Ninja Tune, Wiley & me: Part Three

Magic, violence and frustration in mid-'00s music

Parts One & Two of this series can be found here

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For the next few years, I worked my way up in the industry. I found a part time job doing music PR, scraping by on £7,500 a year. Then, in 2004, Definitive Jux finally set up a London office, and I got a job as Label Manager. The title sounded great, the salary less so – I had a pay rise of £2,500. While I was delighted to have finally got paid work with the label I loved, I already had an inkling that it wouldn’t be plain sailing. The label’s early releases had included great records from Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock and RJD2, and then label founder El-P himself. Now, it felt as though El, having signed up his most brilliant, inner circle, was moving beyond it to less talented acquaintances. The records just weren’t as good.

But no matter. London was alive with music, and the first wave of grime was exploding into the public consciousness.

It was during the spell doing music PR that I first came across Wiley. I was at my desk, leafing through a magazine sometime later in 2003 – it might well have been Jockey Slut again. I paused on a half-page feature, with a picture of a young black man and a headline claiming that he was Dizzee’s mentor. It was a brief interview with Wiley, describing the ‘eskimo’ music he was making – cold, glacial synths, icy snare drums and uncompromising rapping. ‘My heart felt cold,’ Wiley told the interviewer, describing how he’d come to make it. He too was signed to XL Recordings, the indie label that had released Dizzee’s album, and there was a full-length record forthcoming. I instantly resolved to track his music down.

In those days, this wasn’t easy. There was no Spotify, YouTube or TikTok, and music like this wasn’t usually available on the nascent iTunes. You had to go to the record shops that sold it, or download it illegally. Wiley was famed for selling white label 12”s out of the back of his car – this was often the way records were distributed in the early days of grime. Rumours swirled around London that he’d made tens of thousands of pounds doing so.

The records would be displayed in racks in Bow, E3’s Rhythm Division¹ or the West End’s Deal Real and Black Market, with black felt tip writing on the plain white labels detailing the titles; Morgue or Sidewinder. Seeking them out meant physically going to these places and plucking up the courage to ask for them. It would be unfair to say that the raison d’être of all the young men who worked in these shops was to demonstrate their superior knowledge – some of them were very friendly and enthusiastic – but it wasn’t uncommon.

The music I was able to track down was often instrumental. Ice Rink made use of synth stabs as cold as freezer burn, minimal percussion, and sounds that might have been sampled from a Nintendo platform game. It was experimental in the purposeful, enjoyable and thrilling way that black music often is. Eskimo was in some ways a straighter song – tight, garage-style drums, a morphing, knifing bassline and an insistent, sing-song synth melody. The 12”s had long since sold out by the time I began hunting these early classics, and I had resort to using Soulseek, an illegal download service.

I was able to obtain the Lord of the Mics DVDs released by Grime producer Jammer². These featured filmed battles between MCs, which were referred to as freestyles but weren’t really - in the hip-hop sense of being almost entirely improvised. Clearly, these rappers had pre-prepared lyrics. But it didn’t matter, the music was so energised and so new. Nor did it matter that many grime vocals rhymed the same word at the end of each line, something that came from the simpler styles of dancehall toasting or garage MCing. The outward style – the clothing and attitude – of these young artists referenced hip hop, but the music was thrillingly British, and came from a long line of homegrown music.

On the dingy basement steps of Jammer’s house, somewhere in East London, Kano, Wiley, Tinchy Stryder, Footsie and Demon would take turns to deliver sixteen bars to the camera, adapting the more aggressive lyrics to refer to whoever they were battling. These triggered impassioned debates on message boards and internet forums as to who’d won.

There were other DVDs, such as Conflict, which captured everything that was both terrifying and thrilling about grime. In a cramped space at the top of a tower block, the pirate station Deja Vu had a studio. In Conflict’s footage, it’s crammed with young black men. The cream of the grime scene are all there – D Double E, Tinchy, Wiley, Dizzee Rascal and Crazy Titch, all taking turns on the mic. Wiley has his hair in cornrows and wears an Akademiks T-shirt and one of the white plastic chains that was popular at the time. His large eyes are a little bleary - stoned-looking - and he seems impassive, lost in the music, moving to the beat.

Gone are the bling and glamour of UKG. The MCs are completely focused on their skills, and not on entertaining Saturday night clubbers. They’re sweating and dressed in streetwear. Crazy Titch is bigger, looks older and more confident. Dizzee is further away from the camera and looks very young and skinny, perhaps a little intimidated from the outset, but holding his own.

The physical movements that would come to define grime’s style – shoulders and heads bopping in a way that’s both jerky and fluid – are on full display. At first, Crazy Titch, whose name was rumoured to be entirely apt, just seems to listen enthusiastically when Dizzee raps, dancing and looking ahead.

Dizzee passes the mic, and Titch launches into his sixteen bars. His shoulders bop, his gaze lowered so that we see just his mouth below his hat. He too seems to be lost in the music, building up to a crescendo of aggression. And then he turns on Dizzee and pushes him in the chest. For a moment the camera focuses on Crazy Titch, squared up and looming, saying ‘What?’ in the direction of Dizzee. The music stops and the other MCs in the room – including Wiley – get between them. There’s a lot of shouting and the argument spills out onto the roof.

Without awareness of the potential for violence in this argument, it might seem like pistols at dawn. But a few years later, Wiley would be slashed with a knife in a similar situation. When I finally got hold of him to check he was alright, after listening to this take place on air, he said: ‘I’m alright J – they only got my back.’ For his part, Crazy Titch would soon be jailed for shooting another musician dead³.

Throughout the episode between Dizzee and Titch, Wiley plays peacemaker, eventually saying ‘Come on, Dyl,’ and trying to remove Dizzee from the scene.

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Their relationship was not to last. In 2003, just when Dizzee’s success was burgeoning, the pair went to Ayia Napa with Roll Deep, the wider crew they were part of. Napa is to garage what Ibiza is to house, and for grime MCs it offers both a holiday and a chance to earn some money performing.

What exactly happened on the island has remained subject to debate. A persistent rumour, reported by the Guardian at the time and often appearing since, was that Dizzee pinched Lisa Maffia of So Solid Crew’s bum. Wiley referred to this during an online spat with Dizzee in 2017, tweeting ‘If you didn’t try and pinch Lisa Maffia’s bum we would still be pals you stupid idiot.’

In September 2023, So Solid Crew founder Megaman claimed in a filmed video that ‘Lisa Maffia was on stage . . . Dizzee Rascal was his drunk self, went on stage and grabbed Lisa Maffia’s bum . . . While she’s on stage performing, pinched her arse.’

Regardless of what exactly happened that night, trouble had broken out and resulted in a brawl. The following day, Dizzee was dragged from a rented scooter and stabbed five times. He was lucky to survive, and he seems to have realised it. He cut all ties with Roll Deep and Wiley, and the grime scene more generally. He was rumoured to have moved out of east London and to want to live sensibly and well.

He apparently blamed Wiley for the attack, and it would be two decades before there was any sign of forgiveness. In 2007, his third album, Maths + English, included a track called Pussyole that was widely considered to be aimed at Wiley:

A couple of years ago in my road youth days
I was into pirate radio, I guess it was a phase
There was this one particular MC man
Was a older in my ends and I thought he was the don

So I started rollin' with him kind of like a little brother
My cousin used to say he was a pussy undercover
I didn't think that it was nothin' more than jealousy
But I wish I would've listened every time he told me

In 2016, Wiley did take some responsibility for what happened. Speaking to Time Out, he said ‘there was some fighting with another crew’ one night – ‘I won’t say who, but basically everyone knows’ – and that he and a friend decided to ‘carry it on’. Whoever they’d fought with had come looking for them the next day, but found Dizzee instead. ‘The thing we done the next morning led them to go looking for us, but see him and stab him,’ Wiley said.

Megaman appears to confirm Wiley’s story, claiming that after the Lisa Maffia incident something ‘happened down the road with Wiley and a couple So Solid Crew members.’

‘Now I’m older,’ Wiley told Time Out, ‘I can see: Dizzee in his head will always be thinking . . . “If you had left it, I wouldn’t have got stabbed.”’

Megaman takes a less forgiving view of the drunken incident that allegedly started it all: ‘In this day and age, that is sexual assault.’

The spat between Dizzee and Wiley occasionally broke out on radio interviews and social media over the years. Wiley sometimes tried to resolve it, but it would take until 2023 for a glimmer of rapprochement to appear. Nevertheless, the one-time friendship is immortalised in music, and perhaps best exemplified in a segment of a radio appearance with proto-grime DJ Slimzee. This mix, which arguably peaks from the twenty-six minute mark, captures everything that was thrilling about grime in 2002⁴.

Wiley circa 2004 (I was unable to find a photographer credit)

1. This shop, on Roman Road in Bow, East London, was in many ways grime’s ground zero. I lived in Bethnal Green in 2003, less than a mile from Rhythm Division, and it was particularly exciting that grime had emanated from the part of London I loved most.

2. Jammer would soon release vocal work, too - most notably with his single, Murkle Man

3. One of the grime scene’s early stars, Crazy Titch’s career was rapidly cut short in 2006 when he was jailed for life for murder. He was convicted of shooting dead a producer, Richard Holmes, whom he believed had allied himself with a rapper who’d insulted his brother, fellow grime artist Durrty Goodz.

4. In October 2023, Dizzee and Wiley appeared to finally make up. Wiley briefly appeared on stage at a Dizzee Rascal performance in Dubai, the pair hugging and smiling. This long-impossible moment passed off anti-climactically – it would once have been major news in UK music.