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I love it when artists from disparate scenes come together to create timeless music.

I love it even more when they already did it ages ago, and I’ve only just clocked it.

Jamiroquai and their vocalist Jay Kay were a mainstay of British dance music across the 1990s, pioneering acid jazz and funk before achieving unparalleled mainstream popularity and pop chart success.

Around the same time, M-Beat had helped to bring jungle into mainstream recognition, becoming most famous for his anthems ‘Incredible’ with MC General Levy and ‘Sweet Love’ with singer Nazlyn.

Their worlds merged when they collaborated for ‘Do You Know Where You’re Coming From?’, the first single on Jamiroquai’s classic, third album, Travelling Without Moving, in 1996 — which won a Guinness World Record for being the highest selling funk album of all time.

The original of the song peaked at number 12 in the UK singles chart, and later appeared on the B-side to Jamiroquai’s mega-hit ‘Virtual Insanity’.

At the same time, an offshoot of jungle and drum-and-bass called ‘intelligent’ — a cleaner, stripped-back and ambient version of the genre’s rough-and-rugged dance floor origins — became both popular and controversial.

It appealed to those who might want to hear the same shuffly drums and thumping bass at home — over a glass of wine or whilst lost in the exploratory introversion of a snow sports video game.

But it offended those who saw it as the watered-down, patronising derivative of a harder-core scene that had proudly sustained itself on a rave, DIY and pirate radio circuit and deserved its flowers.

Anyway, M-Beat released an intelligent version of ‘Do You Know Where You’re Coming From?’ which I actually prefer to the original.

It has jungle’s (albeit tempered) swagger but with extra delicate components: tweeting birds, faded vocal cuts from Jay Kay that let you feel the rhythm up closer, and ethereal, outer-space keys.

Sadly, M-Beat disappeared from the scene after changing British music forever — he was apparently homeless within months of this collaboration, whereas Jamiroquai soon went stratospheric — before popping up decades later, in 2022, with new music and an interview in DJ Mag.

This is one is perfect for kicking into gear on a relaxed summer’s evening.

Two weeks ago I went on holiday to Oman. For the first five days, before heading into the desert, my wife and I rented a room at a guesthouse in a fishing village just next to the capital of Muscat called Qantab. It had its own quiet beach and was surrounded by rocky hills that you can climb to take in the sunset.

Frankincense burned; the call-to-prayer pierced the cyclical sound of waves lapping softly on the shore. It was so safe that our host, a yoga teacher, left the doors unlocked at all times. On the second night we caught a small boat out to sea to see the plankton glimmering in fluorescent green beneath the surface.

We would take swims in the sea, read and write on our veranda or drive up the hill towards other parts of the city to shop for supplies — coffee, freshly squeezed juice, crates of bottled water to fight the heatwave — and find local food to eat.

I tried king fish masalas, chicken birianis, one of the best burgers of my life (for £2), and shuwa, the Omani national dish of spiced lamb and rice, slow-cooked underground, wrapped in banana leaf. I snacked on nuts, dates and Omani crisps (which are randomly a thing).

Whilst cruising around in our rented 4x4 — a slick upgrade from my banged up old Peugeot back in London — we made our way through a wide range of music.

Being away from home with a Middle Eastern sun shining on my face inspired me to seek out songs that could mirror the warm, rustic vastness of the setting whizzing by outside my window.

For whatever reason, during this endeavour, the artist I kept returning to was Birmingham rapper Kofi Stone.

I’ve been a fan of Stone since I heard him on The Silhouettes Project’s debut album (2020), rapping on a song for which he begins by advising the listener: “If it makes you feel alive, then do it more”.

Then I took in his own debut album, Nobody Cares Till Everybody Does (2019), which has zero filler and can be played front to back, although my favourite song is Lost To The Streets featuring Maverick Sabre — a deep, bassy, crackly, boom-bap POV tale.

He has quietly become one of my favourite UK rappers, someone who can spit soulful wisdom, love letters and social justice analytics all with ease, without it sounding forced or inconsistent. This range is impressive. And I respect his gospel-inspired messaging — I welcome any religiosity or faith in music if it’s offered in accessible language with catchy melodies behind it.

Last year Stone dropped A Man After God’s Own Heart. When it came out, I listened to it several times all the way through, enjoying every minute, but I lazily never stopped to look at the track names.

In Muscat, with my hand on the wheel, one particular song from the project came on and I had to stick it on repeat — not once, but hundreds of times across the rest of the holiday. I’m still listening to it on a daily now.

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These Years Are Golden recalls conversations with an older woman (first verse) and older man (second verse) who advise Stone to focus on his wellbeing, appreciate the present moment and enjoy his life to the fullest.

It’s a simple but profound message that I needed to hear. The combination of crisp lyricism, the beat’s jazzy keys and funky bass, and the sweetly sung chorus have made it impossible to exclude from the All City playlist.

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Now, every time I listen, I think back to those carefree days of escapism in Oman…

When rapper Mist first pierced mainstream recognition in June 2016 with his anthem Karla’s Back, my friend and I were hanging out on a Friday evening watching YouTube music videos on a second hand HD projector that I’d bought from eBay.

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The algorithm blasted the video huge onto my living room wall. Its euphoric production quality combined with Mist’s Midlands accent and bold, cheeky lyricism meant that it would end up as one of my most played song’s of the year, a memorable shift in the power mapping of UK rap, as artists from cities outside of London started making bigger waves than ever before.

It was the first time I came across Mist, but also the song’s two producers, Steel Banglez and Sevaqk. Mist’s use of Punjabi in his lyrics, reflecting the south Asian locale of his Birmingham upbringing was a win for multicultural representation in British hip-hop. The fact that Steel Banglez and Sevakq both have Punjabi heritage, too, made even more sense.

I later interviewed Steel Banglez for the Complex US music platform Pigeons & Planes whilst eating dinner with him at Tayyabs, the famous karahi house in Whitechapel, east London, in the summer of 2018. By then he’d become the hottest producer in UK rap (he recently released his latest album, One Day It Will All Make Sense, on Nas’s Mass Appeal label).

Banglez explained that for songs like Karla’s Back and his other hits, he’d slowed down the core elements of UK garage to make them catchy and dance floor-friendly. To do so, he’d taken inspiration from DJ Mustard’s method of doing the same thing with Chicago house music to make US rap beats.

In one line of Karla’s Back, Mist goes: ‘Just made a banger with Sevaqk’ - shouting out the second producer on the song. For a time, this line would go on to become Sevaqk’s tagline. I followed him on YouTube and Spotify and later recognised his name on various rap tunes over subsequent years, from Chip’s Marijuana to Mist’s Let It Breath.

Then out of nowhere he dropped Jaan Nachdi — ‘jaan’ means life or soul, and ‘nachdi’ means dancing, in Punjabi — in 2022. It is an epic, drum and bass roller with relentless, machine gun drums which sound subtly inspired by the thwacks on the edge of a dhol, and impassioned vocals from Santokh Singh.

It’s a rare thing to hear such slapping, crisp dnb fused so authentically with south Asian elements, especially in more recent years (this type of hybrid experimentation was big in the 1990s/2000s after the birth of the Asian Underground movement).

I regularly stick it on when I need to source some motivation and energy in my day, or when I’m driving at night time.

Enjoy.

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Whilst completing a Q&A recently, I was asked to submit a go-to song for a sunny spring day, given the turning time of year. Right away I went to my UKG playlist to see what felt most appropriate.

I submitted Artful Dodger’s Vocal Mix of Lynden David Hall’s Forgive Me without giving it much thought. After doing so, I realised that I’d been listening to the song for years without digging into its history.

Everyone who cares about UK garage knows about the significance of the producer, but I had little knowledge about the man behind the vocals.

Lynden David Hall grew up in Earlsfield, south London, and attended the BRIT School for Performing Arts in Croydon. A demo tape he recorded there found its way to the desk of BBC Radio 1 DJ Trevor Nelson who signed him to a subsidiary of Virgin EMI called Cooltempo.

Hall released his debut album, Medicine 4 My Pain, in 1997. With the help of its heartfelt title song and raunchy single Sexy Cinderella, it went on to sell over 100,000 copies, earning Hall a Mobo Award for best newcomer in 1998.

He was soon labelled Britain’s answer to D’Angelo, nominated for best male artist at the 1999 Brit Awards and he became the first British artist to win the best male category in the Blues & Soul magazine awards.

The neo-soul original of Forgive Me featured on Hall’s second album, The Other Side, in 2000. Despite Hall’s cemented reputation, its sales performed poorly, and he was later dropped from EMI.

Artful Dodger remixed various versions of the song during the same year that the producer was propelling UK garage’s popular takeover through collaborations with soulful vocalists, most notably Craig David.

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All are packed with the genre’s joyous bounce and Hall’s unique voice, capturing a pocket of sound that only feels possible to have come from that turn-of-the-millennium time.

Hall later had a brief appearance in Love Actually (2003) as the lead singer at Keira Knightley and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s characters’ wedding; he released his third and final album, In Between Jobs, independently in 2005, having been diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma.

As the Guardian’s obituary, published after his passing on Valentine’s Day 2006, closed:

A bone-marrow transplant is the only cure for this rare cancer, but donors must be of the same ethnic group, and Hall discovered that a shortage of black donors gave him a minuscule chance of finding a suitable match. A stemcell transplant in late 2004 failed to arrest the disease. Last November, his wife Nikki held a benefit concert at London's Jazz Cafe, featuring Lynden's friends Beverley Knight, Ms Dynamite and Shola Ama. At the end of the event, she phoned her husband in hospital and asked the crowd to say hello. The cheers raised the roof. Nikki survives him.

Rest in peace Lynden David Hall and thank you for the timeless vocals.

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Recently I’ve been in a battle with myself. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The coldest months of this winter got to me more than ever before. At the beginning of December, on my return from a once-in-a-lifetime holiday in Japan that my wife and I have been planning for years, I remember texting my sister to say that I felt like I could approach the Christmas period with greater presence and positivity than ever before: winding down at work, easing into hibernation, giving myself some grace.

But this didn't happen. Various shifting plates in the foundations of my family life, the pure chaos and violence of the modern world, and the darkening early evenings outside my study window got in the way of me realising my festive intentions.

I persevered into the new year, but I became cocooned by my inner thoughts. Safe but neurotic, hopeful but heavy, pretending not to be overwhelmed but slyly on the brink.

Exercise has long been the only way I can battle this breed of seasonal low.

I resent this because I know it is a dependency. When I fail to depend on it - I promise myself I am going to go on a run, or to the gym, or on a cycle, but end up still in my slippers - I feel my mind and body slipping into stagnation. I beat myself up and end up in a worse place than when I started.

But I love it because of its power to heal me like nothing else in this world. A night run along the Thames, a sunrise sprint up the hill near my flat, a sauna session after exerting myself on the pull up bars: all of these get the blood pumping, the oxygen into my lungs and my mind cleared of the overthinking that otherwise crowds my consciousness, especially in the colder months spent indoors.

Over the last few months, one song that I've loved for a couple of years since it dropped has played a pivotal role in getting me up and out the house when I could stand the negativity and inaction no longer. I credit it with improving my mood and wellbeing more than any other art I’ve consumed.

Youngs Teflon is often referred to as one of London’s most underrated rappers. A rare lyricist of likability but also no-nonsense, he has been at it for years, having elevated out of the road rap of the late-2000s and steadily made his name among UK rap’s veteran elite across the 2010s.

In 2022 he released a project called All Eyes On Me Against The World. I remember the eye-catching pop of the orange and purple artwork appearing on my iPhone screen. I appreciated its Tupac-inspired title, philosophical/literary references of the first two tracks Plato and Homer (both woozy, jazzy, nighttime meditations) and top-tier poetry blended with modern, mature, crisp and reflective beats throughout.

I could run the whole project start to finish and be very happy. But I am unlikely to do so without reloading Cosa Nostra multiple times. For some reason it has become one of my favourite tracks of recent years.

It has an epic, cinematic beat by legends M1onTheBeat and Jackson whose crescendoing instrumentation - the motivational horns, the choral vocals, the slapping bass and drums - make it feel like the soundtrack to an adrenaline-fuelled gangster film.

Tef’s first verse, full of humble braggodocio and cheekiness — “dinner date with bae eating sh*t I can’t pronounce” - is followed by an interlude spoken in what is presumably a Sicilian accent that sounds like it’s pulled from a documentary:

‘Despite the word "mafia" gettin' so much attention
It is only rarely used by its members
Mafiosi are much more likely to call it Cosa Nostra
Which simply means "our thing"‘

Then fellow south London road rap legend Blade Brown joins as the music behind him builds and builds. His verse contains a piece of wisdom I come back to a lot when thinking on past mistakes or visualising future achievements:

"Don’t get lost in the wave cah everybody peaks.”

Anyway, I felt like this song was due a call-up to the All City playlist because I owe it for getting me through what has been a challenging period.

Fortunately, some purple flowers have started growing in my garden.

I just went for a jog at sunset. It wasn’t that cold. The sky was blue and pink. I gasped deep sighs of relief at the end.

Spring and the potential for rebirth is nigh.

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As winter turned to spring in 2021, even though the world was still governed by the surrealism of the pandemic, the worst of the Covid lockdowns in the UK was about to pass, during which snow had recently showered over England, making leaving the cocoon of home even more daunting.

My now-wife Yasmin and I had been forced to push plans for our wedding back six months and cut the invite list in half to accommodate the changing world. I’d just finished the final edit of Cut Short and was preparing for its publication in the summer, which would come a few days before my 30th birthday.

Spending large chunks of the pandemic at a desk immersed in the pressures of completing my first book had turned me into an introvert.

But as the seasonal London atmosphere eased, sun began peering between the clouds and the city’s green showed signs of returning. The sense of the summer approaching came back round again, like it always does.

That’s when Koko appeared my life via shuffle on Spotify, a convincing victory for the algorithm. Never has a song hit me so unexpectedly with such abrupt, hopeful joy, turning my mood completely like the taste of delicious food or buzz of endorphins after a long run through open space.

I’d not heard of British Ghanaian north Londoner Karen Nyame KG before, but ever since then I’ve paid attention to her output. She is near the top of my list of artists I’d like to see perform live.

Koko is an addictive dance floor shaker, formed from a blend of Afrobeats ingredients — shuffly drums, thumping bass, plucked guitar strings, vocals that stay in your head all day, with help from south east Londoner Mista Silva. I played it again and again and again, all spring and summer long, and beyond.

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It remains in my rotation now, especially on these grey, dreary February days, when the depths of London’s winter can start to feel never-ending again.

This too shall pass.

Music is the saviour.

To interview superstar drummer Yussef Dayes for the Observer back in 2023 - after the release of his debut album Black Classical Music and ahead of his sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall - I met with him at a cafe in Honor Oak Park, south east London.

As torrential rain poured onto the tarmac outside, he explained how he grew up in a timber house built by his parents in nearby woodland called One Tree Hill. His mother was a yoga teacher and his father sold imported fruit and vegetables. They filled their light, airy home with musical instruments, encouraging their sons to learn and play them and often hosting live jams on weekends where artists of all ages could stop by to play.

As the youngest brother, Dayes would often be put on drums to hold a beat. The Dayes siblings eventually formed a band together called United Vibrations.

Then across the late-2010s Dayes started building a reputation as an artist in his own right. In 2018 he released Love Is the Message - a song dedicated to his late-mother, who had passed away in 2015 - with keyboardist Alfa Mist, electric guitar player Mansur Brown and bassist Rocco Palladino (who remains a core part of Dayes’s band).

Later that year, the quartet recorded another version of the song at Abbey Road Studios, releasing the filmed session on to YouTube.

“That was a dream team. There are different levels…I don’t just do things for the hype, I know when there is next level talent who I need to make music with,” Dayes told me about that song. "It was when I started to go my own way. It’s a good snapshot of that moment. They’re all incredible musicians.”

There are few, if any, music videos I have played more than this over the last decade. I listen to the song multiple times a week. If I am in doubt, I play it. If I need to escape, I play it. If I crave ease or comfort or joy, I play it.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster, with all four parts given space to speak on their own whilst still coming together with semi-improvised passion to make history, recorded when none were widely known stars like they are now.

Dayes has since made his live performance videos - often in epic outdoor settings - a core part of his artistic output.

I love all of it. But Love Is the Message will, I imagine, remain unbeatable.

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Over recent years, Marnz Malone - who was sentenced to 11 years on firearms charges in 2021 - has spent much of his time sat in a silent prison cell reading books and penning poetic lines about life, love and death.

Then he raps them down the phone to a trusted circle of engineers who lay them over stripped-back, melancholic beats for the outside world to take in.

In doing so, against the odds, the Jamaican-born, Birmingham-raised rapper has become one of the most unique and respected voices in UK rap, amassing tens of millions of streams and a growing fanbase that includes heavyweights Nines, Potter Payper and Central Cee. His 2024 project Tina's Boy reached number 66 in the Official Charts.

Like the crackle of an old vinyl, sharpened by the poetic potency of his storytelling, his words have an analog rawness that makes them difficult to ignore.

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I’ve found that I can stick his music on and just let it run for hours in the background when I’m cooking, driving or being introspective. It is deep and intense, but meditative and cathartic, like nothing I’ve ever heard before.

Malone's new single I Hate January aims to raise public awareness about the tragic epidemic of self-inflicted deaths in custody. He was inspired to write it after his neighbour took his own life. It will feature on his forthcoming project Sabr (which means patience or perseverance in Arabic).

I spoke to him for the Guardian over the phone about his love of reading and writing, his perspective on suicides in prison and what might be done to alleviate the mental health of those caught in the strained criminal justice system. If you read this interview, please do so with care as it covers heavy themes 🙏🏽❤️

This feels like a continuation of my piece about Lady Unchained’s Free Flow show on National Prison Radio. It is quite something that the UK prison phone line has become one of the main technologies enabling the creation of new wave British rap’s most conscious grassroots expression.

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The umbrella genre labelled ‘UK hiphop’ that flourished in the 2000s after two decades of slow, steady growth was one of my favourites, a guaranteed local source of philosophy and feeling. It was a wise precursor to the looser, trappier, glitzier UK rap scene that has since become an established part of the digitised global mainstream.

But due to timing, it never flew as high as it should have done. This difficulty seems in-part to be a function of timing. Because achieving commercial success throughout the first years of the new millennium required competing with grime in the bottleneck of show bookings, label investment and audience attention.

Grime was the predominant sound of British youth culture. Its nativism - the fact we could fully call it our own - meant that it gained the most hype. But for listeners seeking something from artists who weren’t driven by gun-fingers, stardom and financial reward alone, it wasn’t enough.

Sure, grime borrowed from American hiphop - the New Era baseball caps, narrative music videos and DJ-MC combinations - but it was so much faster and overflowing with regional accents, city-isms and island eccentricities.

I loved it, but I also sought more; the observational prowess, humility and slowness that sounded like it had reapplied expression coming from the other side of the Atlantic to a society that I lived in and could see and feel around me.

UK Hiphop gifted us this.

The likes of Roots Manuva, Klashnekoff, Skinnyman, Poisonous Poets and many more took the art and lifestyle of rapping super seriously. Social commentary of the highest calibre was normal.

Mixtapes and albums full of emotional, moody and uplifting beats created space for mature, deep-thinking performers who had come up through battle-rapping or spoken word poetry or road life infamy, alike.

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And within this ecosystem, it bears remembering that Choong Family had bangers.

They were regular faces on Channel U, releasing a slew of video-accompanied singles including Pain Don’t Stop, Fall Back and Memory Lane. They later crossed over to up the tempo with Adrenaline, a grime heater which was remixed to feature legends Scorcher, Wretch 32 and Ghetto from The Movement.

One of my favourites of their songs - which I only recently rediscovered, and have played constantly since - was Dear Life.

It’s a deep cut from their 2004 debut album Higher Elevation. It is pure and peaceful introspection; a pen crying its heart out, writing a letter, pondering life, justice and reality. The keys are delicate, the bass line is smooth, and the chorus sung by vocalist Elizabeth Williams is the cherry on the cake.

Put on headphones, relax and enjoy.

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Every year, on the middle weekend of December, I travel north on a train from London to spend time with my maternal cousins in the Peak District. We rent a cottage with a kitchen big enough to cook properly and a living room with comfortable seating that wraps around a log burner. We go for long walks in the daylight, eat festive pub food at nightfall, drink slowly without guilt, watch epic films, catch up on each others’ lives and reflect gratefully on another year travelling around the sun.

Earlier this week I returned from my seventh annual trip. It has become a ritual that I crave, an escape from the busy city in the stern south, a marker of one era coming to a close and another opening. I always arrive home a new man.

The music selection throughout the long weekend is inevitably key. Portable speaker in hand, I usually assume the role of DJ. The vibe can veer between nostalgic cheese to low-end jazz to upbeat dance to moody hip-hop, and more, depending on the time of day.

Every year, on my train back to London afterwards, a handful of songs emerge as favourites from the past 72 hours. There is usually one that stays on loop in my head.

This time, for whatever reason, it was Sting’s Shape of My Heart.

I could not have specified its origins at the time, as I was only 11-years-old, but I first came into contact with Shape of My Heart’s catchy, meditative guitar riff in Craig David’s 2002 single Rise & Fall, which fittingly features Sting (I’m not sure he would have easily gotten away with using the sample without the collaboration).

An intergenerational duet combining the voices of two iconic British singer-songwriters, it appeared on David’s second album, Slicker Than Your Average, after he had soared to global fame across the turn of the millennium.

I remember listening to Rise & Fall on my mini-disc player a few years after it came out and feeling like there was something so uncannily familiar about it. But I could never figure out why. It was only later that I realised it had rehashed Sting’s original, whose omnipresence in pop culture and on the radio as an easy-listening backdrop to British life must have been playing in my childhood and adolescence since its release in 1993. The handful of Police (Sting’s former group) vinyls in my Dad’s collection, which now sit in boxes in my cupboard, ready to be unearthed when I finally invest in my own turntable, make perfect sense.

Later, at university, I sat down to watch Léon: The Professional - a 1994 film by Luc Besson about a hitman who takes a 12-year-old Nathalie Portman under his wing - when Sting’s guitar riff appeared as the soundtrack, a poetic accompaniment to the unravelling vulnerability of Jean Reno’s lead.

Because of the guitar riff’s hypnotic, emotive powers, which I cannot hear without deriving at least a minimal sense of peace, it is tempting to play Shape of My Heart without listening hard to the lyrics, beyond gaining an obvious familiarity with the chorus, which is ostensibly about love.

But this is the beauty of timeless music. It is patient. It is art that you can return to on your own terms. It can work its way into your life gradually, over decades, and impress its fuller meaning upon you, if and when needed.

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There is no single wholly correct interpretation of Shape of My Heart, the ambiguity of which is an achievement in itself for words that have been listened to and pulled apart so many millions of times over the years. But Sting’s lyrics seem to paint a portrait of a man participating in a card game in pursuit of truth.

He leverages the four suits of a deck of cards in the chorus. There is a humility to his ethos. He hides the King up his sleeve “until the memory of it fades”. Swords, soldier, weapons, war, diamonds, money for this art: these are corrupting, manmade constructs of greed, power and competition.

“But that’s not the shape of my heart,” insists Sting.

On my weekend in the Peaks, we stayed in Hathersage, a gritstone Derbyshire village to the north of the river Derwent. The pub we frequented most, metres from our cottage, was called The Scotsman’s Pack. Hathersage is the supposed resting place of Little John, Robin Hood’s seven-foot-tall chief lieutenant. On the Saturday, at sunset, after we returned from a 14 km walk in hilly forestry, we took a seat in the pub to order mulled wine and early dinner.

I couldn’t help but stare at an old, yellowing poem about Little John’s Grave framed on the wall. It looks like it could have been written hundreds of years ago. Its four-line stanzas and symbolic storytelling, as if relayed by a cloaked nomad taking shelter at the inn to tell tales and refuel before heading back out into the elements, has ended up in the same part of my mind as Shape of My Heart.

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The song appears on Sting’s fourth solo album Ten Summoner’s Tales - ‘Summoner’ being a double entendre pun of his family name (Sumner) and a character from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century epic The Canterbury Tales.

Folklore, like good music, stands the test of time.

Merry Christmas to you and yours when it comes.

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This is one of the most slept-on grime songs and videos from the late-2000s.

A few years after the genre’s golden era at the start of the new millennium, its hard-working underground cohort of MCs continued to fill radio sets, sell-out raves and create rough-and-ready yet fresh sounding bangers, despite the pull of pending commercial success and electro-pop dilution. The sound arrived at a short-lived sweet spot of still retaining core, purist elements but also experimenting with new styles of video editing and conscious attempts to write catchy singalongs, from sweet boy anthems to hardened head-boppers.

Stutta had made a name for himself via his Channel U classic Konk with Boy Better Know originator Jammer in 2006. Then the following year he dropped Cold Outside, with an accompanying video set in an East London concrete underpass, which later featured on his 2008 mixtape Still Konkin Vol. 2.

It’s a classic case of grime’s wry Britishness in its preoccupation with the weather (extending the famed ‘eskimo’ metaphor of its early sound further). But it uses temperature as a signal of street danger: “it’s cold outside, and it’s getting worse, just wait ‘til the summer arrives, if you’re in the whip, stay inside, turn the heat up don’t come out the ride…it’s cold outside, blitz, it’s freezing cold outside, just a little advice from me to you to not play with your life,” spits Stutta on the hook. His voice punches each syllable as he dissects hood fame, dismissing community gossip and warning envious onlookers about doubting or challenging him, carrying a confidence clearly fine-tuned through pirate radio clashing.

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The busy instrumental — which I would love to hear in fully engineered quality on a souped-up car sound system — comes from legendary producer Maniac, who around this time was making futuristic beats for some of the fiercest MCs on the circuit, from Black The Ripper (RIP) to Wiley to Tinchy Stryder.

“The weatherman predicted it,” warns Stutta at the start of the song. “So put on your coats, put on your hats, put on your scarfs, your Thinsulate gloves.”

Every November, when the temperature drops that bit closer to freezing — like it did today — and it becomes that bit more difficult to leave the house, I run this track in preparation for festive hibernation.

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There is such a saturation of UK rap now — compared to, say, ten years ago, when the exploding umbrella scene still felt new and exciting, especially alongside the ageing state of grime and pending chaos of drill — that it is hard to stand out.

But Brixton-raised Cristale does exactly that. Her delivery is relentless and punchy in a way that I can only imagine is great to see live on stage, yet her lyrics carry the self-awareness and philosophical thought that you might expect from a more introverted writer. It’s an impressive juggle that only comes around once in a while, reminiscent of Kano or Dave.

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When I worked at a youth club in Brixton across the late-2010s, young people and studio engineers alike would talk about a teenage MC called Cristale with reverence. She was starting to gain a reputation as a local hero about to blow, someone who could put a different side of the south London town on the map.

I neglected to look more into it until later, when I kept seeing her name pop up on social media. She has since soared to greatness via a strategic slew of catchy, versatile releases, repeatedly demonstrating her purist MCing talent, dropping viral TikTok sounds like Sing Dat with UK drill producer legend M1OnTheBeat and, in an act of masterful placement, appearing on Top Boy to perform her OVO-backed head-bopper Roadents.

Antisocial is produced by multi-instrumentalist TSB, the man behind multiple hits by the likes of J Hus and Stormzy who learned to make music in his garden shed. He layers the beat with deep, melodic keys, stabs of bass and plucks of the guitar, backdropped by choral vocals.

The video shows Crystal camping alone in an autumnal forest as the day turns to night. With cheeky wordplay and effortless flow-switching, in her lyrics, she tackles the contradictions of rising fame, champions family members, reinforces social boundaries and brags infectiously.

The song is slyly a masterpiece, and precisely what the game needs: substance, flair and detail laced together by refined musicality.

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Listen (with proper headphones) to keep your drive and motivation 🆙

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There is a pleasant irony to my appreciation of One For The Heads Who Remember. The same is applicable to grime crew Roll Deep’s Remember The Days from their 2005 debut album In At The Deep End. ‘Remember’ being the operative word and common factor, needless to say.

When I first heard them, because I never danced to 2-step garage or dubstep in the clubs in their original heyday or heard grime whilst it was still only a hyperlocal phenomenon on pirate radio, I wasn’t old enough to fully appreciate their nostalgia.

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But I took in Roll Deep’s words about growing up in East London and, a few years later, vibed to Skream’s blissful vocal cuts, prolonged keys and rolling bass lines.

Now, enough time has passed for me to access my own fond memories of silly, carefree youth when I hear them.

One of my favourite nights out in recent years was to Skream’s Skreamizm residency at KOKO in Camden, north London, in June 2022. As the summer light lasted longer and longer each day outside, across four consecutive Saturdays he ran as many events, packing out the historic venue’s dance floor with good vibes.

The second night that I attended on 11th June was themed around garage (the first had been Skream playing solo open-til-close, the third was house and techno, and the fourth was dubstep, b2b with Mala (which I am gutted I missed)).

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The set list was ridiculous: Skream, DJ Q, Plastician, Riz La Teef, Yung Singh (big up to YS for the invitation). Me and my friend Dan, who I’ve known and listened to music with for over 20 years, found a quiet spot by the canal to drink beers and catch up beforehand. Then we headed inside and stood on stage behind the DJs, giving us full view of the dance floor’s beaming smiles, an atmosphere of soulful celebration that I can only hope it must have been a bit like for garage ravers back when I was still just bopping my head to it at primary school.

One For The Heads Who Remember featured on Skreamizm Volume V which dropped in 2008, a few years after he’d first made his name forging dubstep bangers in Croydon, south London, as an elusive teenager. It is joyous music, a track I play to lift me up and carry me through.

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Grime music might be an extrovert MC’s game. It first thrived through the Caribbean sound system clashing culture of East London’s youth clubs and pirate radio stations in the early-2000s. The best MCs would need the skill and confidence to write and spit their bars but also grab the mic off competitors to stand a chance of being heard over darkening, quickening garage beats.

Franklyn Addo grew up in Homerton, Hackney, in the slipstream of this local tradition, too young to participate in its earliest wave but perceptive enough to absorb its linguistic and performative flair. Raised in a West African, Christian home, whilst he excelled at school, spending his spare time at the library lost in books as an escape from the rugged outside world, many of his contemporaries went the other way. After witnessing a murder outside his block he doubled down on pursuing academic study, creative expression and social justice.

On the cusp of adulthood, he started making waves in London’s underground music scene by penning jazz-inspired hip-hop and grime. At the same time, he secured and declined an offer to study at Cambridge University, sparking attention from the right-wing press which, still only 18, he then duly rebutted in his first of many op-eds for the Guardian.

We met a few years later, in 2016, as postgraduates working at The Access Project, a charity which places academic mentors in inner-city schools, where we bonded over music and literature. Within weeks, he’d showed me his own creations, including Who Franklyn Is, a punchy, no hook introduction to his personality and vision produced by fellow east Londoner and now-celebrated keyboardist Alfa Mist.

Franklyn would go on to work in a range of frontline roles, often focusing on preventing violence, from case-working young people bearing wounds on A&E wards in hospitals, to delivering interventional outreach for those caught up in gangs, to joining forces with me to deliver Pattern, a critical thinking programme for young people at risk of permanent exclusion in secondary schools. He appears at the end of Cut Short for the launch of his 2019 EP Archives, inviting Jhemar Jonas aka Rippa, one of the book’s main characters, up on stage as a support act.

In 2021, Franklyn re-released what remains — and I think will always remain — my favourite song of his: Introspective. Again produced by Alfa Mist over a moody, jazz-inflected grime beat, he unleashes literary levels of lyricism about faith, purpose and moral complexity at relentless speed. He more than proves that grime music can be an introvert’s game. Instead of warring rivals on pirate radio, I imagine him recording these lyrics solo in the candle-lit cocoon of a bedroom studio.

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It was originally released in 2014 — gaining respect from Tom Misch who discovered it on SoundCloud — making it over 10 years old and therefore even more impressive. I still regularly listen and every time I unlock a new pocket of appreciation. As Franklyn articulates among its many poignant lines, “the lyrics I spit are like tears from an innocent child, they make you feel something.”

A few weeks ago I joined a proud crowd at sunset on the rooftop of book publisher Hatchette’s headquarters in Blackfriars, central London. We were there to celebrate and listen to Franklyn talk about his new book, A Quick Ting On Grime (part of the wider ‘A Quick Ting On…’ series of nonfiction books about Black British culture).

It felt like a full circle moment, but also the start of an exciting new era.

Congrats Franko 🫡

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When I was a small child growing up on the borderlands of Surrey and south west London, there would be daily situations in our family home where the tidal wave of pop music swept over my sisters and I — whether I wanted it to or not. More local than the addictive but distant products of Britney or NSYNC, a British contingent of groups like S Club 7 and Five played from compilation CDs, the radio in my mum’s car and limited channels on our television screen.

Sometimes I would try to resist the hype, refusing to admit that I shared my sisters’ tastes; that I was intrigued by mainstream sound’s sugary sheen. Other times I would give up the act and embrace the playful omnipresence of it all.

The Spice Girls, who remain the best-selling girl group of all time, were the obvious queens of my identity crisis. As I progressed through the early years of primary school in the late-1990s, hit after hit colonised playground conversations and soared to the top of the charts (a personal favourite being the trippy lullaby fairytale of Viva Forever).

Then as the end of the decade passed, I began more proactively looking away from pop, towards edgier and more racially inclusive genres like garage, hip-hop and r&b. And something unexpected happened.

After the Spice Girls’ first two number one albums, Spice (1996) and Spiceworld (1997), and Geri Halliwell’s split from the group, the turn of the millennium led to the group’s third and final release: Forever. To move beyond their tried-and-tested pop formula and embrace American r&b’s slick modernity, with its sexier swagger, deeper bass and 2-step inflection, producer Darkchild, or Rodney Jerkins, was brought in to help shape this next phase. He had been, and would continue to be, behind a baffling number of hits, from Whitney Houston’s It’s Not Right But It’s Okay to Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name to Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine to Michael Jackson’s You Rock My World.

Although widely regarded as a moderate disappointment by fans and critics who could presumably sense the Spice flame of yesteryear starting to flicker into lesser relevance, Forever’s opening and most successful single, Holler, became an instant classic.

For me, aged 9 at the time, and I’m sure for many others in a similar boat, it proved a perfect storm. I could continue riding the pop wave for a bit longer whilst recognising that it was changing in a trendier, if slightly forced, direction.

The beat has all of Jerkins’s characteristic bass jabs, drum thwacks, blurred melodies and vocal cuts. In the video, each Spice Girl represents a different element (earth, wind, fire and water, respectively). There is a dress code of black leather, a computer-generated backdrop of liquid metal fluidity, and its choreographed events take place within a morphing pyramid, slightly reminiscent of a 1990s television game show like Crystal Maze.

The song represents the nostalgia of a shifting musical conversation, a soft reminder of Britpop losing its innocence and American r&b’s influence making its way over to these shores at the late height of its golden era.

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Cards on the table: this song is a bit mad. But it deserves a break down and I listen to it so much that I can no longer deny it a seat among All City royalty.

Since M1llionz burst out of Birmingham, in the English West Midlands, in 2019, surfing UK drill’s wave of dangerously lyrical yet commercially viable solo outfits from outside of London, he has held my attention. His deep accent, softened voice and forensic wordplay, all usually laid over haunting beats and alongside epic cinematography, make his journey, style and output uniquely addictive.

He has since managed to juggle underground authenticity and overground sheen with ease in a way that many drillers have failed to do. The frustrating saturation of violent digital content means that it’s no longer easy to surprise viewers of music videos any more. But the iconic, Covid-era release of Lagga in 2020 had my eyes glued to the screen like never before. From then onwards, my ears have tapped into the higher level of M1llionz’s artistry. It makes me wince but still go back for more, especially when I’m working out or jogging. As with almost all drill, I wouldn’t recommend listening if you are feeling fragile.

Accompanied by another mind-boggling video, this time filmed in Nigeria, between jungle and city, Right Dere is a first-person story of vengeance.

The first verse is a series of war philosophies that bring to life the moral complexities of inner-city violence and hyper-vigilance:

“I keep tellin' bro it's not worth it, but I'm a hypocrite,
'Cause I got so much to lose, but still I'm in this park lookin' inconspicuous”

“Have you ever had an asthma attack tryna run from jakes 'cause your stamina's shagged?
Or have you ever banged and it jammed? Delay on the click like COD when it lags.”

The second verse is where things get specific and visceral, like a climactic scene from an audio novel. M1llionz describes turning up at the house of his co-defendant (the person who was accused of the same crime as him), its “lights off, blinds flickering.” By sweet-talking his friend’s mum, who has known him since he was young, he makes his way inside in pursuit of his target. Apart from clearly descending into violence, we’re left on a vague cliffhanger of how it ends.

Like a noir crime drama or bloody horror film — John Wick or Gangs of London come to mind — it is a gripping example of using narrative fiction to give listeners and viewers a window into the gruesome, tragic realities of code-breaking, snitching culture and community violence.

Needless to say, I do not condone the behaviours described in the lyrics. But I do believe that many young drill rappers could learn from a song like this — telling a story that creates a character through whom trauma, experience and feeling can be channeled — to avoid their exaggerated claims of violence being perceived as literal and therefore criminalised by prosecutors in court.

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During my fourth and final year as an undergraduate at the University of Bristol I lived with a friend called K.O in a first floor flat overlooking Whiteladies Road, the busy artery that flows downhill from the Downs between the student hubs of Clifton and Redland.

We didn’t have a television — just a set of CDJs, a mixing board and two Rokit speakers arranged on the dining table. Since first meeting during our first year in 2009, we had been in a constant dialogue about music. K.O wrote a blog, hosted events and introduced me to dubstep as the genre soared in Bristol’s clubs whilst crossing into global mainstream sound. I started to miss the grime and UK hip-hop scenes that I’d been immersed in at school back in London, and few others living in my halls-of-residence knew anything about them. Conversations and adventures with K.O let me tap back in and learn more.

I look back on that time with nostalgia and fondness. I wouldn’t be who I am today without it. I enjoyed my degree, partied hard and met friends — not least my wife, Yasmin — who I’ll have for life.

But by our fourth year both K.O and I were weathered by the overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class and boarding school-educated social demographic of our student body.

So we retreated.

In contrast to the cycles of messy nightlife activity that dominated earlier university years, by the end we spent nights in the safer space of our flat listening to music, cooking food and debriefing life, with the odd episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or My Wife and Kids as background entertainment, or trip to the pub to drink Guinness.

I realise now how formative that year was. I started writing a blog and a personal diary, which sparked my aspiration to become a writer. K.O pursued the early stages of a career in the music industry.

Nearly a decade after graduating we met for lunch in central London. By then K.O had been managing the south east London-raised drumming extraordinaire Moses Boyd for a number of years. I’d watched him apply his passion and precision for musical taste to supporting Moses on his journey to becoming a torch-bearer for London’s thriving, experimental jazz scene.

I’d profiled Moses for British GQ in 2020, interviewing him over Zoom as the pandemic wore on about his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Dark Matter (for which K.O designed the striking, blacked-out artwork with a fist holding a flaming British flag at its centre). My favourite track on the album was, as it remains, the shuffly, jazz-inflected 2-step epic of 2 Far Gone featuring Ezra Collective keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones.

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Over steak, K.O mentioned that there would be a new vocal mix of the song coming out soon featuring dubstep legend and breakout star Katy B — a staple voice of bass music from our years at Bristol. He’d designed the new artwork, too, in which a collapsing, smudged Avirex jacket logo is just about discernible against a black background, an elusive nod to turn-of-the-millennium UK garage champagne dance fashion.

The song was released a few months later and has remained in my rotation ever since, a go-to for some spark and emotion. I look forward to Moses’s sophomore album, hopefully coming before long.

Big up the day ones.

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In the summer of 2017, the relatively tiny strip of south London that I called home was having a disproportionate impact on global hip-hop music culture. As I recount in my book Cut Short (2021), I worked as an education mentor in a secondary school near the hectic roundabout in Elephant & Castle, where the remains of Heygate Estate, formerly the biggest social housing estate in Europe, had been razed to make way for the shiny new build towers that now dominate the skyline, and the (eventually lost) fight to protect the old, crumbling shopping centre and its moat market at the roundabout’s core wore on. I lived two kilometres to the south in a flat in north Brixton whilst volunteering at a local youth club in Loughborough Junction. These two poles of my inner-city existence encased the quaint, concrete town of Kennington between them.

UK drill music was still in its infancy, barely acknowledged by adults but obsessively listened to by teenagers, especially in London, especially south-of-the-river. In April of that year I’d written the first story on the internet about the new British genre, interviewing 67 producer Carns Hill in a pub in Brixton Hill. The following January I would write a follow-up for Complex, juxtaposing Kennington’s flower garden, cricket crowds and cozy gastropubs with the harsh rawness and crazed success of local teenage drill crew Harlem Spartans, who were gaining tens of millions of views and streams for their rugged, bleak brand of music. Their temporary reign across 2016 and 2017, which helped to catapult British drill worldwide, would only last for so long, as tragedy and incarceration eroded the group’s togetherness — with baile-funk-inflected star boy Blanco, who I interviewed last year about his journey, the only core member still on the circuit.

Meanwhile, just round the corner, up the busy Kennington Park Road and into the quiet warren of residential roads and single-storey estate blocks, an adjacent but contrasting rap musical strain was telling a delicate counterbalancing story and alternative urban worldview to drill and Harlem Spartans’ young, trappy violence.

Jesse James Solomon had been riding the Soundcloud wave for a few years, building his name as a poet-rapper capable of piercing, thoughtful social commentary and intricate wordplay, since the release of his debut project Jesse From SE in 2014. Later, in 2018, he would put out Strata EP — a project whose name is dedicated to the unique building with three defunct wind turbines at its head that towers over this part of London, visible from aeroplane windows and the city’s reaches alike (Solomon painted the artwork himself)— and become a staple acquaintance of Skepta and Giggs. Earlier this year he put out a long-awaited project OIL☯WATER with producer MACK.

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But it’s his June 2017 track Son of the Ends featuring fellow SE Londoner Suspect, released when both artists were in their early prime, that remains my favourite, a classic I return to again and again. Each time I am a a little more pained by its absence on streaming platforms yet still happy to see its crisp video by filmmaker Hector Dockrill.

Jesse and Sus sing and bark back to back, their ying-and-yang voices dovetailing over a hypnotic, energising instrumental by RedLee to frame a window into life off the ‘Wooly Road’, in the shadows of Strata and among arguably the city’s most hectic thoroughfare.

The name of this song inspired the title of Chapter 9 in Cut Short, ‘Sons of the Ends’, in which the book’s first tragic climax takes place.

Take it in.

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I remember so clearly when and where I discovered this song. It was the start of the summer in 2023. I was sitting in the same chair I’m in now, at the desk in my office, wearing the same headphones, feeling similarly reflective and heavy-headed late at night. I was writing about my day in my paper diary with a pen. It feels like yesterday; time has flown.

I’d been loosely following the work of Brixton-raised electric guitarist Mansur Brown since discovering him alongside elusive keyboardist Alfa Mist and bass player Rocco Palladino on Yussef Dayes’s 2018 Abbey Road performance of Love Is The Message (which I’ll probably be writing about soon). But I’d not yet listened to NAQI Vol. 1, Brown’s third concept album, released one year before. The deep red of the artwork caught my eye on his profile, so I played it from the start.

It’s all fire. But track number three, Fever, stopped me in my tracks. I rewound it once, then again. Then it was on arriving at the next song, Rise, that its creator entered into another league in my musical tastes, one of his own.

I don’t often cry tears. I wish I did more. But even more rare is being made to cry by hearing a song for the first time: one with no lyrics, one that essentially combines a bunch of electronic loops, one that makes me want to dance, too. A piece of music that somehow channels pain and hope all at once.

I listen to it all the time. Sometimes I put it on repeat while I write my diary, or at the gym, or gazing out of the train window. It is multi-purpose. A bit like Mansur Brown’s sound: jazz, rock, grime, metal, dancehall, ambient…and more. Only in London.

Just make sure you listen on proper headphones and go until the end, because the climax is worth the wait.

Enjoy.

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As Christmas approached in 2001, So Solid Crew changed UK garage music forever with the release of their debut album, They Don’t Know. Its compilation of wobbly, futuristic beats and gritty, rapid-fire MCing pulled the British genre into darker depths as the early signs of grime’s takeover started to show, increasing violence reportedly broke out on dance floors, and the champagne dance-high of the 1990s became a distant memory.

Two years later, in 2003, they released a second album, 2nd Verse. In hindsight, its relative failure to hit expectations and the supergroup’s subsequent collapse pose a question for the longevity UK urban music in the 2000s. Could groups of underground artists responsible for pioneering a new sound by being rebellious sustain their rebellion as they commercialised? Was it possible? Perhaps not yet; though the success of grime elders like Ghetts, Flow Dan and Kano now suggest that more time was simply needed to perfect the formula.

Anyway, one song, Broken Silence, always stood out. It remains one of my favourites, a crutch I turn to when I’m slowing down. Its careful production — the delicate flute riff, steady bass line and choral harmony — and the piercing, hyperlocal social commentary of its lyricism make for an emotionally vulnerable and soulful style of British hip-hop that was, back then, still an unusual combination, but would within a couple of years become normalised in videos on Channel U and songs played on KISS.

At the time I was 12 and I’d just started year 8. Every day I would take the train to and from school in South West London, on the same line that passed Clapham Junction and Battersea, where I was loosely aware that So Solid hailed from. Broken Silence nudged my young mind to empathise with life in the geographically proximate but socially disparate community making it, allowing me to feel its artists’ anger, sadness and determination.

Earlier in the same year had seen the release of Black Eyed Peas’ mega hit ‘Where Is The Love?’. This was a much poppier, cheesier ode to feeling, existentialism and human rights. But it reflected a comparably moralising, melancholic nostalgia. The gangster rap, rave hedonism of the previous decade was a thing of the past. The new millennium was an anti-climax. The psychologies of a Western world caught in post-9/11 blues paved the way for self-reflection.

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Also, it felt special to see a British South Asian man, Sef from The Reelists, who looked a bit like me, singing the hook (like he’d done on banger Haters two years earlier) — a rare example of representation in the creative industries doing its reassuring thing.

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