Ten years ago, grime shows rarely happened at all, let alone in swanky places like Islington’s Upper Street. Not one, but three gluten-free bakeries trade here. To loosely paraphrase Skepta – the Mercury prize-winning grime MC leading the genre’s resurgence – grime shows were almost invariably shut down by the police back then. Often, this was after considering a risk assessment document called form 696, which apparently disproportionately targeted shows pairing an MC and a DJ. Guitar bands were exempt.
Anyone who lived through those days might be pinching themselves hard, as the TV and movie star Idris Elba lopes onto this tiny theatre stage to rail against homelessness (“That’s fuckery!”), and to introduce Tottenham’s top boy Skepta, who sold out London’s cavernous Alexandra Palace last December after 10 years in the game.
Last winter, Skepta partnered with Levi’s to run music production workshops in Tottenham’s Selby community centre. Tonight, the man born Joseph Junior Adenuga will mess around with the lights (“Blue! Purple!”) and raise £30,000 for the housing charity Shelter from this intimate gig and all merchandise proceeds. A “normal procedure”, he says.
New York hip-hop superstar A$AP Rocky is waiting in the wings to trade lines on Put That on My Set – just one of a slew of guests whose arrival electrifies an already ramped crowd. (There’s also Shorty, who partners Skepta on a verbally dizzying version of Detox). Some free tickets have been issued to Shelter service users. The sole detail that recalls the good old, bad old days is the haze of quality weed – and the undimmed urgency of these tracks, old and new.
Clad in shades and a bomber jacket, one of the most serious men in a poker-faced genre opens with the title track of last year’s standout Konnichiwa album. The far eastern tones of the production (courtesy of DJ Maximum tonight) still sound ice-cold. Everyone here knows every exasperated word to it – and to That’s Not Me, Skepta’s pivotal 2015 track.
One of the detours grime took in the late 00s found MCs rapping over dance tracks. Eventually, Skepta beat a disgusted retreat from the mainstream; the emphatic That’s Not Me marks the turning point at which Adenuga went back to grime basics. Tonight, Skepta’s brother Jme bounces on for the latter half of the tune; Skepta declares the “vibe” in here to be “proper”, and ready for the next track, the more recent Skepta Interlude.
If the road from pirate radio to N1 charity gigs has been winding, the journey to Skepta’s most recent release bears retelling too. Around 2014, the Channel 4 TV crime series Top Boy was being aired in North America. Set on a Hackney council estate, and featuring grime MC Kano and former So Solid Crew member Ashley Walters, Top Boy unexpectedly found a fan in hip-hop megastar Drake.
Tweeting his appreciation, it formally marked the rapper’s obsession with grime and his eventual “signing” to Skepta and Jme’s label, Boy Better Know. The affair has climaxed with arguably the biggest rapper in the world giving an entire track of his recent album, More Life, to a Skepta solo outing – in which the Londoner out-spits his host.
This isn’t Skepta Interlude’s live debut – Skepta performed it at Drake’s final O2 gig last month – but it is still box fresh. Phones spring out. There’s grandstanding; there’s griping about fake social media profiles (“block that account, it’s a catfish”)…
There is satisfaction too: with a bouncy Skepta rapping “just came back from the embassy”. Last year, Skepta’s much-anticipated tour of the US was cancelled after he was denied a visa. Now, the Banned from America Tour is going ahead, kicking off at Coachella in a week’s time – another step up for this theoretically parochial cultural form.
Studded with local phraseology, grime has proved surprisingly exportable, despite Skepta’s talk of spitting “in your face with extra bogey” (not what they call them in the States). Tonight, the lighting in the venue means that the crowd can make shadow-puppets project on to the backdrop: guns, and references to reproduction, making Interlude even more memorable. A new series of Top Boy is apparently in the works, too, thanks to Drake’s patronage (he also has an acting role). We also get one more high-calibre post-Konnichiwa track, No Security – a nagging tune about Skepta’s disdain for bling and fuss.
Ultimately, it would not be a Skepta gig without Shut Down. In February, Skepta played it live on the Brits, another moment of poetic justice for a genre racking them up.
Shut Down was, in part, penned as a furious riposte to viewers objecting to the Brits in 2015, when Kanye West brought out grime’s great and good. Tonight, it provokes two swirling moshpits, giving credence to grime’s other role – as, arguably, the punk rock of our age.
