Here in the UK, the term Hip hop was finally embraced across the board in ’86. The number one shop for the music was Groove Records in Soho. They changed their weekly ‘Electro Funk’ chart to ‘Hip Hop’ in February and Street Sounds updated their influential ‘Electro’ series to ‘Hip Hop’ that same year.

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In the UK Pop Charts and on TV programs of the time including Top Of The Pops, The Tube, Club Mix and Solid Soul you had some old skool artists still hanging on at the start of the year such as Kurtis Blow and Lovebug Starski. There were the likes of Whistle, Mantronix and The Real Roxanne who made a big impression for a short period, essentially bridging the gap between old and new skool. I’d add Fat Boys to this category too, although they wouldn’t actually have a chart hit until the following year. Then by the end of 1986 it was all about Run DMC.

The biggest Hip hop event of the year was on July 19th at Wembley Stadium. UK Fresh, organised largely by Morgan Khan from the Street Sounds and Streetwave record labels and hosted by Mike Allen of the Capital Rap Show. The daytime and evening featured a mixture of: old skool acts like Grandmaster Flash, Lovebug Starski and Afrika Bambaata; plus Electro era favourites Captain Rock and the World Class Wreckin’ Cru (featuring Dr Dre and DJ Yella before NWA); heavy hitters of the day such as Roxanne Shante, The Real Roxanne and Mantronix, plus Steady B, Sir Mix A Lot and Just Ice who would all go on to become underground stars in the late 80s and early 90s. Here’s a news report that went out before the event.

Representation of homegrown UK hip hop artists was still limited. Here in Wales even more so, despite scenes starting to bubble up in Cardiff, Swansea and Cwmbran especially. Llwybr Llaethog, a London based crew from Blaenau Ffestiniog, released their groundbreaking Dull Di Drais EP but wouldn’t hit TV screens until a little while later. Geraint Jarman could be seen rapping in Welsh on S4C’s Drannoeth y Ffair which was recorded live at the Majestic in Caernarfon the previous October. However the track in question ‘Dim Lle i Droi’ owes more to Ian Dury and The Clash than anyone from New York and as great as it is, I’ve never seen or heard the track referred to as hip hop before.

The first real taste of what was happening in London that year was on a BBC 2 music marathon called Rock Around The Clock in September. As well as including US acts like DJ Cheese & Word of Mouth, T La Rock and Mantronix, a segment of the program called ‘Hip hop Grandmaster Class’ also featured Faze One live from the Town & Country Club. The group had appeared on Hip hop 15 in the Street Sounds series and also had some minor US attention when their track ‘Layin’ Down A Beat’ was picked up by Sutra Records in New York. The label which had been responsible for launching the Fat Boys’ career. This undoubtedly led them to be the first British rap group featured on US television.

The following month a programme called Chasing Rainbows on Channel 4 covered Southall’s Circuit Crew. Although the episode was largely about the Bhangra scene, it included the young collective of rappers, DJs and breakers bringing Hip hop to the wider South Asian community. Hip hop would go on to become a big influence on the Bhangra music of the late 80s and 90s (the clip below says 1987 but the program was broadcast on 11th October 1986.

In November The Tube did a whole feature on British Hip hop that included Faze One and Hardrock Soul Movement aka Max & Dave who started out with the pioneering soul, rnb and hip hop sound system Mastermind Roadshow and went on to host the Kiss FM Rap Show. In ‘86 they released tunes on Andy Sojaka’s Elite label and Morgan Khan’s Streetwave.

It also included Sanny X & Mr P who I know very little about, except that Sanny X came over from Sweden to enter the DMC Championships in 1984 and was invited to stay in the UK by Tony Prince, signing to the DMC label and recording a number of remixes for them, as well as releasing the track ‘Golden Rules’ with Mr P, who was a rapper from Newcastle.

1986 also saw the launch of the 24 hour Music Box channel on cable TV, which was simultaneously broadcast on Yorkshire TV during the nighttime. Nobody I knew had cable or satellite TV growing up so I couldn’t tell you how much rap was played on it. I doubt much at all from the UK, except for a group of their own presenters (including Timmy Mallett) called The Rap Pack, who are best forgotten.

Music Box’s show Boogie Box did include this quick section featuring Max LX from Hardrock Soul Movement and Howie G (or maybe D?) from the short lived rap duo Fission. It also has a competition to win a copy of Street Sounds’ Hip hop 15.

There’s no doubt that the UK acts featured here haven’t aged particularly well, and in keeping with the time period they all rap with American accents, or at least a heavy twang. But this still doesn’t excuse the fact that they frequently get left out of the history of UK rap.

The only group from this period who do still get some recognition in UK rap history are London Posse. This is largely due to the fact that Rodney P remained a central figure in Hip hop throughout the late 90s and 2000s, presenting a BBC 1Xtra show with Skitz between 2002 and 2007 and taking hold of his own narrative in many cases.

The group were also influential in shifting the window of authenticity from rapping like you were a New Yorker to UK rappers embracing their own accents and dialect (although some Welsh rappers had embraced their own accents and language even earlier). It’s interesting to note Bionic from London Posse’s comments about accents in this clip from the Irish TV show Megamix. Alongside him is Sipho (RIP), one of the founding members of the group and one of the UK’s most influential beatboxers, although he was originally from Kerry, which is likely how they ended up on Irish TV.

This post follows on from UK Rap on TV - Early to Mid 80s. Coming up next time, 1987.

I want to cover a few of these bands in this ‘Field Music’ series, along with some of the programmers that have helped to support their growth and inspired me over the years. I don’t want to make this too formal so much of it will be through my own personal lens. I promised to tell you about one of my favourite bands that I caught performing at a secret set after last Saturday’s St Paul’s Carnival, so what better place to start.

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I first met Babyhead in 2004 when Dregz and I performed on the Dance stage at Glastonbury with the band Dark Chunk. That same year we also performed in the Theatre & Circus tent, with a contemporary dance group called Re:Form. We’d been brought in as guest vocalists by our friend Hannah from Cardiff but there was a local Glastonbury town connection through another dancer in the group, Josie George, our brazen and beautiful sister who heart breakingly left this life back in 2022.

We met many wonderful souls through Re:form and it was lovely to see a number of them, either in person or streaming in through people’s phones, at The Plough for Bobby Newman’s 50th Birthday. He’s a very close friend of Babyhead’s and had been at nearly every gig of theirs from the beginning until they finally called it a day in 2016. They’d agreed to get back together one last time as a special surprise for him and it was a beautiful, tear filled moment when he realised what was happening.

The band started under the name Geek in the mid 90s. They were all family and friends from Glastonbury and the clues to their early sound are in the first gig they played, supporting ska punk rebels Citizen Fish and Alex Gordon’s somewhat dubbier project Bender.

Turns out the name Geek was already taken so Babyhead were born around the same time that they all moved to Bristol together. They’d already been putting on shows in the city, creating the Monsterpiece Productions promotional collective alongside another Glastonbury band called Think. Then in 1999 they signed with Continental Drifts, the pioneering festival agency spearheaded by Chris Tofu, that had scooped up many of the country’s most exciting ska, swing, polka, cowpunk and cabaret aligned bands such as Los Albertos, Baghdaddies, Top Cats, Pronghorn, Tragic Roundabout, Tarantism, Headmix Collective and the 2 Tone group The Beat. I’ll definitely be covering a number of these bands in this series, along with Chris Tofu himself.

Babyhead’s first gig with Continental Drifts was the ill fated Total Eclipse Festival, a 6 day affair in Devon, put together to mark a rare eclipse of the sun that happened at 11:11am on the 11th August 1999.Not the most auspicious of occasions it turned out, as only a third of the expected attendees turned up causing the main organisers Megadog, Essential Festival and Harvey Goldsmith to put it into receivership. Still the stage that Babyhead played, programmed largely by Tofu, was put together by an even more colourful character by the name of Roy Gurvitz, under the banner of Lost Vagueness.

I’ve never actually known Roy personally and remarkably I don’t remember ever making it to the Lost Vagueness area of Glastonbury (though my memories of 2004 and 2005 are incredibly hazy), but their impact on Boomtown and my own personal journey through the festival world cannot be understated.

I will cover this breeding ground of anarchic, ironic mischief (in smart evening wear) another time but the “naughty corner” of Glastonbury in the early 2000s perfectly matched Babyhead’s sense of rebellion and playfulness, as well as their theatrical undertones. Both began to spread their influence into the rest of the festival world, playing the first few Secret Gardens and then pretty much any worth the price of a ticket.

Babyhead also began to make moves across the rest of Glastonbury, playing multiple stages and opening the Jazz World stage (now West Holts) on at least one occasion. I remember seeing them at least 4 times one year. Their music further embraced the sounds around them in Bristol. Keith Allen once called them, the”bastard child of Ian Dury and Iggy Pop” but you could hear ska, reggae (Toots Hibbert also gave them a nod of appreciation) and hip hop especially. Bristol in turn embraced them further and they had incredible packed out shows at St Paul’s Carnival and the main stage of Ashton Court Festival. Their energy on stage was through the roof and Mancub on vocals held the crowd masterfully in his hand.

After a couple of initial 4 track EPs, they released their first album The Geek Show in 2004, followed by Babyboomtown in 2007 which featured local collaborators such as Jakes, Stepchild, Bubber Lucifer from Aspects, Zen Hussies and Lou Drezla. The title track inspired the organisers of the Recydrate The West festival in their next venture - Boomtown.

If I remember rightly there wasn’t one year that Babyhead didn’t grace the Town Centre stage at Boomtown until they eventually split in 2016 (check the video above from 5:03 for a taste). We tried everything to convince them to come back and there was at least one year they played as a side project Babydub in the Hidden Woods, but their time had eventually drawn to a close. I did manage to get them back together for my wedding in 2019, which Mancub also so perfectly officiated, but that was it until last Saturday night. It really was a special occasion, made more so by the fact it was in The Plough, which Mancub is also now the co-publican of.

For various reasons it felt like dancing with the ghosts of my past lives and it was only the sheer power of the band and Mancub’s impassioned rants against corporate, military and political abuse of power that kept me present. Babyhead did leave a couple more great albums in their wake which you should definitely go and check out, but their main legacy for me is tied up in the memories of their countless live shows and the festival fields that will always carry the memory of them, even when their name begins to fade and new generations of revellers grow up without experiencing what we were once so lucky to be a part of.

I have been fortunate enough to hear a fantastic forthcoming project from Mancub, now under his everyday name Tom Quarrelle. But I’ll tell you all about that when it’s finally ready to drop. If there’s any groups you would especially like me to cover in this ‘Field Music’ series then please do leave their names below.

I had made the mistake of accepting the official SPC statement that the 2025 Carnival wouldn’t be happening. Then after seeing videos online of streets packed with people and sound systems I had major FOMO. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

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I have every respect for the committee in charge of organising the Carnival. They have a tough job and are woefully underfunded to deliver the event as responsibly as they are required to, so when they announced that there would not be an official Carnival again this year, I understood.

But it was never going to stop Carnival from going ahead anyway. Of course the mas parade was missed. I’ve played on the floats a couple of times and it’s a great part of the day usually. I’ve also seen some great acts on the official main stages, such as Frankie Paul and Macka B (I also programmed acts for their online event during covid). But for most attendees the main focus is the sound systems, the food stalls, the atmosphere and of course the people. All of those were very much still happening.

Yesterday I heard the phrase “the People’s Carnival” on a number of occasions. It showed the tension that exists when the community feels overly regulated and it highlights the fact that all good carnivals are laced with a rebellious spirit, carrying the strength of unity at their heart. It’s no wonder Carnivals all over the world increasingly feel sanitised and commercialised but St Paul’s have always resisted that. Yesterday even more so and you could feel that energy in the air.

The police presence was relatively moderate and hands off. They obviously recognise that the wrong approach could spark a response too big for them to handle. To be honest though I didn’t see one scrap of trouble all day and I haven’t heard of any incidents since.

I headed down just after midday with Fernquest after picking him up from Newport. He was supposed to be MCing on Brute Force Audio’s 45K sound system but along with a few other rigs they’d been shut down early. Thankfully they were a small minority and as we got to the edge of St Paul’s we could hear and feel the collision of a few dozen sound systems at full volume. Some might find that kind of loud chaotic noise intense but we both felt instantly at home as waves of nostalgia hit me along with the smell of the smoke from the jerk chicken stalls.

I’ve mentioned before on here but my very earliest memory is the sounds and smells of Notting Hill Carnival so perhaps that’s why I get such a sense of belonging in these spaces. Add to that the many great memories of previous years here and the fact that I’ve been missing Bristol a lot recently and you can understand why it felt like coming home for Christmas. I’ve spent around 13 years of my life living in the city and it’s a big part of my history and identity.

So it was a pleasure to walk around and see that Bristol was out in force. Of course you had the St Pauls’ community, rooted heavily in the Windrush generation of Caribbean people who settled in the area between the late 1940s and early 70s. But then you also had a wide representation of underground and alternative cultures from across the city. Generations ago you might have been able to define them as new (and some original) travellers, hippies, bohemians, punks, ravers, rastas, rudeboys and rudegirls, but nowadays all the lines are blurred and nobody’s policing the boundaries.

The music was as varied as the people and as we walked the streets we heard: heavy dub; old school lovers rock, dancehall and roots; amapiano and afro house; modern bashment; UK funky; UK garage; jungle and drum n bass; acid techno; hardcore tekno; soca and more. The Carnival committee had advised everyone to put in Temporary Event Notices (TENS) for their sound systems and pop up bars. Not all of them were successful but a few had taken their chances anyway.

Our first proper stop was in a garden behind Jerk King, where Out The Box had set up a rig and Dave Cridge was playing a mixture of old skool hardcore and jungle, with a number of modern dnb remixes of the two. It was just the kick start we needed and although I’m tee-total these days we set off to find Fernquest some Wray & Nephews. Always a solid choice for these occasions but sadly way over priced with the “Carnival price” increases.

I get adding on a little. In tough times it’s a chance for residents to make a quick raise. Hell we even saw a fox out in the blazing afternoon sun, trying to get a little extra from the influx of visitors. However £22 for a pocket sized bottle of rum is too much.

The fruitless quest to find a better price did take us down side streets we might have missed otherwise. We caught two kids around 8 or 9 years old playing some serious dub. Turns out one was the daughter of Sam Stryda from Dubkasm and Teachings in Dub, whilst the other was the son of the sound system’s owner. They both knew exactly what they were doing and had great taste in tunes. We stayed there for a little while and saw Ray Keith walk into the house next door, but we didn’t manage to find out where or when he was playing.

I missed a lot of great artists who were down for the day. I bumped into Brixton reggae singer Shumba Youth who told me that Prince Fatty was on somewhere. I know Rampage were playing too. They were always my favourites at Notting Hill as a teenager. In fact I couldn’t tell you who half of the DJs and MCs we did see were.

We definitely caught Guire from local reggae band The Golden Guild. He was hosting a jungle set from a DJ called Heavy D, and was joined on the mic by a clean cut white kid who’s name I didn’t catch, but who had a similar conscious roots reggae flow. We heard Docta Flex dropping some Carnival classics and also passed through Crazy and Rising Son’s hip hop set.

My favourite spot was over at Jonesy Wales and Stormy J’s house where we danced to Dub Boy, Rukus and a couple of other amazing DJs who’s names I didn’t manage to catch. The music policy there was globally minded, with plenty of dancehall and soca still but also chutney, classic reggaeton and shatta in there as well. Jus Now played there, with Keshav fresh off the plane from Trinidad to spend festival season in the UK.

It was a good place to hang out as the music was perfect for me, but it was also tucked down a small side street so it wasn’t anywhere near as hectic as the other sounds. I still managed to bump into a ton of people there that I know from Bristol and Cardiff.

There was: my old house (and band) mate Tom Swindell, now best known for his filmmaking; Tommy Popcorn and Gemsski from Ujima Radio; the alternative Cardiff rap duo Skyn; Charlie Stoic from Terrain; Bristol graffiti pioneer Inkie and his partner Vicki who programmes stages at Boomtown and WOMAD, as well as various venues in Bristol; Atki2 - super producer and DJ plus another of my Super Soca Show family; Coreysan, the Bristol based Trinidadian who as well as producing his own music, plays bass for the legendary Calypso Rose; Carly Heath who has just stepped down as Bristol’s Night Time Economy Advisor but remains active and important in the scene; Tom Gutteridge from Bermuda. I’m not sure what Tom’s up to these days to be honest. I didn’t get enough of a chance to chat to him properly but my point here is that in a very small corner of Carnival I bumped into so many inspiring and creative people that it’s no wonder the place fills my soul.

I lost Fernquest thanks to the lack of phone signal there, but thankfully he made it home safely with Mace The Great. I grabbed some Jerk Jackfruit and watched a little bit of Milo at the Star & Garter. One of the original Wild Bunch members, Milo is a great DJ and had his own fascinating adventures when the others went off to form Massive Attack.

I left St Paul’s around 8pm and finished the night at The Plough pub in Easton watching a secret reunion gig from one of my all time favourite bands. But I’ll tell you all about that next time.

Shout out to everyone else I saw throughout the day. Too many to mention but I will give a nod to Elro, ManLikeVision and Vibe Chemistry who were down there filming some promo for their new tune that came out this week. If you don’t mind your raps a little x-rated then have a listen.

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Actually there was a week’s holiday in Portugal at the tail end of our relationship. That had some lovely moments and I have fond memories of the food and scenery, but my lasting impressions are, seriously spraining my ankle whilst storming off like a child mid-argument and prepping for a job interview with Museum Wales, that I had to have over Zoom from the Air BNB. That was all over 4 years ago now though.

Sadly there are no night classes on ‘How to Spend the Day On a Beach Doing Nothing’ but just being aware that it would be a good skill to have is a start. With that in mind, I wouldn’t class my trip up North at the start of June as a holiday, but it was a welcome 2 weeks out of the confines of my own 4 walls. Working from home is convenient but occasionally stifling and to be honest I was going a little stir crazy.

It was just the dogs and I in my dad’s co-housing community by the river. My dad and Alison were away, though in such a close community I saw a number of folks I know and was invited to join one of the communal dinners that are a regular occurrence there. I’ve always prized community and put it at the heart of everything I do, but honestly, I rarely even speak to my neighbours and I’m not sure how suited I would be to this way of living. Perhaps that’s just decades of inner city programming though. As an ideal I can see the appeal.

I was still working but with some breathing space I also managed to do some writing which was a relief. I got some fantastic walks in, with plenty of rivers, beaches and waterfalls. I spent hours watching the blue tits, robins, blackbirds and woodpeckers on the bird feeder. Plus the occasional squirrel trying their luck. It was all very wholesome to be honest, and very necessary. The dogs loved it too, despite the fact that it pretty much rained the entire time we were there.

On the final weekend my dad returned home and my uncle kindly came up to look after the dogs so that we could go on a grief ritual together. I could probably write a whole post on that alone but the feelings are still a little too raw and it feels too private and personal to share right now. Powerful stuff though and well worth looking into.

All the above gave me just enough space to tackle the next two weeks of trying to do two full time jobs on top of Big Love, writing and prepping for DJ shows. As well as the Writing Trees business which kicked into full gear and is close to launching (check out our Substack), I started a project with Sound Progression, helping young music makers to take the next steps in their careers.

I’ve really enjoyed working from their base in Grassroots and some of the music coming out of there is amazing. Of course there are a number of different levels to what they do and some young people simply want to learn how to better express themselves through music. That’s just as inspiring to me. Music and musicianship doesn’t always have to be turned into a career or commodity but for those who do want help with building an audience, I’m there to just make sure they are taking the right steps and ticking the right boxes as they go. Somewhere between a mentor, a manager and a youth worker really.

Paul Lyons is the charity’s founder and so I’m amongst friends and family. We had a good little mission to SouthernSunDown festival at the 3 Cups in Ogmore where I also had a lovely catch up with headliners, Beans On Toast and Mr Bruce.

A few of the Sound Progression artists were performing as part of a Windrush Day celebration and Izzy & The Aristocats played as well. They’re a fantastic young neo soul band who you can catch at Big Love in a couple of weeks (Beans On Toast also)! Things are obviously hectic with last minute preparations for that.

We’ve been working on re-launching Paul’s record labels, Soul Good and Headfunkt after the passing of co-founder John Khan last year. Lots of great music in store but we also took a crew to SMK Live at Milton Keynes Stadium for a takeover. Because of the train chaos during the heatwave it took Paul, Farra and The Tribe of ViBE 10 hours to get there from Cardiff. I had only stayed behind because my dog Marley got heat stroke so I wanted to make sure he was okay.

I drove Luna Amani and Dregz up in the morning after our own train and two hire cars got cancelled. Sadly I missed my set but luckily Farra was around to jump in and the rest all smashed it. We managed to catch a few of the other acts too. Basement Jaxx being the highlight but Clean Bandit were actually decent, Katy B was great, Sigma brought out Barry Town emcee Comma Dee and both Groove Armada’ and Jax Jones played as well.

Dregz and I stayed over another night to hang out with his brother MG and play on the Sunday but missed most of the other acts such as Black Eyed Peas because Marley had ended up in the hospital with another round of heat stroke and I wanted to get back to him as quickly as possible. He’s fine now thankfully but we have to be really careful if it gets back up to 35 degrees again. Even with numerous cool fans going, plenty of water and keeping his feet as cool as possible in the shower and on a wet towel it was too hot for him.

As well as Big Love coming up, there’s St Paul’s Carnival this weekend, Weekend Rumble where Paul, Grandma Funk and a couple of the Sound Progression acts are performing. I’ll be back hosting Aleighcia Scott’s BBC Radio Wales show on Thursday July 9th, we have It’s A Disco Thing on the 25th July and I’ve got tickets for Hamish Stewart from Average White Band, David Byrne and T-Rev’s album launch party. Look out for a small feature on that from yours truly.

Of course this is not just a simplification of the story, it’s a criminally lazy revision of the facts. Those of us old enough to know better find it frustrating, but for the artists who actually paved the way for today’s rap stars it must feel downright disrespectful.

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For the moment let’s put aside all of the many missing pieces in this story from the 90s until now and let’s go back to the 80s. The main omission from the story of course is hip hop (or Hip hop when we talk about the culture as a whole). Written off by too many would-be historians as a side note at best, or at worst a uniquely American affair, for us ageing b-boys, 80s British hip hop is where the real foundation begins.

That’s not taking anything away from the reggae sound system crews. They are still essential to everything, no question about that. I’m not trying to exclude Saxon Sound, or Sir Coxsone Outernational, or Unity High Power or any of the others. But their story is at least partly represented by plenty of other writers, researchers, directors and curators already. That said it’s worth looking up clips from shows such as Rockers Roadshow, Ebony or Black on Black to see some of the MCs (DJs, Toasters) in action.

I’m just a little fed up with hip hop being left out of the party, so I wanted to readdress the balance. I’ve compiled a selection of TV appearances from the early years of UK rap and hip hop. Hopefully this will make things easier the next time somebody is telling the story.

The first UK rappers to find their voice after the likes of Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, Spoonie Gee and Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 first hit our shores tended to be novelty acts such as Allen & Hewitt and Barnsley Bill, or punks tuned into hip hop’s crossover with New York’s downtown arts scene. Acts like The Clash or The Slits put out some great records in 1980 but there are very few people who would include these acts in the hip hop canon.

The most credible British rap track from that period would probably be Bo Kool’s ‘(Money) No Love’ track, which was a favourite on the New York disco scene, with plays at seminal venues The Loft and Paradise Garage (shout out to Wrongtom for schooling me on that a while back).

Then as punks became pop stars you had raps from Adam & The Ants and Captain Sensible. Even Wales gets a look in as Scritti Politti’s Welsh front man Green Gartside raps on their 1982 track’ Jacques Derrida'. An honourable mention to Wham for ‘Wham Rap!’ the same year, though they were never punks of course. There’s also Ian Dury & The Blockheads, which is a whole other story (and timeline). Perhaps I can save them for a future post.

Many of these tracks were included on TV and I’m sure some were influential to later rappers, but they’re not Hip hop in the cultural sense. They were just dabbling and if you had seen any of the above at a Hip hop jam, it would have been as observers rather than participants.

The earliest sign on British TV that there was a new shift happening culturally was on the Oxford Road Show in February 1982. This BBC2 music programme was neither a roadshow or anything to do with Oxford, but it was largely broadcast from the Oxford Road studio in Manchester. They covered a lot of new wave and post-punk artists but in the below segment their reporter Jackie Spreckley visits The Gargoyle Cub in Soho, at the iconic 69 Dean Street venue.

At the time Gargoyles was home to The Comedy Store, which launched the careers of Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, French & Saunders, Paul Merton, Ben Elton and Keith Allen amongst many others. Downstairs in the basement was a club called Gossips where Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues were on a Thursday, a young Tim Westwood was playing jazz-funk on a Friday and David Rodigan had the Saturday nights.

The name of the rap night is not mentioned in this clip but it was called Language Lab and I’ve seen its launch in 1981 credited to various people depending on the source: Tom Dixon and Nick Jones from the band Funkapolitan, who appear in the video. I’m fairly certain they were the resident band; Simon Oakes who is also in the video; and celebrated fashionista James Lebon. It’s likely that all played some part in its inception at least.

Although primarily a Britfunk band, Funkapolitan and their rappers, Cyberman and Man Friday in particular, helped to lay down the foundation for the UK hip hop scene and Language Lab was a space that both centralised and legitimised rapping as an artform. Cyberman was later down with the 3 Wize Men, who provided some of John Peel’s early UK hip hop sessions (his first being from Junior Gee And The Capital Boys in October 1984).

Man Friday’s career is harder to follow but he had a great single called ‘Picking Up Sounds’ with fellow London based rapper Jive Junior in 1983. The single was produced by Queen bassist John Deacon and Wham! guitarist Robert Ahwai but is a decent attempt to capture what was happening in New York.

Jive Junior was the next rapper on our TV screens. In March 1982 he featured on a BBC 2 program called Riverside, a magazine program broadcast from the Riverside Studios. Sadly I haven’t been able to find any footage of that one but Jive Junior was part of the Cosmic Rockers crew with his brothers Superintendant, Mixer Al Capone and Sir Skull. He popped up in the media again in 1985 as joint winner of the Radio London rapping contest (alongside a rapper from Brixton called Little Red Rapping Hood).

In December 1982, controversial British punk svengali Malcolm McClaren released the video to his track Buffalo Gals. Not a rap track as such and I’m reluctant to call it UK hip hop in any way, but it was a revolutionary video featuring breakers, graffiti and turntablists from New York and New Jersey, inspiring the first significant wave of Hip hop culture across Europe more than anything else. Adding to the impact was this Jools Holland interview with Malcolm on the BBC2 music programme The Tube.

After a short incubation period, we get the full “Breakdance” era and a number of breaking crews feature on our TV screens, especially Manchester’s Broken Glass. However this seems to overshadow the UK rap scene and there’s very little on screen representation from rappers, despite a handful of decent releases from the likes of Dizzi Heights, Family Quest, Junior Gee and Newtrament.

Hip hop is still bubbling away on the streets. In 1984 dedicated radio shows appear from Mike Allen (Capital FM) and Tim Westwood (LWR). Westwood starts his Zulu Message column in Blues & Soul Magazine and features at a big GLC Hip hop Jam on London’s South Bank. Films such as Wildstyle and Beat Street give more insight into the culture and BBC2 screens an Arena special called Beat This: A Hip Hop History in July 1984, but fails to cover anyone on the growing UK scene (Malcolm McClaren excluded). The biggest British rap tune of the year is a dancehall track from Saxon Sound’s Smiley Culture. In ‘Police Officer’ he flips from Jamaican patois to cockney chat, arguably laying down a style that would be incredibly influential on the future of UK hip hop.

By 1985, with little television coverage happening, artists and promoters began producing their own videos. Nellee Hooper from Bristol crew The Wild Bunch hired film makers Steve Haley and Julian Monaghan to create a promo video for them and the Electro Rock documentary, filmed at an event called Hip hop at the Hippodrome, becomes the best snapshot of what was happening in Britain at the time, with performances by various breaking crews, a number of US acts and British rappers such as Dizzi Heights, City Limits Crew, Junior Gee and Family Quest. Sadly neither of these videos make it on to television, but Electro Rock does get an official video release.

As far as the wider world is considered Hip hop has already had its day in 1985, though there is a performance from City Limits & the Mutant Rockers on BBC2’s Ebony programme in April (sadly I’ve not been able to hunt this down - also noted that producer Ricky Rennalls of the Hip hop Alliance and Mutant Rockers remembers City Limits causing trouble at BBC2’s Pebble Mill studios for a programme called Black On Black, however that was a Channel 4 programme so whilst they may have appeared on that programme also, it’s likely he’s thinking about Ebony). In November that year Simon Says claims that “Hip hop died when Ollie & Jerry entered the charts and the little kids started breaking” in the Barry & District news but 1986 would prove everybody wrong. I’ll cover that next time.

Note: There are a number of men mentioned above who’s behaviour is documented as being questionable at best and abusive at worst. I mention the likes of Tim Westwood, Malcolm McClaren and John Peel here strictly for historical purposes and not because I endorse their behaviour.

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Of course nobody quite warns you how badly your body will start turning against you but I’m not ready to stand in the Post Office queue and complain about my hip giving me jip just yet. I’m grateful to have made it this far, relatively unscathed, but with my birthday falling on the Sunday of Big Love weekend, my close friend and festival founder Stu is on my mind more than ever. He would have just beaten me to 50 last October but sadly he never got to finish the race.

“You’re going to have to make the next Big Love a special one” he whispered to me from his mobile scooter at last year’s festival. He had a rare aggressive form of cancer that had made him too frail to walk or talk properly within a matter of weeks. It’s a strange feeling to start grieving for somebody before they’ve gone. Stu hated the idea of anybody grieving him. He didn’t want to bring people down. After all he’d spent his whole life creating the best parties he could. He was all about the good times.

Big Love will be a giant celebration. A celebration of Stu, my 50th, the festival’s 10th Anniversary and of life itself, but it’s been a struggle without him this year. The team is amazing, full of genuine lovely and creative souls who have pulled things together through hard times. Stu was always my closest connection to the festival though. I tried to quit events for good after Boomtown but he managed to keep me on board and I refused to take any money until he paid himself, which he never did. People are often surprised that such a successful festival struggles to break even but costs have tripled since lockdown and they keep rising. There’s no way to adjust the ticket price to allow for that, so independent festivals are hit harder than anyone else.

Stu always believed we just had to soldier on and things would improve. Maybe he was right, that’s yet to be proven or disputed. One thing’s for certain, all the work will be worth it anyway. Every year I marvel at how beautiful everything is. How warm, sparkly and friendly the crowd are that Big Love manages to attract. I guess it’s all in the name but it’s mostly in the people that build it. The crew, the artists, the traders and other performers. The atmosphere radiates out from all the above and embraces the rest of the festival like an almighty cwtch.

But all credit to both Stu and Badger. They have built up one of the best festivals it’s been my pleasure to work on, a small gathering with a big heart, and I look forward to being back there in a month’s time. Who knows what the future holds. If this last year has taught me anything it’s not to take anything or anyone for granted, but I do know that I will take Stu at his word and we will most certainly make this a special one.

Things kicked into gear when I met up with Osamagbe Izevbigie at the start of the month. I originally met Osama through his work with the Black Welsh Music Awards, but he has been putting on events here for a while through his companies - OTID (Our Turn Up Is Different) and Afrowales. He’s got a lot of passion and has been putting in the work to try and change things for the better here in Wales.

Back in March he launched the Amplify Wales Charter with the rest of his team. Focussing on four main issues, the charter seeks to take a number of important conversations that have been going round for a while, and turn them into action. Not just at a grassroots level, but aiming at Welsh political policy, to change things at a structural level. I will examine this in greater detail another time, but it’s a solid list of demands and our discussion gave me a lot to think about this month.

The conversation continued at FOCUS Wales, especially within the Black Music Export in Wales panel discussion. FOCUS is one of my favourite weekends of the year and I wrote a diary each day that you can check out starting here. My only issue is it comes at the start of the summer season and it can be hard to maintain these conversations throughout this busy period.

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I’m sure May never used to feel like summer, but it’s definitely the start of festival season now and we often have the weather to back that up. My FOMO kicked in a number of times as my feed filled up with a bunch of Shindig videos in particular, plus footage of Magugu with Mungo’s Hi Fi, Wends and Tom Spirals at Knockengorroch.

Love Saves The Day in Bristol also looked epic. I saw some incredible footage from that one. I worry I might be a little too old and sober to go there these days, but they’re obviously still focussed on creating cultural moments rather than just chucking a few DJs into a field and hoping for the best. I did have tickets to In It Together festival but the jury is still out on that one.

I was at a very different festival to all of the above on Bank Holiday weekend. For the second year in a row I closed the Saturday night of HowTheLightGetsIn with my Big Lovely Disco. Also for the second year in a row I had a bigger crowd than their infinitely more expensive headline DJs in the main tents (just saying).

There is some great music at HowTheLightGetsIn and it was a pleasure to catch up with Mr Tea & The Minions, DJ Ikamba and his sister Liz Ikamba while I was there. But the bands and DJs are secondary to the talks and panel discussions they hold there. My highlights of the day were: the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talking about the problem we have of prizing loyalty above ethics; and a chat between Jeremy Corbyn and Faiza Shaheen about the Future of the Left. It was more of a rallying cry and further exploration of the problems than a road map for the future, but it’s important to at least carry on these conversations until a solution presents itself. Certainly there’s a lot to be said for Faiza’s ‘Tax Justice’ campaign.

I wish more of these conversations were making their way into the communities that are most affected by the outcomes. I meet a lot of people when I’m out and about. It’s incredible how quickly a complete stranger will turn the conversation to the problems of “immigration” yet it’s rare that I’ll hear anyone saying “tax the rich” even within my relatively progressive circles. I did see a few people I knew outside of the performers. Osama and a few of his team were there to check the talks, and the rapper and community activist ValleyBoyZero was up there as well.

The only other festival I went to in May was Feast On Cardiff, a food festival in Bute Park. I was asked to host the main music stage there and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of acts. Some of the stand outs were Bristol reggae crew The Golden Guild, Razzomo who are a two piece from the Mr Tea & The Minions family, Cardiff “rage folk” group Ophelia’s Beard (who are also playing at Big Love this year) and a Latin funk boogaloo band called the Shingalings.

It was a long weekend, with a couple of DJ sets thrown in for good measure, followed by a 9 hour drive up North in the rain that should have only taken 4. I am now typing this from a hideaway by the river and intend to stay here for a couple of weeks so I can get my head down.

Now that I have some direction it’s time for action. Plus there’s still Big Love loose ends to tie up, a compilation album I’ve been commissioned to curate needs finishing. I’ve finally found a publisher for a book that I’m writing, so that’s a constant in the background and it’s also time to charge full steam ahead with Writing Trees, the new project I’ve been working on recently with my friend Michelle and a lovely small group of creatives. We’ve just started a Substack for that so please do give us a follow.

Aside from all of the above, I’ll be working as artist manager for Sound Progression over the next few months. I’ll tell you more about that once I’m settled in but being this busy means no extra DJ sets are going in the diary.

This month is quiet on that front but you can catch me at SMK Live in Milton Keynes. On Saturday 27th June I’ll be doing a secret guest appearance with the SoulGood takeover alongside Paul Lyons, The Tribe of ViBE and Grandma Funk. We’ll be on Stage 2 supporting main stage acts such as Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Clean Bandit, Katy B, Moonchild Sanelly and more. Then on Sunday 28th we’ll be doing a Kaptin & Dregz set before Black Eyed Peas, Maverick Sabre, Jalen Ngonda, Jaguar Skills and others. You can grab tickets for that here.

I think summer is just about gritting my teeth and getting s**t done. I can reassess everything else when we get to September but hopefully all of the above is taking me in the right direction at least.

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The final day of a festival can go two ways for me. I either need mellow, gentle sounds to soothe my bruised soul or something that bangs hard enough to keep me trooping along. At first I thought it would be the former and I was certainly off to a good start with Peach, who you might remember I saw performing with Amanda Whiting at Brick Lane Jazz Festival. Jazzy and soulful was definitely the order of the day, though her lyrics had a smart sharpness to them which gave her show some bite.

I was half expecting Jasmine Power to be along similar lines. After all she’s definitely got her jazz credentials intact having come up with Ezra Collective, and performing with her own band that has included the likes of Moses Boyd, Joe Armon-Jones and Daniel Casimir previously. Gilles Peterson and Jamie Cullum have both expressed their admiration in the past, she’s jazz right? Well yes, no question, but so much more as well. Her songs were often stadium sized cinematic bangers that caught me a little off-guard and really hit me in the feels.

Jasmine is clearly an impressive songwriter and we had a good chat before the show as I know a couple of members from her team really well. She spent time living in Nashville, the songwriting capital of the world and even Sir Paul McCartney has said that, ‘her songs are very good and she sings them wonderfully’. Definitely an artist to keep an eye on.

From there I ran over to see my friend Ben drumming with a new singer from Norfolk called Lfay. I really enjoyed their set as well, especially the live drum n bass numbers which helped to keep me going. Ben runs Wild Paths festival and is also a programmer for Shambala so he knows good music and this is a project with a lot of promise.

There was no going back now though. I needed beats. I’m a big fan of Cerys Hafana and they were performing at St Giles Church which is just the perfect stage for them but I couldn’t settle in long enough to fully appreciate their performance properly this time. I had the same issue with Mared, which is no reflection on either artist at all. Both are fantastic, I was just starting to run on empty.

KyoYoko from China was exactly what I needed. I’d had them recommended to me a few times over the past couple of days so I knew I had to check them out. If you get the chance, then go see them. I’ve literally never seen a FOCUS Wales crowd so swept up in a performance. I guess you could call them techno punk but with a definitely slice of twisted cabaret. It ticked all the right boxes for what I needed right then.

Nothing else quite hit home after that, though I did enjoy watching Isle of Hip Hop (K-Saulz, KJ and Mr Milosevic) in a sunny beer garden, winning over a crowd of mostly Wrexham locals with their cheeky boom bap numbers but even though I still had a few more acts on my list, I decided to call it a night early.

I haven’t even mentioned about the panels and talks, but all 3 from that day were running around my head, especially the one from the UK’s new black music export organisation, Blacmex. It was entitled ‘Black Music Export In Wales’ and sparked a lively conversation in the crowd. I also had a good catch up with co-founders Kwame and Audrey who left me with a lot to think about. I’ll save talking about that for another day though, I’m still very much digesting everything at the moment and Monday left me little time to think with a grand to-do list that had been building up while I was away. I also need to follow up on tons of interesting chats I’ve had at FOCUS Wales this year. It really is one of my favourite weekends of the year, I just wish I had a couple of days to recover afterwards.

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The only panel I managed to catch yesterday was pretty bleak. It was discussing the current landscape for venues, festivals and artists. Ultimately it was a great overview and there was a faint glimmer of a silver lining, though perhaps too faint to save the scene as we know it. I’ll cover some of the main points another time as it’s a subject that hits close to home, but at the moment I’m still trying to get my head around everything.

The daytime was mostly spent rolling from networking mixer to networking mixer, trying to kick start my social battery enough to mingle, whilst stuffing my face with the food they give out at these type of gatherings. My mum raised me to always avail of a free buffet and so it’s hard to say no, even when my body is crying out for some green vegetables to go with the carb heavy offerings.

My favourites are the Montreal mixers where you’re almost guaranteed some poutine, Canada’s unofficial national dish and essentially Quebec’s take on chips cheese and gravy (which also happens to be Newports national dish). Though this year Scotland took the lead with some tasty vegan haggis, together with neeps and tatties. Oh and a fried mars bar which was far tastier than it should have been and nowhere near as wrong sounding as the crispy silkworm pupae and bamboo caterpillar that I ate at the Axean festival mixer.

I caught snippets of music throughout the day but my mind was on our Kaptin & Dregz showcase in the evening. I’d sent emails to everyone along with follow up reminders and whatsapp messages. You never know if that’s going to do the job though, so I went out on a last minute poster mission around the town as well.

Thankfully everyone had a decent turn out for their shows, starting with Courtney Scotto who I first saw perform here a couple of years ago. This time she came with a band who were seriously tight. Courtney’ has a classic rnb style with a strong vocal range. Not only did she pull off an impressive rendition of ‘Ex Factor’ by Lauryn Hill but her own songs show serious promise.

Next up were two artists from PITCH Scotland who got somewhat incorporated into our takeover as well. Conscious Route is an artist that Dregz and I first put on back in the Higher Learning days, with his band Fugazi Rum. Now based in Edinburgh and laying down roots in the scene with his new group The Collective. They played a solid hip hop and dnb set, living up to the ‘conscious’ name with thoughtful and uplifting lyrics but also bringing some serious energy.

The levels were taken up to 11 with guest vocals from WENDS, who also performed afterwards with her own reggae set. There’s something in the Scottish water when it comes to reggae, and WENDS very much lived up to the standards set by the likes of Mungo’s Hi Fi, Soom T, Escape Roots, Tom Spirals and An Dannsa Dub (also wasn’t Finlay Quaye from Edinburgh?). She brought Conscious Route back on to perform their new dnb tune ‘High & Mighty’ which I’ve had on repeat recently.

Dynesti I mentioned yesterday. Dregz saw her at PITCH Scotland last year and instantly knew she had to be at our takeover. Even though I’d just seen her the day before she totally blew me away again. I really hope she manages to build a reputation and following over here because I’d love to see her keep coming back.

She was followed by two legends of our own hip hop scene, Mr Phormula and Skunkadelic. If you follow this Substack there’s a strong likelihood you might know them already but it was a pleasure to introduce them to some new people yesterday and both played outstanding sets as always.

We closed the night with our customary open mic cypher. Last year we lost the crowd for a while by putting it after a band but this time we went straight in after Skunkadelic and it really helped to boost the energy from the start.

I was a little worried as many of the artists who’d agreed to jump up started to leave early. As FOCUS grows, taxis have been an issue for everyone having to stay outside of town plus many were wiped out after long days of performing and networking.

This left space for some of the younger, hungrier MCs and singers. Many of them weren’t performing at the festival but were either local or here with Cardiff youth music organisations like Sound Progression and Platfform.

There were also a few artists such as Lily Webbe and Skyn from the Lock Off takeover downstairs. It was such a great mixture of styles and voices and the support in the room was overwhelming. We even had a random wedding party come in straight from the ceremony who loved every minute.

Special shout out to Replay who barely left the stage the whole time and Dill The Giant from Canada who popped up with a freestyle near the end. We really wanted to create a unique moment and I think we managed that.

I didn’t last long afterward but did catch some of Yard, an EBM sounding act from Ireland. A great end to a fantastic day all round. I’m posting this very late though so you might need to wait to see what the last day brings.

This spreadsheet has been invaluable to me but when you’re in the middle of a conference with hundreds of people around you, it isn’t always going to save you. I sat in front of it this morning trying to remember the dozens of conversations I had yesterday and all of the new people I met from around the world. It’s certainly a workout for the brain and body being here. I’ve heard many people joke about the number of ‘steps’ they’ve got in already, but I’m taking things relatively steady this year. This means missing out on tons of acts I really wanted to see yesterday, but I caught my fair share still.

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I spent most of the day in Old No. 7 watching The Larynx Entertainment and Tan Cerdd showcases. Everybody represented incredibly well but Luvly at the end was my highlight. I’ve only ever seen him pop up a couple of times back in Cardiff but the Nigerian born, London raised artist has a unique style that brings in a number of influences from Fela Kuti to Anderson Pak. With just keys for accompaniment, his rap-sing style pours out of his mouth like milk with cascading rhythms that really catch the ear.

I finally managed to catch Fat Dog after missing them so many times. They were definitely worth the wait and sounded more Brixton than ever, though my highlights were Kimmortal - a queer Filipino-Canadian rapper from Vancouver, and Dynesti, a half Jamaican and half Trini artist, also from Canada, who mixed up rnb, neo soul, hip hop, dancehall and gospel into a tight performance with her DJ, Chanl Marshl. They’re playing on our takeover at Penny Black later and I couldn’t be more excited for that now.

Another great rapper from Spain called Kawak had a crisp early 2000s hip hop feel to his music, Sage Todz was on point with his new live band and I caught a little bit of Papaya Noon who have just been signed to First Word Records. I also saw a couple of crazy uncategorisable bands from Montreal called Hawa B and Boutique Feelings that were definitely an experience.

The folk and roots selection at FOCUS Wales is exceptional so I made sure I caught a little at least. Scottish harpist Esther Swift was stunning at the serene and glorious St Giles Church venue, and I saw esteemed Welsh fiddle players Angharad Jenkins and Patrick Rimes at the Trac Cymru showcase and Canadian banjo player Kaia Kater, who was on the same Misfit showcase as Kimmortal. She gave me my favourite quote of the day, “When life gives you demons make demonade”.

There was a really high standard all round and I haven’t even had a chance to tell you about the panels, the mixers and the speed meetings. It’s a lot to take in but honestly the only way to experience these things is to jump right in feet first. I’m always baffled by artists who just turn up, perform and then disappear. There are opportunities to learn, connect, feel and be inspired around every corner of this conference so why not make the most of it? I’m already looking forward to what today has in store.

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Then there’s the geographical divide. The M4 may be a convenient link across the bottom of the country, however as beautiful as the drive through Wales is, there’s still no such connection between North and South and it shows.

Larynx Entertainment have been doing their best to bridge that gap, but it’s rare to see MOBO artists from North Wales in our part of the land and those from the South can only really be found in the other half once a year, at FOCUS Wales.

After the 4.5 hour journey to Wrexham I understand it. I too am only really here once a year, but I love it each and every time. Many are surprised to hear it, but FOCUS Wales is by far my favourite music conference.

Many of the reasons for that seem to be by design. The founders Andy and Neal do a great job of inviting delegates who genuinely love music. That may sound like a given but you’d be surprised. Secondly, although there’s certainly a strong drinking culture, I’ve never once noticed any harder drugs amongst the delegates here and that’s really refreshing. If for no other reason than it makes for far more interesting conversations than the 15 minute coked up name dropping sessions that you can experience at some conferences.

Musically it’s not over reliant on buzz bands so you can get to see most acts without a horrendous queue, including many that you won’t get a chance to see anywhere else. This year alone there’s acts from New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia, The Philippines, Malaysia, South Africa, all over the UK and Ireland, USA and Canada. Oh so many Canadians.

The delegates are just as equally spread across the globe, and I know because I’ve emailed all of them personally to invite them to our Kaptin & Dregz showcase. This takes a few days but I’ve learned not to leave any stone unturned when it comes to trying to fill a venue. Plus I’m really interested in what everybody actually does and what brought them here in the first place. I’ve made lifelong friends at FOCUS Wales over the years and many of those come from very different music scenes to the ones I’m used to. I’ve also learned so much about the industry and how things work outside of my own bubble.

Last night I met new people from Vienna, Germany and Canada at the opening BBQ. Networking does not come naturally to me but everyone here is open and interesting, so it’s made a lot easier. I did slip away for a little while to watch the football and catch up with Dregz and a few other friends. As well as being a great opportunity to connect with the industry, it’s also a time for our own scene to hang out and spend some time together. FOCUS Wales is the biggest gathering of MOBO artists in Wales and so it’s a perfect time to see how each of the artists are progressing, and to plot and scheme for the future, or simply put the world to rights. I’m pretty sure it’s also the biggest gathering of folk and roots artists in Wales and maybe even Welsh language artists. There’s a lot of artists playing in a relatively small area and the whole city centre comes alive because of it.

If you happen to be here as well then do make sure you check out some of the MOBO artists. There’s a number of showcases dedicated especially to it such as Larynx, Lock Off, Starving Artists and Tân Cerdd. Plus on Friday we have the Kaptin & Dregz evening upstairs at Penny Black with: Courtney Scotto, a young Cardiff rnb singer with gospel influences and an incredible voice; neo-soul and hip hop influenced Canadian act Dynesti; bilingual Welsh rap pioneer and scene stalwart Mr Phormula; Afro Cluster lead vocalist and our very own baritone rap king Skunkadelic; and also two artists presented by PITCH Scotland - there’s Conscious Route and the Collective, rooted in hip hop but exploring various sounds, and reggae vocalist WENDS, who is also known to jump genres. Add to these our Open Mic at the end which always gives some golden moments and it should be a great night.

If you’re not here then don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it in a couple of days. I’d better head off though, my first networking event is at 9:15am. It’s going to be a long day.

The BBC let me back on the airwaves to cover Aleighcia Scott’s show again! If you need a mega dose of feel good classics then the whole 3 hour show is still available on BBC Sounds.

Dregz and I went up to the Roundhouse in Camden to watch his daughter Tia-Zakura claim second place in their national Poetry Slam contest. The standard of the poets was incredible with Takunda Muzondiwa taking the title, but Tia definitely represented well for Wales. Which was made even more impressive by the fact that back in Cardiff it was the opening night of her play Girl-Coded. She still managed to get a full standing ovation for that though and we all went to watch it the following night. Although still a work in progress it’s a fantastic play and an incredible achievement for a 21 year old. Hopefully she gets to develop it further and take it around the country as it deserves.

Earlier in the evening there was another play on the same stage. This time it was Fight, Flight, Survive, a production from the Next Up Academy which supports young people to make Hip hop theatre in the Wales Millennium Centre. It’s part of their Platfform initiative that Dregz’ first started 10 years ago and I was lucky enough to help out a little on this one. It’s truly amazing what the groups from Peckham, Cardiff and the Valleys pulled together in a relatively short space of time. All respects due to the team who facilitated it all as well, everyone put in 100% and it really paid off. Hearing the young people’s testimonials about the project at the end and how much they’d gained from it personally was emotional.

I’ve been taking it easy on the DJ front, saving myself for a busy summer. However I did manage to get out to Bristol to play The Attic with the excellent Afro Cluster and one of my favourite DJs from the city, Ru Robinson. We even managed to have a little back to back for the first time. If you don’t know Ru he’s a regular on the festival circuit, a programmer for Shambala festival and one of the main brains behind the Jam Jar - which has easily become my favourite venue recently. I’m yet to visit their new 3,000 capacity venture Sawmills but it looks impressive so far.

/old-school-kwaito

I’ve started Grief Counselling which I recommend to anyone who has lost loved ones, but that goes double if you’re as good at suppressing your emotions as I am. I signed up with a local organisation called Platfform Wellbeing and they’ve been great. Although I had to wait a little while, I got six sessions for free. I never know how much I need it until I step into the room each week.

I’ve already written about my time at Brixton Jazz Festival with my Dad, but as we were staying out at Seven Kings and had to travel on the Elizabeth Line each day we decided to stop by the brand new V&A East in Stratford. I’m going to tell you all about that another day but you should definitely go and see their exhibition The Music Is Black despite their distinct lack of Welsh representation (aside from our Shirley of course and a cursory nod to the Deniz Brothers). I’m going to wait until I’ve finished their accompanying book before I write a post about the exhibition but at least they did have Mace The Great perform on their opening night so that’s something. Make sure you book in advance if you do go as they were sold out when we got there and we were incredibly lucky that they eventually let us in.

I really need to do a post about Skindred soon but for now I just want to acknowledge that they got their first Number 1 album in the UK Charts last week. Well deserved and a win for Welsh music in general.

I took some much needed time out and rediscovered TV, which has been brilliant. I’ve binged Season 2 of both A Thousand Blows and Paradise, and I’m currently watching the latest Daredevil: Born Again and The Boys whilst dipping into This Fool as well. How did I manage to starve myself of any telly for all those months?!

Although I’ve had to skip a couple, our weekly Cinema Club has given such highlights as: Exit 8 - a Japanese film which is essentially just a dude stuck in a subway corridor for 90 minutes, but it manages to be a solid buddhist meditation on guilt and atonement; They Will Kill You - which is silly mindless fun that looks great so long as you ignore any promises of a Tarantino like affair; and the new Super Mario film in 3D. Well we had to have a family friendly one at some point. If anyone in the Cardiff area is interested in joining up then let me know. You can dip in and out as you wish of course.

I did my first Speed Awareness Course this month. I’m always fascinated when I have to step outside my social bubble into the real world and I have no idea how some of the folks in the room got a driving license in the first place, but I actually found it really helpful. In particular how little difference driving 80 miles an hour makes in overall time than simply going 70, but also how much more damage you can do hitting someone at 30 miles an hour than 20. Mark Drakeford may have been incredibly clumsy in his implementation of the speeding change here but there’s no denying that it’s saved a number of lives.

Speaking of politics it’s our Senedd Elections on Thursday so let’s all hope for the best of a bad bunch at least. Make sure you go out and vote, just don’t vote for any fascists or racists please.

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I keep promising to tell you more about this secret project I’ve started with my friend Michelle and a great little team of legends. I will but for now we’re just celebrating the fact that we’ve been accepted on Business Wales’ Start Up Accelerator programme which is a huge win for us.

This week you can catch me up at FOCUS Wales with our Kaptin & Dregz takeover at Penny Black on Friday night. We’ll be upstairs from 6:45pm until Midnight with artists from Wales, Scotland and Canada. We’ll also be hosting an Open Mic cypher at the end if anyone wants to join in.

Later in the month I’ll be back at How The Light Gets In festival in Haye On Wye on Saturday 23rd May and hosting the music stage at Feast On Cardiff the following weekend. I’ll also be joining Paul Lyons to play two very different nights in Cardiff on Saturday May 30th.

First is the Toucan Club reunion at Porters. If you don’t know the Toucan Club it’s one of the best venues that Cardiff ever had, plus they gave me my first ever DJ residency and allowed us to put on our Higher Learning nights for years. It was like a peaceful dress code free oasis in a sea of violent shoes and shirts venues, and a hub of creativity whose regulars included Super Furry Animals, Sian from Kosheen, Amy Wadge and so many others from the local scene. We’ll be staying true to their weekend recipe of funk and soul for the evening plus their house band will be reforming with Dregz and Dionne Bennet on vocals.

The second night is joining The Tribe of Vibe and Paul Lyons on the tech house tip at Bar 105, a great underground basement venue in Cathays. I last went there for Cardiff Dub Club and it had the best sound in the city. I’m itching to play some new music out for that as well. Tickets for that are here.

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It was great to get out of the house, catch up with my Dad for a few days and experience something that would wrap me up in warm, healing jazz sounds. This trip has also given my inspiration a necessary boost, but I’m glad it’s time to go home now. I’ll keep this post short and sweet but I couldn’t just leave you hanging, so here’s the Sunday highlights.

Amanda Whiting

I bumped into a number of young Welsh rappers, singers, musicians and producers whilst I was at the festival and I was surprised at how few knew the only Welsh artist on the line up, especially somebody as established as this talented composer and harpist, who has not only worked with the likes of Matthew Halsall, Alice Russell, Chip Wickham, DJ Yoda, Rebecca Vasmant and Don Leisure, but is also the Jazz harp specialist at both Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

I was raised on a diet of Gilles Peterson and Straight No Chaser magazine, so Amanda’s albums on Jazzman, Albert’s Favourites and First Word are right up my street. Her music is a warm and textured fusion of soulful grooves and stripped back spiritual jazz that really does soothe the soul, perfect to start our Sunday with. Guest vocalist Peach is also a talent to look out for in future.

Zena

In keeping with the tastes of young jazz listeners at the moment, there’s a lot of mellow music at this festival and I was worried that I might not actually have the patience for any more of it, but for all their laid back charm, Zena have a really exciting mix of sounds and the Brownswood signed duo brought along Alex Cosmo Blake on guitar and Zoe Pascal on drums to form a seriously tight and talented quartet.

On a mission to bring out the sexiness in Ethiopian music, Zeno certainly smooth out the edges while keeping a lot of the rhythms, melodies and tones of their homeland intact. There’s plenty of other influences to help with that from rnb and neo soul to Dr Dre style g-funk. It all makes for a really satisfying blend.

Joe Armon-Jones

I’ve seen and also booked Joe a number of times either with his solo project or as keys player with Ezra Collective and Nubya Garcia. Perhaps even with Binker and Moses but that’s going back a decade so I couldn’t swear to that. I’m a fan for sure but Dad and I were getting impatient after sitting through an underwhelming act before and I was really starting to feel wiped out from the weekend. I’m meant to be recovering from stress related fatigue and had already pushed things a little too far . We left half way through and headed back to the hotel but what we did catch was fantastic as always. As jazzed out as I was, I found it especially tricky to leave when Asheber was back on the mic for some of their reggae collaborations. Still, it’s important to live to jazz another day. I’m sure I’ll be back here again next year. I highly recommend you check it out also.

Knats

I only just discovered this Geordie jazz band recently and didn’t know too much about them before heading into the gig. Luckily I bumped into my friend Kate Hutchinson, a fantastic music journalist, who gave me a bit of a crash course as we watched the handful of incredibly young looking players absolutely tear up the stage with incredible skill and an ever changing sonic sphere of musical influences.

Their second album, A Great Day In Newcastle (a nod to Art Kane’s classic Harlem photograph) was due in March but got picked up by Fontana Records and so is now out later this week, it’s already on target for a Jazz Number 1.

A recent addition to the band is the poet Cooper Robson, a fellow Geordie whose accent really helps to ground their music and stories firmly in the North East. Although the band are now based in London, it’s refreshing to hear such a strong jazz presence from an area which is hugely underrepresented usually. These guys have been one of my highlights so far and definitely one to watch.

Before moving onto the next act, I have to shout out the Each One Teach One sound system project that was running throughout the festival, teaching young mpeople to build a sound system over 7 days. The end result instigated a little street party on Brick Lane which added to the festival atmosphere perfectly.

Levitation Orchestra

These guys look just like a band I might have booked on one of the smaller stages at Boomtowns back in the day. In fact I’m sure I recognised a few of them.

I was half expecting to be hit with a folky, Balkan influenced skank out, but instead got something way more akin to spiritual jazz. There was definitely a mystical element to it. At the risk of sounding more pretentious than it felt, I imagined them weaving new alternate worlds to climb into.

I’d say that was helped in no small part by the inclusion of their harp player, though Dad complained that he couldn’t even hear her at all. He was far less impressed by the whole thing than I was to be honest.

Sam Wise (Sam & The Wise Ones)

I think it’s fair to add a disclaimer that by this point in the day I was tired and a little irritable. At any other time I might have enjoyed this set a lot more, after all it was tight, well presented and Sam Wise has adapted to having a new band better than most rappers would. It really does suit him and his vocal tone and flows sit nicely on top of smooth jazz.

It was perfectly pleasant music to listen to but lyrically I just felt I want getting much beyond standard UK rap fodder. Perhaps there’s layers I’m missing, like when Kendrick hides meaning under a seemingly mainstream formula. That could well be the case and so the jury is still out. I did enjoy ‘Remember To Live’.

No doubt that having a band will help Sam Wise take his career to the next level and he’s certainly talented. I just think maybe I’m about 30 years too old to appreciate this properly and that’s fine too.

Brian Jackson

Perhaps this is more my age range. My Dad was happy to find out that Brian is just six months older than he is, plus he is the only artist we’ve seen this whole weekend who is older than 35. Brian is also the main reason we ended up here at the festival.

I messaged Dad right after seeing the show at Southport Weekender. We saw Gil Scot Heron live together 40 years ago at Glastonbury ‘86 but I have no memory of it at all, so this is the closest we were going to get to seeing him now.

The set list is the same as Southport with tracks reimagined on his new album such as ‘Home is Where The Hatred Is’ ‘Lady Day & John Coltrane’, and ‘The Bottle’. Moodyman and Rich Medina joined him last time which was amazing, but even though there’s no extra guest appearances here, there doesn’t feel like anything is missing. I’m not sure the crowd would appreciate it anyway. When all the incredible artists featured on the album are read out, there’s very little response in the room.

The sheer power of this band live really does put every other artist on the line up to shame. Paul Jones and Dean Mark in particular are such a strong rhythm section that you’d swear they’d been playing in this band for decades and funk drips off every note. It’s a shame the audience doesn’t quite seem to match the energy. Still it’s nice to see such a full room for him and the sound at Village Underground is (mostly) on point once again, although the vocals were a little too low in the mix.

I was really tempted by the Tomorrows Warriros show, A Grime Supreme after but we are completely done in by the end of Brian’s set so we decided to grab some fantastic Ramen from Shoryu and save ourselves for the final day. I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.

So instead I’m here on my phone, simply chatting with my friends about the first night. You might not get the full 3 day series, but I’m filled to the brim with music, it’s healthier to let some of it spill into these pages than try to hold it all in.

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I definitely don’t want to write a review. That feels like too much to think about. So instead let me put on this compilation of Brick Lane Jazz Volume 1 and let it play out for a while. It really is packed full of fantastic acts that you should listen to.

Eliana Glass

Sat playing a Nord Grand 2 for the very first time and largely obscured by a giant pillar in front of the stage, Eliana Glass looked to be around her early to mid 20s, but the voice we heard singing was far more mature than the young lady in front of us.

She sounded like a long lost Greenwich Village folk singer harbouring a deep love of jazz, achingly melancholy with a 3am slur that meant many of the words were lost but the emotion was not.

Unfortunately that emotion only really seemed to operate on one level and as beautiful as she was to listen to, after 3 tunes we felt like we’d got the picture and headed to the next venue.

To be fair my dad did revisit her album later that night to help him get to sleep.

Kau

This was another relatively swift visit, though listening back to their latest EP I wish we’d given them a little longer to pick up the pace. Still, this Brussels based trio and their guest string quartet (looking a little like the Brontë sisters, they were likely to have been the blu/quartet from Cologne) played a solid, enjoyable take on the UK’s late 90s post trip hop jazz movement. I would have quite happily stayed for longer if I hadn’t been so keen to see the next singer.

Tawiah

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this London singer, recently relocated to the countryside. Most of her top songs on streaming platforms are collabs with the Cinematic Orchestrq, though there are also a number of Paul Oakenfold tracks on there as well. It could have gone either way.

As it happens she opted for a stripped back set with just a lone guitarist to accompany her, while she handled the keys, bassoon, her own guitar and of course vocals, really using her voice as an instrument. It was definitely all that was required to impress us.

“How is she not a super star?” my Dad asked at the end of her set. I don’t have the answer to that but I definitely echo the appreciation of her talent. Raised in a strict Pentecostal household, gospel underlines much of her music but there’s something more. I definitely detected a little Whitney Houston, certainly classic 80s soul ballads were an influence and maybe just a touch of Elaine Page style musical theatre in there too. Her sound could have easily tipped into cheesier realms but it didn’t. It was simple and sometimes repetitive but powerful and reverent.

She invited the audience to meditate to songs if they wished and a story of her healing journey from various physical ailments unfolded (she’s now set to run the London Marathon on Sunday) along with a spiritual mission to reconnect with her “why?”. Then near the end a soft, gentle singalong version of ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’. I knew I’d heard some Whitney in her voice.

Anaiis & Grupo Cosmo

Next we took the 10 minute stroll over to Village Underground, a venue that has a lot of nostalgia for me. I spent a year in the offices above and next door back in 2011-2012 and little has changed since then. Aside from the sound in the venue, that has vastly improved. It sounded clear and punchy despite arriving late and being stuck at the back of the room.

Anaiis is a French Senegalese singer based in London, but the band tonight are from São Paulo. This is only the third time they’ve played out live together and their first show in the UK. If that hadn’t been said though, we’d never have guessed.

The music was a perfectly lovely blend of neo-soul, British pop rnb and jazz ballads with just a little samba to reflect the Brazilian side of things. If I’m honest it tended to wash over me at times. Very warm and pleasant like soft rain on a summers day but perhaps a little too daytime 6 Music or Spotify jazz playlist to resonate for too long.

Nídia and Valentina

Everything so far had been more than enjoyable for sure, the talent on display undeniable with plenty of artists I’ll no doubt come back to again. However nothing had quite taken me out of my comfort zone just yet. Praise be for this pair who were about to switch things up a little.

They were half an hour late, which is a pet hate of mine at multi venue shows. As the sound team set up a set of decks I wondered if this was going to be worth the wait but I needn’t have worried, Nídia used the four cdj decks as both backing and percussion instrument, whilst master percussionist Valentina jumped between her drums and marimba with such incredible skill and energy that you couldn’t help but feed off it.

Representing their hometown of Lisbon, with elements of kuduro and baile funk, their warped take on batida sounded like a carnival on ket. It was noisy and abrasive and it was fucking fantastic.

We planned to finish the night at the Jazz re:freshed stage watching drummer Richard Spaven but by the time we made it back to Brick Lane the queues were insane to get back into the venues. We still hadn’t moved after a quick beigel break while we waited so we decided to call it a night and save our energy for the next day. Speaking of which, it’s time to head back out there.

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When I was Head of Music at Boomtown I could probably tell you who 90% of the acts at Coachella were, even if there was little chance I’d have booked them. Now I struggle to recognise even 30%.

I Google a few names and realise I’m not missing out. I’m happy to have reached an age where I dismay of the music young folks are listening to, but is there an extra layer that irks me about Coachella?

For many of us in the UK festival world the USA’s biggest music gathering is shorthand for everything that’s wrong: the commercialisation of our culture; the gentrification of alternative music; the triumph of capitalism over community; and with a sea of phones at every stage - the favouring of spectacle over being immersed in the moment.

I have no doubt that for attendees this is a gross misreading of their annual pilgrimage. I realise Coachella has to be so much more than that and it’s hard to be high and mighty when these are all problems that increasingly face our own festivals.

I’m a staunch defender of Glastonbury against many similar accusations. Are there pockets of genuine counter culture within the walls of Coachella? At least with Glastonbury there’s an attempt to hold onto a thread of their more radical roots and with advertising frowned upon there, the corporations are generally left to find sneakier ways to market their products.

Of course many have never had to hide that much. The first time I ever had Coca-cola it was at Glastonbury 1982. A nice hippy couple bought it for me when I had lost my dad in the crowd. Even if we don’t indulge in some of the more nefarious corporate food and drink products, they are so ingrained in our every day lives that we hardly notice them.

That said, if there were billboards to Coca-cola at Glastonbury, there would rightfully be outrage. If they suddenly had a McDonalds food stall, at least a large chunk of their older audience and a reassuring amount of young people would refuse to come back. But what about their musical equivalents? They might feel good at first bite, but are they nutritious enough for the soul?

This question began to hit when I woke up in the early hours of the morning and against better judgement, turned on the live stream of Coachella’s main stage to watch Katseye. I only lasted a minute or two but it was enough to set my brain off.

I’m under doctors orders to rest at the moment so I’m not going to unpack all my thoughts now. I only know Katseye because I’ve been teaching modules all about K-Pop and I know more than any 50 year old should on the subject.

Even though they largely bypassed K-Pop’s intense upbringing in training camps, the LA based “global girl group” were inducted into them through a reality TV show financed by South Korea’s Hybe corporation and Geffen Records, part of the Universal Music Group.

Whilst I’m certainly not ‘anti’ Katseye and have a soft spot for some K-Pop bangers, they are a shining example of manufactured pop music. The music industry at its most industrial. Purely exploitative, manipulative, music by numbers. Kids love them.

Multinational corporations in the guise of record labels have long dominated large festivals line ups but can you imagine the backlash in 1999 if rather than Rage Against The Machine, Tool and Beck - Coachella had booked the Backstreet Boys or the Spice Girls? It feels as if the machine no longer needs to hide in these events, that our festivals have been buried under so many layers of corporate meddling that it’s hard to see what it might look like without it.

There is still a huge benefit in gathering together in large numbers for a shared musical experience - even for those of us viewing online - and as the music eco systems and industries further fracture it’s hard not to lean on pop artists to give us those moments. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who finds moments of connection in the crowd of a Katseye concert and I don’t completely hate that Coachella feels more artificial each year, or even that the Glastonbury line up is now cheesier than Pilton Pop ever was. I just hope that we always keep a space for the rebels, the artists and the counter culture. I know there’s still plenty out there. Hell, if you look closely you can even see Suicidal Tendencies and Black Flag still lurking on the Coachella poster.

For the record I had a much better time watching Blood Orange headline one of the other stages at Coachella this year and I watched a Japanese act called Creepy Nuts who mixed techno, trap, jersey club and even afrobeats with cheesy J-pop and touches of electro swing. A cringey cocktail at times but at their best moments sounded like Kneecap or or a (hopefully) less problematic Die Antwoord. I think that’s my fill for this year though. David Byrne is currently on as I write this but I think I’ll wait for the ‘in real life’ version at Cardiff Castle this summer.

We can still appreciate the culture he helped to create and even acknowledge his contributions.

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I was hoping to unpack Afrika Bambaataa’s complicated legacy much later down the line but his passing this week from cancer has pushed these thoughts to the forefront for me and so I shall attempt to explain some of the issues surrounding his life. At the heart of this is the way we tell stories. Hip hop history is a mixture of mythology and great man theory, which can be problematic at times.

Kool Herc helped to incubate Breaking culture by catering to the tastes of the local dancers that had the best following, and Grandmaster Flash helped rap evolve by bringing on board the MCs that would eventually make up the Furious 5. Bambaata more than anyone helped to bring together crews of DJs, MCs, graffiti writers and breakers. This in turn influenced some in the Downtown art scene to create a cultural package that they could market. in order to sell graffiti art in galleries.

There’s also a general consensus that Bambaataa attributed the name Hip hop to the movement, although it was a term being used somewhat derogatorily to describe the rap and breakbeat based music that young people in the Bronx were making.

When the likes of problematic punk provocateur Malcolm McLaren and his assistant Lady Blue decided to take this very same package globally in 1982, it was Bambaataa that they pointed to as its primary figure. He in turn tipped his hat to Kool Herc as the founding father.

Digging through myth and misinformation to get to the history of Hip hop can be a tricky task but in 1975 after the death of his friend Ronald Bethel (known as Soulski) is when Bambaataa has generally attributed his move away from the Black Spades gang to form a new group, The Organization (although the gang was already beginning to dissolve by this point). As a member of the Black Spades he was on the war council of the first division, first chapter. The president of that chapter was Kool DJ Dee but it was another DJ in the gang, Disco King Mario, who would help to give Bambaataa his musical start, as an assistant on his sound system.

The Organization grew into the Zulu Nation around late 1976, and although this doesn’t exactly tally with their official birth date of 1973, it’s hard for me to comment on that without knowing the group’s reason for choosing that specific year. What I do know is that their underlying philosophies were influenced by the various black nationalist religious organisations such as the Nation Of Islam and its offshoot the Five-Percent Nation.

Whilst there is much to be said for the afro-futurist approach of imagining alternative realities, and replacing narratives of trauma with narratives of agency, this can really become problematic when it enables community leaders to exploit those searching for an escape from that same trauma. A prime example of this is Dwight York from the Nuwaubian Nation who was indicted on 120 counts of child molestation and rape.

Bambaataa borrowed many of the Nuwabian’s teachings - a mixture of pseudo-Islamic themes, Judaism, black nationalism, Egyptology, cryptozoology, Christianity, UFO religions, New Age, the sovereign citizen movement and popular conspiracy theories. He also struck up a friendship with York and this raises uncomfortable parallels. It can often feel as if we all got indoctrinated into a cult at some level.

It would certainly explain the heavy levels of cognitive dissonance surrounding the allegations against Bambaataa. Some claim to have known about them for decades and aside from all of those in America who have come forwards in the last decade, the stories include abuse in both the UK and France. This is more than just hearsay and it was only the time between the incidents taking place and going public that seems to have kept Bambaataa out of jail while he was alive. Of course without a clear legal resolution, it’s become easier for everyone to bury their head in the sand up until now. This doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t care. Avoidance is often a mixture of of overwhelm and instinctive self preservation. But the bottom line is he sexually abused multiple children across decades.

Considering how he took away their childhood, I think it’s a small price to rethink our childhood relationships to him. I don’t discount all of the stories of his humanity and perhaps he had a genuinely caring side to his personality. I also recognise that he was allegedly abused himself as a young boy. The whole situation is tragic in itself but we have to build a future that is more protective of our children. We have to create an environment whereby powerful figures cannot get away with their abuse. This means we cannot separate art from artist until the artist no longer gains from their art. We need to build a new support system for artists that doesn’t involve putting them on a golden pedestal, no matter how powerfully their work affects us. Right now I don’t know how to do this, so forgive me if my writing in future remains wedded to the old ways.

In 1983 Sonic Youth told us to kill our idols and instead we created more than ever. A culture is not built by a handful of men, it’s built by communities and connection (and I should really include capitalism here but that’s a post for another day). I still love and respect the culture but I believe I have finally left the cult.

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After Ye was denied entry to the UK, the decision was swift to pull the whole festival for this year. Festival Republic obviously didn’t feel they had a line up strong enough to make going ahead worthwhile, which might speak to how they ended up with such an ill judged headliner in the first place. I also assume that there was a clause in their contract or insurance policy (or both) that made cancelling the whole affair the most financially viable route, especially as they could easily argue that it was due to forces beyond their control.

I think they’ll be back next year and I’m fairly certain some of the acts I mentioned in my previous post will be there, possibly rolled over from this one. Much can change in the space of a year but it’s unlikely that the headliners will shift that dramatically. Of course now they will be under closer scrutiny, which could cause them problems if they book Nicki Minaj for example. Her allegiances to the MAGA movement and her controversial husband may ruffle some feathers, but it won’t have anything like the same impact as Ye has had. Of course he will likely get a boost for his new album and extra notoriety points amongst his fandom. I don’t think this will affect his career as badly as turning up and just being Ye would have. Let’s see how long he can stick to that last apology now.

The people who really lose out are the traders, or the festival freelancers who were relying on that weekend for income. Not forgetting those up and coming rappers who miss out on a handy step up the ladder by performing, and the crowd who get too few chances to see such a rap heavy line up as it is. Wireless is not for me really, but if I was a teenager right now I’d likely be gutted. Of course there’s still VIP tickets to the Saturday of All Points East. I’ll be there to watch Tyler The Creator, Ghostface Killah, Danny Brown, Jim Legxcy, Syd and a bunch of rap acts and singers I’ve never heard of.

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So it’s unsurprising that this would eventually come back to bite him, and now the Wireless Festival. Two big sponsors have already left and more may follow, which is huge for such a big corporate festival. The press and public backlash has been severe and there’s calls to deny him a visa. This puts Wireless in a very difficult position. They can bow to the pressure and drop him from the line up, but this leaves them three headliners down.

It’s very last minute to be doing that as artists his size generally book up their tours a year in advance. Of course it might still be easier to do now rather than gamble with his visa being revoked. By then they will be incredibly lucky to get any replacements at all. They could simply upgrade their second line, which at Wireless Festival are often potential headliners anyway. But three nights is pushing it.

Perhaps they can get another artist to headline the full three nights? But who? Drake did the same last year and Tyler The Creator already has two nights lined up at All Points East. Kendrick Lamar perhaps? Usually both the artist and festival would want to have something to tie into the show such as a new album and there’s nothing planned for him that we know of. Plus he did a stadium tour with SZA just last year so it’s unlikely (for either of them).

J Cole could pull it off. Especially if The Fall Off really is planned to be his last album. Three nights as a series of farewell shows would be a winner.

I mean why book Ye in the first place right? It’s very hard to find headliners that suit in this day and age, so when you’re having to recycle the same artists every few years you are often at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating a decent price and you’re at the mercy of release plans, touring schedules and the general unpredictability of an artist. It can lead to panic when your options start to disappear and so I bet when they saw the chance of 3 headliners in one, they ignored the misgivings they might have had.

They also looked over the fact that last time he played the festival in 2014, he got booed after a 20 minute rant and a lot of the crowd left. A similar thing happened at The Big Chill in 2011, which was probably the first time we heard him compare himself to Hitler. Glastonbury was a relatively rant free affair as far as I remember, but it has to be up there with one of the worst headliner sets that the festival has ever had. I know many disagree, but Ye’s hardcore stans will pretty much forgive him anything at all.

So who else are we looking at for headliners if Ye does fall through? Many of these might already be booked for the festival and so they’d be foolish to release the rest of the line up until the current mess is sorted out.

Personally the one artist that would get me there is Doechii, but I’d expect her to be second line down rather than top billing. Plus with cancelling her last tour she could be seen as being unreliable by bookers and ticket buyers alike. That said Lil Uzi Vert has a history of cancelling and still seems to get booked. He hasn’t actually played since 2022 so he might be a good option. Lil Baby isn’t though. He cancelled all his UK shows last year and there’s rumours that he’s retired for good.

Nicki Minaj played just two years ago in 2024, but then again there was only a two year gap the last time she played previously, and there is a new album coming. Cardi B also played 4 years ago. She’s still touring her last album with no UK dates showing, so she could be a good bet to be there.

A$AP Rocky is another artist who was there 4 years ago and he just dropped his first album in 8 years. I’d say he’d be definite if he didn’t already have a UK tour booked in for August and September. The Weeknd and Playboi Carti are around just before that so they’ll be out too. Gunna is another act who already has shows in March, although he is coming back in the summer for Reading & Leeds. This only makes it more unlikely that he’ll be at Wireless though, unless it’s as a secret guest.

There’s rumours that Rihanna is looking to tour here again for the first time in a decade which could be a huge coup for Wireless if they can get her in. Plus with the 10 year anniversary of Anti it’s enough of an extra hook.

Would they go for some older rappers perhaps? Snoop Dogg is due to drop an album this year but as much of a cultural icon as he’s become, I’m not certain he would still land a headline slot there. Is Eminem completely out of the question? I think that’s a long shot personally. I doubt 50 Cent will come back so quickly after his stadium tour last year and Lil Wayne’s visa issues make him an unlikely candidate. Ye’s old pal Jay Z already has three nights at Yankee Stadium on those same three dates so I guess he’s out too.

How about some UK artists? Dave and Skepta are both playing Reading & Leeds so the chances are slim. Central Cee popped up with Drake last year but hasn’t had his own set since 2021, unless you count the random Birmingham episode the following year. He’s also touring his Can’t Rush Greatness album still so he’s definitely in the running to reappear. J Hus was there in 2024 so I doubt he’ll return just yet. Stormzy maybe? That would be great and he’s not been there since 2018. He’s working on a new album though so I think he’d want to wait until that’s due to be released at the very least.

Melvin Benn who is the MD of Festival Republic has just released a statement saying, "Forgiveness and giving people a second chance are becoming a lost virtue in this ever-increasing divisive world." Either way I really hope this whole episode resolves and doesn't signal the end of Wireless. It’s hard enough for kids these days to get line ups like the ones they offer and I’m not sure there would be a decent replacement if they folded. Of course a few Welsh artists on the line up would be nice. We’ve got plenty here to choose from.

Growing up in the pre internet 80s and 90s meant that culture was more clearly defined and many of us built a shared identity with those whose interests matched our own. That still happens of course, but the communities are more fractured and the boundaries are more blurred now than they’ve ever been.

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Being a part of the Hip hop community means carrying a complex set of cultural codes. Understanding this was integral to curating the ‘Hip Hop: A Welsh Story’ exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff. Over the space of 40 years the rules have shifted, but they were a lot simpler when we all received our information from the same places.

We all saw the same records and record sleeves, or the handful of magazine articles and television segments, filtered through just 3 or 4 TV channels. Seeing how the culture has evolved through the decades and how it has influenced the world around us has been fascinating. To spend time digging deep into the history of Hip-hop’s foundation and collecting some of the stories from my local scenes and their extended families in Wales was truly an honour and a privilege, but it was not without consequences.

The exhibition has been closed for over a month now and I’m nearly ready to unpack that journey, but before I do that I feel it’s important to reflect on my own relationship to Hip hop, from the very beginning.

If you’re expecting stories of how cool I was as a kid though, prepare to be considerably disappointed.

I only have a handful of faded memories from my childhood in the 80s and music tends to be the hook that I hang them on. This starts with the records and tapes that my parents played. From my mum I got The Police who had just released ‘Reggatta de Blanc’ or classical pieces from Edvard Grieg and Prokofiev. My earliest memory of my dad is the ‘Sergeant Pepper’ album from The Beatles, or Simon and Garfunkel.

Then slowly I became aware of the music I heard further afield. We moved from Gowerton on the Welsh coast to Ladbroke Grove in London around 1979 to 1980. There was still a huge Caribbean community there at the time and so reggae was most definitely the soundtrack to life around me. That remained the same when I moved to the White City Estate with my mum and two sisters, and when I went to live with my Dad on the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney. There were a few brief stops between these but we don’t have time for a tour of all the places I’ve called home.

The first taste of Hip hop that I remember, outside of the graffiti that was all around me in London, was when two kids at my infant school in White City, did a body popping and robotics performance in class. This would have been around 1982 - 83, before the first proper wave of Hip hop was about to hit. I wish I could remember the music that they used, that detail is lost to time but I remember being blown away by the movements.

I’d like to say that the first rap tune I knew was someone like Spoonie G, Kurtis Blow or the Funky 4 + 1. But fate (or perhaps memory) has not been that kind to me. It’s not even ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 which was huge in 1982. So big in fact that it was adapted by the Green Cross Code to teach kids about road safety in ‘83. This was the earliest rap music I can remember.

I don’t fare much better with the next song either. Roland Rat was a self-obsessed ‘superstar’ puppet from the West Midlands that first appeared on morning television during the Easter Holidays of 1983. Later that year he released the single ’Rat Rapping’ which spent 12 weeks in the UK Top 40. It’s pure novelty for kids and definitely not Hip hop but I loved it. The production from Mark Rye and Steve Jeffries still bangs as well.

In fact Hip hop as a term wouldn’t be in popular use for a little while longer. The culture first came to us Brits en masse as a mixture of “breakdancing” and electro music. It took a little while to incubate after landing in November 1982 with the video to Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ and the New York City Rap Tour. By the summer of 1983 it was starting to show up around me and by 1984 it had completely taken over.

The breakdance explosion was happening everywhere, but it felt especially fertile in Hackney. I remember seeing moves put into practice on every side of the playground at school. I really wanted to be a part of it all, but I was very young and just didn’t have the discipline to develop. I didn’t really get much further than a disjointed caterpillar.

Then we moved way, way out of town. I suddenly went from a multicultural East London housing estate to a bungalow in the Avon countryside. When I said that breakdancing was everywhere, this happened to be the one small village that it seemed to pass by. I didn’t have the moves to introduce it either, but I did try. The local kids just looked at me blankly when I threw down my caterpillar. It must have been bad, because I can count all of my memories from that school on one hand.

Sadly I can’t remember much after moving to Bristol either. This would have been between 1985 to 1986 when so much was happening culturally. DJ Jaffa told me that he was going to Wild Bunch parties around this period. I have no such memories though. I know every single film I saw at the cinema back then, but I can’t name any music that I wouldn’t have heard regularly on BBC Radio 1 or Top of the Pops.

Except for two songs. 1986 was the year I bought my first rap record, but it’s unlikely to ever make a dent in the Top 100,000. It was a flimsy pink flexidisc that came free with the first edition of Oink, an anarchic comic for kids, whose writers included Frank Sidebottom, Mark Riley from The Fall and BBC Radio fame, and a school-age Charlie Brooker. ‘Oink Rap’ was another take on ‘The Message.’ Its chorus went, “Don’t eat pigs cos they’re made of ham, eat the nasty butcher man.” and it must have found me around the time that I turned vegetarian.

These novelty rap records were fun, but they didn’t prepare me for what I would witness when I turned on the TV one evening in the summer of ‘86. There was a relatively new programme on Channel 4 called The Chart Show. Re-launching in August after a brief dispute with the musicians union, I believe it was the first show of its kind on terrestrial TV, with nothing but back to back music videos, including one from Run DMC and Aerosmith.

I can still remember the electric shock of pure excitement, and a certain amount of confusion, when ‘Walk This Way’ came on the screen. What the hell was this? It sounded so different to anything else that I knew. I was a fool for not rushing straight out and buying the ‘Raising Hell’ album, but despite that oversight, the impact of seeing the video has stuck with me all of these years.

It was the same year that house music hit the charts and ‘Jack Your Body’ by Steve Silk Hurley felt like it was on all of the time. I became obsessed with the Top 40 and so everything was pop music to me. I saw no difference between that and Mel & Kim or even Bananarama, both of whom I loved.

Some other New York rappers were reaching the UK Top 40. Doug E Fresh and MC Ricky D (aka Slick Rick), The Real Roxanne and Kurtis Blow had all charted between 1985 and 86. Even the Brooklyn crew Whistle made it in briefly with ‘Just Buggin.’ Somehow I had missed all of these.

We set sail for another new city in 1987 and this is when things started to shift. In Birmingham I saw local rappers in assembly and a noticeable fashion style of baggy acid wash jeans with cartoon patches and JD Sports bum bags. I was still tuned to Radio 1 rather than local pirate stations such as P.C.R.L. but now they had Jeff Young’s Big Beat Show. On television there was a fresh BBC 2 music program called Behind The Beat, which showcased house, soul, ragga and of course Hip hop artists.

When the Def Jam Tour came to London it was Behind The Beat that screened it. LL Cool J’s live set was shown while I was hanging out at my friend Carl’s house. He was mostly into Guns & Roses and AC/DC but also loved the Beastie Boys and had blagged a Volkswagen pendant from the company by saying he didn’t want to join the rest of their fans in stealing car badges.

LL stomped across the stage and I was fully transfixed. Carl’s mum was a loud lady with a sharp mouth but when she tried to change the channel I pleaded my case to keep it on. My brain couldn’t quite compute what I was seeing. Everything was so minimal. He was just pacing back and forth, so what made this performance so compelling? There was a raw energy feeding me from the TV and it just made so much sense to the way I was feeling at the time.

There was a lot of tension in my life. Some of it normal adolescent stuff that any kid has to deal with, but mixed with extra family problems that were happening around me. On top of that I had always had run-ins with bullies but High School was a whole new world and I was starting to stand up for myself more, as well as picking a few fights that were largely unprovoked. It’s hard to admit but I could also be a bit of a bully at times. I was generally a smart and well behaved kid, but every now and then I’d explode with rage. LL Cool J somehow connected to all of that through the TV.

This was a really exciting time for music in Britain. Even though rap had been in the charts since 1979 it felt like a new frontier still. The jazz funk, soul and disco scenes were starting to overlap breeding a new UK sound, ragga was the most potent form of dancehall yet and house music was in its ascendancy with techno and garage following up close behind. All of these sounds could be found in the country’s more clued up clubs and warehouse parties, and they started to filter back to me through the mainstream.

Although inspired by what was happening in New York, the UK was taking a different direction. That became apparent through groups such as Coldcut, M/A/R/R/S or L.A. Mix. Their beats were largely house and garage but their cut and paste sample heavy approach was very much based in Hip hop.

It was a time of experimentation and an influential, eclectic club culture but questions of authenticity were still important. Cookie Crew weren’t sure about mixing their Hip hop sound with house music when The Beatmasters first approached them to make ‘Rok Da House’. I am grateful they eventually went along with it because that was a huge single for me. It was also my first taste of real deal British rappers.

It wouldn’t be long before I started to dig deeper for the more underground artists, thanks in no small part to Simon Harris who died recently. There were so many great UK rappers that I was soon to discover and most have never truly had their full appreciation for the foundations that they laid in the UK’s rap and dance music history.

At the start of 1988 I had no idea that I was about to enter one of the most incredible times for music in the UK, or that I was going to experience it from a new home in Cardiff. The Second Summer of Love is when my passion for Hip hop goes into overdrive and when it begins to form the core of my identity. By the time it’s over, I would embrace the gangsta era and the violence and misogyny that came with it. Hip hop was the soundtrack to my teenage rebellion, but also the secret to remaining level headed through turbulent times. I’ll save all of that for the next post though.