JEHST INTERVIEW

Firstly let’s talk about your new record, The Dragon Of An Ordinary Family, interesting title. How’d this come about?
I was just playing with it as a title. The album had to evoke the same kind of things that the title gave to me. It comes from an old kids’ picture book. Someone asked me about it and afterwards, I was thinking ‘Yeah, what is the deal with this title?’ and I started thinking part of it is the juxtaposition of ‘Dragon’ with ‘Ordinary Family’. You’ve got references to everyday mundane shit that everyone can relate to, but at the same time there’s something otherworldly about it and something that’s kind of fantastical and people can’t quite put their finger on. It’s that mixture of the everyday with the surreal.

When did you begin work on the record?
 2004. There’s one or two tracks that were done when I was doing Nuke Proof Suit. I knew I wanted this to be entirely self-produced and I had an idea of what I wanted that to sound like. Again, I based it around the title. Everything on that record had to be tough and sound hard and the lyrics are predominantly battle-orientated. Nuke Proof Suit is about the survival of the fittest, or the survival of the best-equipped. If you’ve got a nuke proof suit, then you can survive anything. Nuke Proof Suit itself was a metaphor for your state of mind: you’ve gotta have such strength of mind that you’re impervious, nothing can break you.

So, ‘cos that was a specific, concept idea, I didn’t want certain tracks like ‘Poison’ that I had started writing. I was like, ‘Nah, this shit’s getting saved for the next album’ and that was kind of when the title of Dragon came up. So yeah, it’s a funny album, it hasn’t been made with any set process or set amount of time because I’ve been doing so much other stuff. I’d I’d get distracted then I’d be back to the album. It’s like looking at it fresh again every time. It’s kind of like I’ve stopped and started on this record year for the last five/six years. I’ve never really had any prolonged period of time to focus on it, but that’s really how I like to work.

I’ve produced an album by Kashmere called Kingdom of Fear which is coming out soon. We did this all in back-to-back sessions. The beats were done on the spot while he was writing the vocals. It was all done from scratch over a couple of weeks and then it was revisited and during the mixes later. It’s a creative process that we just banged out whereas Dragon is the total opposite of that. It’s like a scrapbook.

Does the track ‘Starting Over’ mark a new beginning for you as an MC?
Maybe – I mean not so much as an MC, I guess just as a person. In some ways it reflects what I’ve been saying about the whole album being stop/start and being revisited over time. Every time you start over, your intentions are different and interpretations of things are different. I was in the studio trying to knuckle down and say ‘Right, you’ve finally got a bit of space. Put the album together, just draw a line under it.’ I knew I wanted to add a couple new things and I had beats that I wanted to work with. I found the lyric in the pad and it was like ‘Oh shit, this is actually really good’. I think when I had written it I had dismissed it as not being complicated enough but when I came back to it, I was like, ‘Yo, this is kinda ill!’ it just developed from that.

The true heads that follow all the underground shit know that I’m still here and I’m still doing stuff but there’s a lot of people who bought my albums in the past who may have have been thinking, ‘I don’t know what happened to that guy’, ‘cos I haven’t been visible in that way.

The track ‘England’ couldn’t be a better representation of the atmosphere in South London after the murders some years ago. Can you talk us through how this track came about?
Totally of its own accord. The beat was by Beat Butcha and sounded like it was saying ‘England.’ I started writing it on the train with the beat in my headphones. It wasn’t like ‘Oh, I’m gonna write now.’ The first couple of lines came to me and then it just wrote itself. The thing that sticks in my mind, I remember changing trains at London Bridge or whatever, but I was still writing it in my head. I was stopping, carrying on, jotting a bit more down. It was recorded as a demo. I just did a quick one take and that was it. The intention was to re-record it but whenever I came back to it, it never had the same energy and the same vibe. Maybe being recorded on a fucked up mic in a fucked up situation added to the rawness of it. But, yeah, I’m really happy that it’s actually on the album cos there were points where it was gonna get left off. It provokes such a response from people – it’s making people think, I guess. Making people sit up and listen – with a lot of rap you just switch off, now.

There’s definitely a gap in the market for real UK Hip Hop at the moment. You’re one of the few covering it. Where’s everyone gone?

To the Job Centre.

It was when the Lowlife label went, wasn’t it? Everything went downhill.

Depends how you look at it. Musically and in terms of creativity and specific artists and their careers – yeah, you could definitely say it’s gone downhill. But then from another point of view, there’s the whole commercial market that’s emerged and the fact that UK rap is fully accepted within the mainstream. It was kind of ghettoised , the way it was. I think the issue now is, do artists wanna make Hip Hop that has a bit of imagination and lyrical content and take advantage of the fact that rap is part of the wider pop culture of today? It’s to your advantage in the terms that people aren’t immediately gonna shut off when you tell them you’re a rapper from the UK. ‘They’re not gonna make any money, ain’t gonna sell no records’, that was the general perception within the music industry then. What we did discredited that myth. You’ve had this whole commercial thing that popped off the back of that and also off the back of the whole Grime movement. It’s always gonna be a creative springboard for like some commercial shit..

Personally, I feel positive with where things are gonna go and just interested in seeing how things are gonna develop. It’s like yeah, things will evolve, there’s still a lot of room, and as you said, there’s a big gap for Hip Hop that is actually Hip Hop, not just rap music. But most of the UK Hip Hop isn’t really Hip Hop. They didn’t even call it that before, but now they do. Before, they didn’t wanna call it UK Hip Hop, but now they do. I think that’s really interesting in itself – I think it marks a milestone because what’s happened now it that is what UK Hip Hop is. You couldn’t have really said that a few years ago. But now it’s safe to say that if you wanna know what UK Hip Hop is today, it’s not me [laughs]. It’s commercial, dance orientated, radio orientated, that’s the dominant thing. It appeals to a very narrow demographic. A lot of it is pop music for teenagers… or younger. It’s interesting though, I’m hoping to see certain younger cats come up and flip it but, you know, we’ll see how it develops.

You were just a kid of 19 when you released your debut, Premonitions, back in ’99? Since then you’ve been changing the face of the UK hip hop scene. What got you into Hip Hop in the beginning?
I’ve been into Hip Hop since I was seven or eight years old, when I was hearing Run DMC, getting into graffiti, graffiti books like Subway Art, Spraycan Art. All that appealed to me, even when I was that age. I started to get into the music and a friend of mine, he was getting stuff passed down to him from older kids and he’d pass stuff onto me and then it just developed naturally. I grew up in that era of early Def Jam, Cold Chillin’, BDP through to UK stuff like Blade and Demon Boyz, London Posse, all that old stuff. Even though it wasn’t that visible to the mainstream, there was a lot of UK stuff in the early 90′s and late 80′s. It just quietened down a lot in the mid 90′s and then shit didn’t really start again until the late 90′s, with people like Lewis Parker, and Roots Manuva. I’m still a fan of all that stuff, so there’s a natural progression.

Hip Hop’s been such a big part of my life. Commercialisation is inevitable but there will always be real shit and it will always have its time and it will always have its place within the mainstream as well. If you look at America, some of the biggest commercial artists that have had staying power are ones that are also accepted by the underground, they’re artists who also have a lot of credibility and authenticity. Biggie, Tupac, Jay Z, Kanye West, these are all people that have come from actual roots. People talk about Reggae and then Roots Reggae. I’m starting to see Hip Hop like that, [Laughs] like Roots Hip Hop.

I’m always starting over, always starting again. Right now I’m feeling really refreshed, like I just wanna get in the studio ‘cos I’ve got the weight of the new record off my back but I’ve got ideas and I’ve got a fresh take on things. Sometimes I get bored with Hip Hop and Rap, ‘cos it seems like a limited format, but then it’s not, it’s actually a limitless format, you’ve just gotta remember to use it in that way. A lot of times people forget to use it in the right way. The beauty of it is that it’s open to anything, anything you wanna bring into the mix. It’s still Hip Hop.

What you listening to right now?

Right now… My mind goes blank whenever I get asked this. Danny Brown. The new Fatima EP on Eglo, that’s real nice. This question always throws me, then later on I’m always like ‘Why didn’t I say this? Why didn’t I mention that?’ I’m still listening to that Pharoahe Monch, the ‘W.A.R’ album. There’s that new DJ Premiere ‘Beats That Collected Dust’, a couple of tunes on there that are just ill. I’ve been listening to vibraphone versions of Bach [laughs], The Telemachus album. I just listen to anything, all kinds of shit. I’ve been listening to Shafiq Husayn, an old one, called The Frequency Clash. It’s just mental. I’d never heard it before but I picked that up recently, that’s ill.

In the beginning, how’d it all kick off?

I was into it from when I was young, always dabbling with it. Obviously when you’re a pre-teen, you’re only taking things so seriously. The main thing I did as a kid was draw, but I was always creating stuff. As a teenager I started getting more into the music and then it developed naturally. Doing Premonitions was the first attempt to try and do it, you know, go in the studio and actually try and make a record.

We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing We’d had some studio experience and done demos before, some little shows and whatever but I was like 17 or 18 making that record. It’s a lot more technically advanced now. My computer was an Atari ST, purely for sequencing, I couldn’t record sounds into it.

Doing Premonitions was just like, ‘I wanna do this to say that I’ve done it’, it wasn’t a career move, it was a statement: this is what I’m into and I wanna do it. I was studying illustration, that’s what I was actually doing at that time in terms of trying to make careers moves and shit. I was doing a degree in illustration but the music was so well received that it just took over and that was it.

The significant milestones were putting out Premonitions, hooking up with Low Life, and Lewis Parker. Low Life came to represent a vocal point for those artists and fans of those artists but actually it’s much bigger than that, people were doing their own things independently. That was a big thing. High Plains Drifter was a big turning point. I knew from the response that it was changing shit, not just for me, but for Hip Hop and Rap in this country. I knew that at the time. I knew I was making my contribution and I knew that I had something to offer.

I’m fully grateful for all the love that I get. I’ve heard some pretty wild claims [laughs] about how good I am, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but I take it as a massive compliment but at the same time. I feel like there’s a lot more to do, much more to establish. I don’t wanna preach to the converted, there’s more people out there to reach out to. It’s not a fame thing – it’s empowerment. The more recognition you get, then the more doors are open to you in terms of creative opportunities. I just love to get creative and work with different people.

A lot of the mad talented people people I work with aren’t having the opportunity to work professionally and it limits their ability. The more established you are, the easier it is to work with another artist – you can make that happen. I’m trying to work on this project with M-Phazes. He’s really established himself. Whenever I pick up an American album he seems to have a beat on it He reached out to work with me some time ago – it’d be great right now if I could just say ‘Right, fuck it, I’m hopping on a plane and going back out to Australia and carrying on the work’. Right now, I wanna make up for lost time. I wanna bang out the Phazes record, bang out another record of my own. I’m trying to do some work with Paul White. He’s got a project coming out soon on One-Handed Music. I’m just still hungry, I’m hungry like I’m 16 again.

What have you got planned for the coming months?

Desperately trying to get in the studio. Obviously I’ve got to do shows and promote the album. It’s a big mistake for artists to make to think ‘Right my album’s out now, work done’. That’s when the work starts. The minute it becomes available to the public, all the work you did leading up to that point is a different thing. Once the record’s out there you gotta work to keep it visible. You can’t just assume people know about it ‘cos it’s out. To me, a new album is something that’s come out in the last year, I think it takes that long now. It’s changed a lot from going to your local record shop seeing what was new in that week. Sometimes it’ll take people six months to catch on to a record. You gotta plug it relentlessly – so I’ll be doing that.

I’ll be at Outlook festival in September, I think we’re playing the Big Chill actually.

How was the launch party?

Yeah, good.

Did you have a say in who you were playing with?

I didn’t get to pick who was there but Stretch Armstrong and Rob Swift were there, both legends in their own rights. I felt kind of honoured to say it was billed for my album launch. In the mid 90′s, they were like infamous for freestyle sessions on their radio show. There was a dude in the UK who had a label and a shop called Liberty Grooves. I think it was straight bootleg, but he pressed a bunch of this shit up on wax. We’re talking about Nas, Bootcamp, Organized Konfusion, Big L, Large Professor and people bringing their own beats. Those freestyle tapes were a major influence.

Yeah that was dope, so shout out to Spin Doctor for putting that on. It was good, really good. It was nice to be doing the main room in what is probably the biggest club in London on a Friday night. I think that says a lot for Hip Hop now, in terms of it being accepted as being commercially viable. There was a time when it would have been unheard of to say ‘There’s gonna be Hip Hop in the main room’ and this straight Dance music in Room 2 and 3.

One last question, what was the last track you listened to?

Beautiful Music, the last track on Action Bronson’s Dr. Lector album. I like to listen to albums all the way through. If I’m happy to flick, then that shit’s disposable. I’m still in that vinyl mentality – you put the needle on the groove and you let it play through to the end and you do the same again. None of this trigger-happy iPod shuffle shit. But yeah, it’s a good album, it’s pretty dope. He’s definitely a sick MC.

I’ll have a listen to that one then.

Yeah, if you’re into raw New York shit, which there ain’t a lot of nowadays, check it out.