Last Of The Summer Grime.

Yesterday was almost certainly the last time I'll visit the Museum of London at its home in the Barbican. It's moving. In four years time it will reopen a few hundred yards down the round in the former Smithfield meat market. If the plans Mo and myself saw yesterday are anything to go by the building, with huge neon lettering on the roof, looks more like a nightclub.

But I trust it will still be good. This old place certainly has been. The last two exhibitions they're running are on grime and the footballer Harry Kane! Kane's obviously a pretty good footballer and with fifty goals for the England national team it's surely only a matter of time before he breaks Wayne Rooney's record. But I can't imagine an exhibition devoted to him being all that interesting to anyone except the Tottenham hardcore.

I mean, he's not mega-interesting, is he? So grime it was then. Neither Mo nor myself profess to be anything like experts on grime music but I do, at least, like much of it. I can't say I roll particularly deep but I enjoy the music of artists like Stormzy, Skepta, Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Lethal Bizzle, Kano, Afrikan Boy, and Meridian Dan. I was gonna say J Hus too but Wikipedia has him down as British hip hop/afroswing (?)/road rap!

 

I know what grime sounds like (most of us do) but if you were to come to this exhibition to learn about the music, its influences, and its lyrical themes you may have walked a way a little bit disappointed. I get that they can hardly have the likes of German Whip, Big For Your Boots, or Numbers blasting out of the speakers while others nearby are trying to learn about the Roman conquest of London or the Great Fire but my main gripe (and it's a very minor one - the exhibition was free after all) is that the show was not so much about grime as a genre but the environment grime grew up in and the way it's been policed and racially profiled.

That still made for an interesting (if small) show. The exhibits weren't particularly thrilling but the films were hugely illuminating. There's a short video of Skepta's 2003 song DTI in which he mocks Department of Trade and Industry officials and there's another segment from a 1996 BBC documentary, First Sight:Radio Renegades in which those DTI officials and pirate broadcasters in the East End of London talk about the cat and mouse game they play. 

Studios are set up in unremarkable looking flats, transmitters and aerials are installed on the top of the highest available block of flats, DTI officials go up to the roof, pull them down, twist them so they can't be used, and, sometimes, take a hammer to the vinyl records (or vinyls!) that the DJs have played. Then the pirates start again. It seems an enormous waste of time.

And for what? To try and prevent people illegally circumnavigating broadcast laws, for sure. But also to try and stop young working class people, often - but not always - black, getting their creative efforts out there. Britain should be proud of grime. Though it borrows, sometimes steals, from American hip hop and Jamaican dancehall culture, it is a truly homegrown scene.

The most authentic working class culture since the house music revolution or the punk scene. Possibly their equal. There are clips at the Museum of London of artists like JME, Tinchy Stryder, and Skepta performing sets for pirate radio stations like Rinse FM and Raw Blaze and whereas some of the lyrical concerns are regionally specific (to the degree that if you don't live in the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest, or Barking and Dagenham you probably won't have a clue what's being referenced) the energy, and the sonic innovation - often achieved at very low cost, is undeniable.

The theme of the censorship of black creativity is one that runs through the show. There was no place for grime in the mainstream so that necessitated the use of pirate radio. In the year 2000 alone there were 1,300 DTI raids on unlicensed pirate radio stations in London. Fed up with this, Rinse FM vowed to go legal in 2006. It took them four years.

In 2005, the infamous Form 696 was introduced. Form 696 was a risk assessment form aimed specifically at events that featured DJs and MCs and potential promoters were asked to submit information regarding the ethnicity of performers and the likely ethnicity of audience members. It's hard to imagine someone promoting an indie night above a pub having to do that. Interestingly, Feargal Sharkey (ex-singer of The Undertones and then head of UK Music) sought a judicial review against this obvious injustice but it took until 2017 before it was scrapped. 

The story doesn't end there though. In 2019, drill artists Skengdo and AM received prison sentences for breaching an injunction and performing their song Attempted 1.0. It is believed to be the first time in British legal history that somebody has been sent to prison for singing a song.

Gentrification is the other major theme of the exhibition. Areas like Shadwell, Stepney, Globe Town, and Bow sit in what's almost a valley of comparatively low rise buildings between the skyscrapers of both the City and Docklands. Huge, unimaginable, wealth is stored in these glass and steel monsters - much of it owned by people who may never have even set foot in London.

Many of the luxury flats in the region sit empty as they're used as trading chips by rich Chinese, Arabs, and, until recently, Russian oligarchs. The myth of the trickle down economy that is peddled by the ultra wealthy is just that - a myth. Most of those who live between these two super rich areas see nothing of the money that is stored there and though most agree renewal and investment is needed in these areas there's an overwhelming sense that the political classes see the locals as a problem to be moved on and not as people who need help. People who may benefit from some of the wealth that the Olympics, for example, brought to the area.

Not least when the grime artists themselves have brought people into the area. On a trip to Kyiv nearly fifteen years ago, a young man, Artem, who was showing me and my friend Shep round (and got us free tickets to Dynamo Kyiv v Zaporizhzhia) asked us about Hackney and Bow because he'd heard it on grime tapes, DJ Slimzee's Sunday afternoon show would have people travel in to the city just so they could pick up the signal and, of course, Stormzy (admittedly from Croydon, not Bow) has headlined Glastonbury and become something of a national treasure.

For his troubles, Slimzee received an ASBO that, for five years, stopped him from accessing the roof of any building over five storeys high. Other pirate stations would sometimes disappear over the night once the law closed them down and politicians would try to win over the hearts of middle England by being tough on grime artists. Even though David Cameron once suggested we should try hugging a 'hoodie'!

Alongside RiskyRoadz's handwritten storyboard (signed by Kano), Rhythm Division record bags, photos of 'grime gran' Margie Keefe (RiskyRoadz' grandmother), and Trinity Korg keyboards, we get a chance to take a video tour, in a black cab, of some of the locations that were pivotal to the early days of the grime story.

RiskyRoadz (Roony Keefe) is both an early enthusiast and advocate of grime who went on to document the scene's early days. But he's also a black cab driver and with various figureheads of the early scene his passengers he takes a spin round places like Stratford, Leytonstone and the Isle of Dogs and stops so his fares and him can reminisce about such locations as Jammer's graffiti strewn basement (or 'dungeon') in E11, the EQ club in E15, and the Crossways Estate in Bow. 

The Deja Vu FM pirate radio station is now the site of the Copper Box Arena in the Olympic Park. From grime to handball in a few short years! That's the kind of gentrification that Dr Joy White is on hand to both disseminate and dismantle. In the last decades the number of youth centres in London has nearly halved and Covid has only made things worse. In Newham alone the number has fallen from eighteen to thirteen since 2019.

That makes it more difficult for emerging new artists (be they grime, drill, road rap, or some genre I am yet to even hear of) to make the connections they need to realise their dream, to find the space to write and rehearse, and, ultimately, to come through and end up, like Stormzy, headlining Glastonbury.

Despite this though, I am all but certain new (and, for some, challenging) forms of music will emerge because that's our human nature. It is impossible for creative people not to be creative. Grime is one of London's, one of the UK's, most impressive cultural movements ever. It was long overdue that it was celebrated by a major institution like the Museum of London. My only regret is the show could have been much larger. Thanks to Mo for joining me for this story of grime and punishment.