentees and we would collaboratively unpick and debate all things drill: the beefs, geographies, videos, lyrics and more. One time, a boy in Year 8 sat slouched in the canteen at lunchtime detention, his performative screwface staring at the floor, so I went over to chat to him. We hadn’t met before. He gave one word answers to my questions, refusing to show any weakness or vulnerability, or interest in what I had to say. But when other students started trickling into the room and one yelled at me: “Sir, you heard the new Harlem track?” the young man’s eyes widened, his mask of bravado slackened, and his normal twelve-year-old self was freed. I had conducted a whole year of trust-building in two minutes. From that moment on, he became one of my most committed mentees.

What fascinates me most about drill is its ethical complexity. “Do violent lyrics reflect an honest social reality and therefore serve the purpose of empowering its artists? Or do they reinforce and exacerbate the issues they describe?” I posed in a long-read for FACT last April, for which I interviewed top producer Carns Hill in a pub on Brixton Hill. He kept stressing to me how he saw his beats as a platform for elevating his community. “It’s not my mission to make violence and my past acceptable in society. Drill is a good platform to get you recognised as an artist, but then you have to expand from there,” 410’s AM told me when I later interviewed him and Skengdo in the damp car park of their estate. And I have remained caught by the lyricism of Harlem Spartans’ Mizormac—the way he switches so effortlessly between bars of outrageous violence and those of deep, social reflection. “I grew up in the Harlem slums/trapped in the trap with packs and cats/I’m trapped in the trap with drugs/now look at what we’ve all become,” he spits on “War”.