5 things we learned about grime godfather Wiley from reading Eskiboy

UK grime would be a much more boring place without Wiley. 

His musical releases might be erratic but his behaviour is entertainingly so, from leaking huge Zip Files of music to slagging off Glastonbury ('Fuck your farm') and uploading YouTube videos of him making his breakfast, there are fewer weirder personalities in grime. Or at least, if there are, they keep it under wraps for fear of losing fans. But not Wiley. He lets it all hang out in the best way possible. So if you read his new Eskiboy biog, then you'll be unsurprised to discover that this is all over the place too.

He compares himself to football clubs and martial arts experts within the same paragraph... 

'I was like Ajax. Ajax train players. It's nuts. They put time into people, they work them hard. And then they sell them. That's something that I have done. And no other musician has. But I was just helping people. I didn't expect anything from it. I don't take anything from them. I don't sell them. I'm like a Kung Fu master.'

Sting helped inspire him 

'Eskimo Dance used to be mad. It used to be properly underground. It all came from Sting you know.'

He spent a lot of money (according to his sister) 

'One day he called me from Manchester. I need you to pay our hotel bill. It's a lot. £48,000. He'd taken over a whole floor of the Hilton in Manchester for a week.'

He is an efficient multi-tasker (according to Scratchy)

'Recently we were out in Cyprus and even just driving down the road with him was hilarious. He was on his phone and he was eating, drinking some kind of slushy red daiquiri thing and bombing down the road with the boot of his car flying open. I was looking at him juggling this ridiculous ice drink in one hand with chips in his mouth and he just looked at me like, 'What?'

He's into roast dinners

'Yorkshire pudding, my god.'

Someone needs to give this man his own TV show...

Tottenham Community Press

Tottenham has been our ends since mid-September and the vibes have been big and strong ever since we landed. Bruce Grove is our hood and it's been on point, from the Italian joint San Marco's to Aldi, the Beehive boozer and the Bruce Castle Park. We've been having a lovely time scrabbling around the post code and attempting to embrace the place, or at least uncover the boozers which will let us quaff ales with our sprog past 8pm without giving us a scolding. Don't judge us. Purleaseeeee.

As part of that, I've started putting together words for the Tottenham Community Press, a new social enterprise aimed at shining a light on the area and the good stuff that's going on in a community that feels like it's on the brink of taking off. Check out their website here and dig into the first piece I've written for them, on the next wave of grime to come in your ears.

Read issue one via PDF. 

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...