What’s all this about you being a veggie these days?
I just watched some video on it on YouTube. I definitely feel better for it. I do still smoke though but once I kick that I’ll feel 100%. You know when you go gym and you walk out, you feel good about yourself? I feel good about myself that I don’t eat meat. Everything I eat is from the ground. Since I’ve become vegetarian I’ve lost so much weight.
Are you veggie or vegan?
I can’t do vegan cos I love cheese too much man. I don’t drink milk and I don’t eat eggs. I’m nearly a vegan but I have to have cheese. I can’t live without cheese. I need to keep my protein up, so I eat falafel, gnocchi and avocado, things like that. I’ve lost so much weight that now I need to get back into the gym so that I stay in shape rather than looking tired and skinny.
What do you miss most about eating meat?
I miss the texture of chewing meat. That’s why I can’t stop eating cheese because it’s the last thing that I have that feels like meat to me and is chewy in a similar way. But I don’t miss the taste. I don’t miss Nando’s Chicken because it’s the taste of the sauces that I liked. I like the taste and the flavour of Indian, West Indian and Nigerian food because of the flavour they put on it. So I don’t miss chicken because I can still get the sauces.
Your Ace Hood Flow collab with OUTBXD sold out 48 hours. 48! It seems like the T-Shirt game is still healthy these days?
Yeah, I know! We were supposed to have the website up for a month, but we sold every single one in less than 48 hours. We did a pop-up and it popped down straight away. Mental! I always wanted to do apparel but I didn’t just want to do just do Boy Better Know stuff because that was JME’s thing. JME would always be like ‘Why don’t you invest like £10,000 and earn some money for yourself’. I didn’t want to do it just because I was trying to get more established as a musician, and I didn’t really have ideas for clothing, so I waited. Then all of a sudden I started doing all of these ad-libs in the background of my lyrics; like ‘Mental, Sexy, Icy, Violent‘, and all this shit, so I thought I’d try the mental and violent on a t-shirt. I called it Zombie Attack and every show I go to, it’s mental man, so many people are wearing it. When JME was doing Boy Better Know, I knew it was doing well, but I couldn’t see how well. Like, people from other countries like Australia, Canada and America were wearing it. I didn’t even realise we had that reach. I knew musically people liked us, but I didn’t know that I could make something and people would want it for the fact of my creativity. They like my mind.
What’s the craziest outfit you’ve worn? I remember the Ed Hardy dressing gown onstage at the Indigo2, for one.
See, when I wear something, I don’t think it’s crazy. When I was younger, my mum and dad couldn’t give me everything that they wanted to, so I would be the kind of kid drawing Nike trainers and Ferrari Testarossa’s, on a piece of paper because I really wanted it. That’s why I went hard on Ed Hardy a few years ago. When I was growing up, I had a bit of Moschino, but when I went to D&B raves back in the day, Northstar and all the older Tottenham guys were the ones wearing the nice clothes, and that’s what I always wanted. So when I got older and got some money and found Ed Hardy, that’s when I went mad on it. Dressing up is probably a Nigerian thing, it’s in my family. Africans love to dress up innit so now I’m like the new African boy of the next generation of Adenuga’s; I’m just dressing up and wearing mad shit. And to make it better, I get to go onstage with it and make it look good, make it look better than it already is. I’m blessed man.
Where’s all your Ed Hardy now?
I gave it all to charity. When I started seeing it on the market stalls, that’s when I stopped wearing it. When I started to see it in abundance and people with no swag wearing Ed Hardy that’s when I said ‘Nah, it’s time for me to put the cloth to a better use and let someone stay warm with it’ so I gave it all to charity. I had thousands and thousands of pounds worth of it. Mental.
How do you define style or swag?
I think everyone’s got their own style. When you’re born, you’re so free, you’re so you. When you’re a kid, your parents would put stuff on you but you’d turn a sleeve up or put the collars up or do something else to it that makes it your own. But then when we leave school we enter this scary society of people, everyone’s trying to get money – everyone’s in a rat race and you get sucked in. Now this is where style comes in; some people get sucked in and they have no swag, they just copy whatever they see. But some people manage to never conform to society or one day they come out of conforming. So style is being yourself after you’ve conformed to society. People think swag is being able to go and buy loads of garms and put them on. That’s not swag. When you can wear something and you’re the man who makes them clothes… You, yourself, as a human, are so cool that you make them clothes look sick. A lot of the stuff that Pharrell wears, if he wasn’t him wearing it, them clothes might not work but because he’s wearing them, and he’s just being himself, then it’s sick, it’s his style. Style is very personal.
Is it tough being an artist and running a clothing line?
Yeah, that’s stuff is hype! Like I have team that works for me, my friends, who help and we’re learning as we go along. Quite a few high street shops are interested in stocking our brand but we don’t know yet which ones will be right. Will it make it shit if it’s in a certain shop, or will it make it good? So at the moment, I’m treading carefully. There is a lot of work, we’re still going to the factories ourselves and trying on the jumpers and getting the cuts right. I’m quite heavily involved and I’d like to stay that involved for as long as I can but it’s very time consuming and I need to make music as well – cos that’s definitely my first love.
What’s happening with the new album, Konniciwa?
I’ve got some sick beats for the album already. I’ve been just working with people to see what comes. When I’ve got 13 tracks, I’ll consciously go into the studio and do three more tracks so I can put out the album. But as for now, as naturally and as organically as Blacklisted was made, that’s how I want Konniciwa to be, cos when I force myself to make music it never really feels… free. When I’m free is when I’m at my best. I’m happy that I’ve got this clothing line to keep my mind occupied for when I don’t want to do music cos sometimes I need to go away for a minute to make good music. You need to live a little bit and so I’m happy that I’m designing new jumpers and shit so that when I’m ready I can give my music the proper time and attention that it needs. Have you heard the Dev Hynes song? It just came out. We did a song called High Street. Oh my god the song is MENTAL. It’s SICK. When I first found out about him, I didn’t know as many people knew about him that do. I found him on Youtube, my friend showed me him. When I first started watching, he had like 50k views so I was like ‘Oh right’. But then I found out that he was from England and he’d moved to America and to do that you have to be so free. This is a black guy from England and he’s gone to America and embodied like Prince and Michael Jackson, he’s sick! When I bigged him up on Lay Her Down, he hollered at me on Twitter about doing a song and I was gassed. I’ve been listening to it all day. We did it over email and there was a lot of sending back and forth so it was as natural as possible. The tune is sick.
That’s a great thing to do, to work outside what’s naturally expected…
Trust me, there’s going to be a lot of things now that I’m going to do. I think it was because of Blacklisted that I can do it. But I needed to take myself out of the grime scene to do it. I am a grime artist and I will be forever, but I’m not in the grime scene. I’m not that guy who goes to Eskimo Dance to clash everyone and get 1000 reloads. I’ve been waiting for the time that people that look at Skepta like the guy in the art class who’s going to draw a better drawing than you. That’s what I want people to understand; I’m one of those guys who like making, and listening to, sick shit. So now I’ve drawn myself out of the whole grime circle with Blacklisted, doing tunes with Dev Hynes in my spare time, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I listen to in my spare time, I don’t listen to all these grime artists really. I listen to old-skool grime; I’ll listen to D Double E and that, old songs, but I don’t listen to what’s going on now because I don’t want to trap myself in that box because I don’t think there’s too many creative people in there. There’re a lot of sheep and not enough leaders. There’s no wow factor anymore. People weren’t making echo sounds on the mic like D Double E back in the day. There’s no innovation now. So this is me now, I remember that this is music and there are people out there freely making music; the Dev’s, Theophilus London, Toro Y Moi, James Blake. And me. I’m going to stay free.
Credits
Text Hattie Collins
Photography Bella Howard