Focus is important to him, perhaps because he’s often multitasking: balancing his music career, his fashion label Mains, film-making and acting (his debut short, Tribal Mark, came out in 2024), his Big Smoke festival and a house music project, Más Tiempo. He coordinates them all from the scruffy but functional studio in London’s West End where we meet. At one point, he picks up a Rubik’s Cube from the cluttered coffee table, and, over the course of five minutes of conversation, solves it.
He seems newly attached to the idea of being a “conscious” rapper, and more mindful than ever of his past missteps. The mums of his children’s friends are going to hear what he’s spitting about on the radio while they’re all doing the school run, he says – there’s no room for loose talk any more. I’ve made ignorant songs, I’ve made ‘turn up’ [ie party] songs, there’s still that side of me.
I’m still Joseph from Tottenham. But I’m growing and I’m learning.” In person, Skepta is wary about not being seen as preachy, a stance bolstered by his experience of talking about politics to his two young children. The choice of Suggs for this grandstanding defence of multicultural Britain is no accident.
Skepta pulls his collar aside to show me the two-tone neck tattoo he got 14 years ago. I’d see skinheads in my house when I was younger. My dad would come home with his friends from work and start playing his vinyl, and my mum would have her white friends round, Auntie Elaine and Auntie Susannah.” Skepta sees multiculturalism not as an abstract idea, but as something that’s “second nature to me”.
It is, he says, at the root of what he does – ska couldn’t have come from anywhere else but the UK’s unique cultural mix, and nor could grime. Even my parents: my mum’s Igbo, my dad’s Yoruba, and in Nigeria, they’re not supposed to mix, they’ve had wars together. But they came to England, met each other, fell in love and had me.
This whole ignorance towards immigration at the moment is horrible. We know who it is when we open the door to the Uber: it’s just people here trying to work.” Skepta’s ongoing reckoning with his personal responsibility is why it has taken him seven years to make his sixth album, and it’s the source of his pride in it, he says. The Fork and Knife, his first full solo record since 2019’s Ignorance Is Bliss, was announced on 1 January 2024, and now it’s complete, it’s not a full-on conscious manifesto but features a fuller sound enhanced by the wisdom of age.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
