Meeting the Murkle Man

Grime emerged all scruffy and raw back when we were living in Sheff town in the early to mid 2000s and blammo if it wasn't the most excting musical force we'd ever encountered. British, youthful (unlike Mumford and Sons, your parents wouldn't get it) and musically totally fucking weird. At the time it made a bass heavy kerfuffle and exposed a whole new breed of producers and artists to a massive audience. The mainstream briefly eye balled the grime crew, gave them a few moments of their attention before running for the hills scared and confused.

It meant that for a few years there was a large vat of record deals and money being churned up as the music industry movers and shakers endeavoured to get their head round what was going on. For some folk this worked out just fine - Dizze, Stryder, Skepta and their successors Tine Tempah and Labrinth have gone on to be big in a whole slurry of different games. Even Wiley has had massive success despite his inabililty to comply with the demands of the major players. Others have disappeared without a trace (Demon - where are you now bruv?) while others, such as Jammer and Lethal Bizzle, still have music careers but ones where the noises are made are relatively minor.

Thankfully with my current employ, we get to find out about these sort of cats and I had the pleasure of meeting Jammer at a press day in prep for his album Living the Dream. It was in a ping pong club slash bar near Holborn and our Murkle Man was almost an hour late before he rocked up in the most ludicrous garms I've seen in timeeeee.

As a result, we spent most of it talking about the elephant above (the record sleeve is his debut album Jahmanji). It was made funnier by just how baked our Jammer seemed to be.

You can check out the fruits of our interview here on M Magazine.

Below you can see what was going on through Jammer's eyes in a video he put out after the day. Confusion rules...