H5. ‘If You Can’t Say It, Spray It’
So I was living in this concrete jungle which was Heath Town, Wolverhampton. I was doing as much graffiti as I possibly could. I was doing so much graffiti that I’d run out of wall space – not just in the flat that I was living in, but on the whole estate. And for some reason the police couldn’t catch me. It became crazy, it became whatever it was. And then, all of a sudden, thanks to Bombin’, I was in New York meeting my heroes – physically living the dream. There’s an interview with me on YouTube from that time in New York, wearing a fur coat, with a drink in my hand, but not pissed, just relaxed in myself – full of beans, full of balls like steel, full of everything, every bit of sperm is kicking hard. I’m just drenched in ego, spunky as fuck, totally fucking ruling. My accent’s all over the place because I’m talking about these New York graffiti guys and so there’s a little bit of them in there, a little bit of West Midlands hanging on for dear life, and even a little bit of Ireland out of nowhere ’cos that’s where the interviewer came from. I adapt. That’s how I was and still am now – I adapt. I guess it’s partly a children’s-home thing. When you’ve got all those lockers with all that different music in it you’ve got to find a way to fit in, and you’ve got to find a way to stand out. So when suddenly you’re on Staten Island doing this graffiti piece and the artist who you’ve looked up to from afar says, ‘You ready for this, man, you fucking English boy?’ you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Let’s make this happen,’ straight off the bat. I remember he laughed. It was the same when I was in Miami, in the flea 256
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markets, people would speak to me in Spanish, which obviously I don’t understand, but I would still interact with them: ‘Yo . . .’ I’ll play, I’m street, I get it. When I got back to Wolverhampton, once Bombin’ had come out, and also because of the big graffiti events we’d done locally (like the one where Brim Fuentes came up to Birmingham library), I’d have kids coming up to Heath Town on little pilgrimages. Not like the organised ones you see now around Shoreditch – official tours of the graffiti museum – just individuals who were into it finding their way up to Heath Town from Birmingham, Coventry, Leamington Spa to look at the graffiti. It was nice to have given people a good reason to go to the place I lived in, because there hadn’t been many tourists before. Sometimes these kids would catch me on the estate and I’d bring them back to the flat and school them out and tell them stories about New York. I guess there was a bit of a Pied Piper vibe going on and, alongside the roller-hockey and the breakdancing, it was an early taste of being a bit of a celebrity on the underground, which I liked. Another thing that had happened in the course of Bombin’ SI DE H
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was that I’d met Robert Del Naja. I was quite competitive with some of the other UK graffiti writers – especially Mode 2 and some of the London guys – but I never saw Delje as a rival, always as an ally, especially once he’d given me the tape with Miles Davis’s Decoy on it, which fucking blew my mind. I think I met him at Bristol carnival first, for Bombin’, and the big graffiti show at the Arnolfini gallery, and then we did a video for the band Westworld up in London, in Hammersmith somewhere, where we were painting this Mini on the set. I think that was the first time I did speed – I didn’t realise it would keep me awake for three days. I was a bit of a bad lad in those days. I used to go down to Bristol in my gold three-litre Rover – no tax, no insurance, sawnoff shotgun in the boot, which I’d then carry round in my coat like I was in the fucking Sweeney or something. Even how we got that car showed what wannabe gangsters we were. I saw an ad in the paper for this car for sale for £500 down in Leicester. Five or six of us went down – me, my brother Melvin, a couple of other brothers – and we basically strong-armed this kid on an estate. I think we gave him £275 for it. It’s not my proudest moment, but at least we didn’t leave him completely empty-handed. Anyway, we took this car back to Wolverhampton and I used to drive it around like a madman – big boombox on the back shelf, because the stereos back then weren’t cutting it. The batteries that thing used to get through, it was unbelievable – the big heavy ones, too. I used to commission kids to nick them for me in return for a couple of spliffs of weed and, of course, the privilege of finding me batteries. I was a proper little Fagin on the estate. At that time I was living next door to a gambling house in a block called Hawthorn House, so because my door was always open, people often used to walk into my flat thinking they were gonna win some money. 258
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I’d often end up bombing down the M5 to Bristol for sound- system house parties in St Paul’s. It was a mental time – as well as Delje, I met Mushroom, Tricky, everyone, all of what would become Massive Attack, who were then mostly in The Wild Bunch. Milo was the main man, though. It was almost as if hip-hop culture had dropped like a glass in England, and the glass had shattered into different pieces. Manchester had the breaking, Bristol had the parties, London had the breaking and a few of the parties, Birmingham and London had the graffiti. When I was first at the Dug Out club in Bristol with The Wild Bunch, I was just there as a punter – it was the next step on from the Half Moon Club, really. To me, when I first met them, the Bristol people were the absolute bollocks. They were the start of me realising that all those breaks on those mixtapes I had actually came from somewhere. They brought in that crate-digging aspect and opened the way for me to go back to the source, which was what rare groove was all about. I didn’t even know what that was till I saw The Wild Bunch and heard Nellee Hooper playing songs like Maceo and the Macks’ ‘Cross the Track’. That was when I started to realise that these breaks were frozen in time. There’s a kind of concertina effect where all these ripples from the past come through, but into your present. Another record which made a huge impression on me was ‘If You Don’t Give Me What I Want (I Gotta Get It Some Other Place)’ by Vicki Anderson (Jhelisa Anderson’s aunt) – the piano on that record haunted me for years. It was almost like it politically motivated me, but not in a political cause, more in terms of being drawn to these chicks who were getting a hard time from the guys that were getting all the kudos for the music. It was almost like, ‘Yeah! Right on!’ – even though maybe that’s a bit ironic, given that I wasn’t treating the women in my own life very SI DE H
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well at the time. But I think it was an early awakening for me in terms of how the feminine side of music really works: hang on a minute, the real soul of the music is not about the guys. I guess the aggression would kind of get pent up by the oppression of society, because someone’s got to get food in the kitchen, but once it’s there, then someone’s got to cook it. I always felt that whenever there was an argument in a children’s home, or with foster-parents, the kitchen was the place I remembered going to make it all right: that was where the love came from. And it was the same with the music. As I was trying to work out what it was about these tunes that drew me to them, I started going to Salvations, which wasn’t religious, but a club that played rare groove, and I guess there was a big spiritual element in a lot of that music. Once people like Public Enemy started to come through I could really feel that music – but at the same time also all the original music that the samples had come from. That was like stepping through the cartoon to find Eldorado for me – you go through the waterfall and you’re in another world of the original music with the breaks in it. And it’s not just a music of black origin thing either, because you’re thinking, ‘That’s why De La Soul are so soulful, because they’re borrowing from Hall & Oates!’ – who are obviously borrowing from black music in their turn, so it all becomes this big circle. Like if you think about ‘One More Night’ by Can, could you honestly try to tell me that is not a soulful record, even though it’s made by a bunch of far-out German guys and their Japanese mate in a fucking studio taking LSD? As usual, it was all about lamenting the loss of the mother for me – locating the soul in music. That’s probably why I have so many female vocalists onstage with me and so few male ones if you see me play live now. It’s also maybe why I wasn’t so drawn 260
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to the early stirrings of UK hip-hop that were coming through at the time. You might think that would’ve been a logical way for me to go when I came back from New York full of the excitement of the Bronx, but in a way I think that was what stopped me doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Rodney P and Bionic from the London Posse, and for me Silver Bullet was way ahead among UK rappers. Cookie Crew going out to America was also a big deal, but I didn’t feel any desire to emulate what any of these people were doing. I almost felt – as strange as this might seem given that I was living in Heath Town doing graffiti at the time – that the social backdrop we had wasn’t depleted enough for the music to quite sit right. Like it’s time hadn’t come yet – Wolverhampton could be bleak, but it wasn’t the Bronx. When I went there and saw what they were singing about I just thought, ‘Fuck, this is not a game, they’re actually really singing about it.’ It was a similar thing a few years later for me when drum ’n’ bass started. Because I’d done the reggae thing in the eighties, when I was wearing a sheepskin and growing dreadlocks and the power of the bass bins at the Half Moon was making me physically sick, I didn’t feel the need to have jungle MCs on the tracks I was doing. It was a bit ‘been there, done that’ for me, and I think that’s where some of that divide came from. New York was always the Mecca, and I felt Britain needed music of its own. I think the industry wanted Americanism, that’s fair to say. And I think the buildings and the guns and knives that the US rappers were singing about were a glamorous fascination which we hadn’t quite experienced yet, which was why the language never really stuck. That’s also why I was so excited when the rave scene started happening – because a load of people gathering in a field essentially saying, ‘We’re SI DE H
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not anything, our music is faceless,’ and being berated by the Thatcherites, that felt like more of a homegrown thing to me. I guess drum ’n’ bass, and then maybe grime, ended up being the fulfilment of what homegrown UK hip-hop would sound like. In my opinion French rap was way ahead of ours in the eighties and early nineties. I think maybe the social conditions they had on their HLM estates were maybe more in line with the projects of New York, and the fact that they had to rap in their own language made it easier for them not to copy the Americans. There was certainly speed in their dialect: you only have to watch La Haine to see that. I remember when the south London graffiti writer Mode 2 moved to France it felt like he was ahead of his time. Although there was a certain amount of animosity between us – hip-hop kind of bred that, and we did feel that a bit with the graffiti writers from London, though I don’t know if it was them getting on our backs or vice versa – he taught me a lot about graffiti, because he was really good at characters. In fact, I think he’s been one of the greatest graffiti writers of all time. We got on fine later on – and still do now. He sent me a great book of his with the inscription, ‘From bitter rivals to close friendship,’ and I even asked him to paint a Saturnz Return billboard for me. For me, graffiti was always – and still is – the movement within hip-hop culture that I’ve felt a part of the most. That’s why I’ll always feel so close to people like 3D and Mode 2, because we speak with the same aerosol tongue. I guess the concept of the hieroglyphics – physical representations of a language that I could understand even if some other people couldn’t – was a big deal to me, and not least from a dyslexic perspective. The vibrancy of the word ‘love’ resides in the colours it’s filled with, more than the word itself – I think that’s what I’m trying to say. It couldn’t be spoken about, but it could be shown. 262
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