スケプタ：「私は名声を気にしない、アートに気を配る」

It is difficult, almost maddeningly strenuous, to get an audience with the King of Grime. Everyone says so and everyone’s right: the artist keeps a moat. When reporters are tasked with writing about Skepta and his skittish, swaggering music, the word that emerges most often is, by my unscholarly survey, ‘rare’. They say that landing an interview with him is ‘rare’. They identify him as a ‘rare’ talent. They write that his position in the culture, as the singular, enduring crossover star smuggling into the sunlight a genre that bloomed in the shadows; as a man who seemingly inaugurated a second-wave grime renaissance and forced America to its feet; and an artist whose output has remained inexhaustible for two decades and who seems incurably addicted to his own metamorphosis – well, they write that it’s all ‘rare’. And you would be hard-pressed to prove any of them wrong, even when it seems like they’re being obsequious.

So it’s not surprising, in fact it’s almost fitting, when four weeks elapse after the first few emails and I am still waiting for Skepta, hearing from one publicist and then another but never from the man himself. What else to expect from the hyperactive veteran MC, who is congenitally allergic to stasis? Ever since he won the 2016 Mercury prize for Konnichiwa, the only grime rapper with the honour next to Dizzee Rascal, Skepta has struggled to sit still. He has shown himself to be hellbent on continually expanding our understanding of who he is and what he can do. Skepta, you see, is an actor. (See: Anti Social, from 2015.) No, Skepta is a filmmaker and screenwriter. (See: Tribal Mark, from 2024.) No, still: Skepta is a fashion designer referencing the raves he grew up at, or an oil painter who auctioned his first creation for £81,900, or the co-founder of a house music label, or the organiser of a music festival. “I feel like now, I just want to branch out,” he told BBC Radio 1Xtra back in 2021. “I can’t be a rapper. It’s a waste of talent.”

This, to my ear, is a sly, characteristic bit of provocation, a winking sliver of indignance from an artist who has little left to prove. It’s Digga D at the top of his powers rapping “Fuck Drill” over a drill beat, or Mk.gee stretching the sonic potential of the guitar while explaining that he doesn’t relate to the instrument, or John Singer Sargent rejecting the form he’s mastered by writing he “abhor[s] and abjure[s]” painting portraits. Skepta knows the people are waiting. He has a wifi connection. It’s been six years since the release of his last studio album, Ignorance Is Bliss, which is a lifetime in an online culture that incentivises constant output and where the choice to withhold anything is a risk.

But he hasn’t just been sitting on his hands, abandoning his own promise. In August, Skepta will host the second instalment of Big Smoke Festival, which boasts big names and underground ones alike: his brother Jme and Central Cee in the former camp, Skyla Tyla and BXKS in the latter. It seems interesting to me that an artist would, at the inflection point of his career, choose to slow down his own rap releases and apply himself to showcasing the music of other people, DJing on Miami Beach and throwing a summer music festival in London. The thought seems to amuse him. “I kind of wanted to move to the side,” he says, grinning. “I don’t want to be that guy who’s just headlining all the time, when there’s other talented artists doing so well in the UK. I’ve been in the game a long time, to the point where I’ve gotta know sometimes when I’m just getting in the way.”

For years, Skepta has teetered on the brink of pop stardom, but resisted its more embarrassing inclinations. (Not without the odd misstep: some of those dance singles between 2008 and 2012 come to mind.) There is a version of his career where he coasted on the success of Konnichiwa and became the sort of rapper who mostly does brand deals, offering gritty texture to soulless US radio smashes made by flagging pop stars trying to recapture their capsized fan bases by getting hip to whatever’s hot. Instead, he’s passed the mic off to the artists he admires, and retreated to his home studio where he can work away from the gaze of the public. “I don’t care about fame,” he says. “Really. I care about art. I care about making the best song. I care about people selecting my poetry as theirs. I hate being famous. My whole thing is –” and then the old phone he is talking on dies, the image cuts out, and I, like everyone else, am waiting for Skepta again.

I don’t care about fame. Really. I care about art. I care about making the best song. I hate being famous

Skepta never really wanted to rap in the first place. All he wanted was to make beats. Joseph ‘Junior’ Adenuga, the eldest of four siblings, was born in 1982 to Nigerian immigrant parents, and raised in Tottenham among the booming soundscapes of his father’s reggae records. Barrington Levy, Gregory Isaacs and Half Pint comprised the sunny lingua franca in the Meridian Walk household where he began DJing, and which his family relocated to after Junior, aged three, accidentally set his teddy bear on fire and burned the whole house down.

It was in school that Junior was first moved by the frenzied, mutating sounds of north London’s Heartless Crew – made up of MCs Bushkin and Mighty Moe, and DJ Fonti – who are today widely credited with paving the way from UK garage to its darker, stranger child: grime. “They would be on the pirate radio stations while I was in school, and I would do anything I could to listen to them,” Skepta says. “I would hide my earphones so I could listen to them in class, because the way they were rapping on the breaks in these garage-grime songs – it was so undeniably London and so sick. I feel like that’s where I got a lot of my style from. And when I say style, I mean across the board: my music taste, my taste in art, but also my fashion style.”

In his teens, Junior was seduced by music. At home, when his parents were away, he would rig the speed control on his karaoke machine, connect it to a belt drive vinyl player and leave the front door open while he DJed, so a constant flow of people would come in and rap over his instrumentals. Later, he started going out to the clubs, where they played house music, drum & bass, UKG and the ragga jungle that cracked his world open. Those raves became a major source of inspiration for his brand, MAINS.

“I would pay attention to everything, from the way they tied their shoelaces to how they wore their hats, and the jackets and tracksuits we all used to wear,” he says. Already, he had an artist’s quality of attention. He started hanging around pirate radio stations too, which were by definition illegal and often moved locations regularly to evade discovery by the Department of Trade and Industry. This hyper-local network of radio stations was integral to the development of not just grime, but also the UK garage, jungle and dubstep scenes, and they were relentlessly raided by the same genre of government officials who later cracked down on drill and grime music events under the guise of ‘controlling gang conflict’. (Grime, like drill, is a uniquely Black, working-class genre that flickered to life in council estates and youth clubs, and is defined by unsparing narratives of street life recited over restless, jagged instrumentals.)

Eventually, Junior landed his own show, DJing on a pirate radio station called Heat 96.6 FM, where he telegraphed his trademark collages of UKG, jungle and the American rap he discovered when his father gave him a CD of Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. He would sometimes invite his Meridian Crew to do sets on the show. Meanwhile, the budding artist cut his teeth producing at home. In the quiet of his bedroom, armed with nothing but his game systems, Junior would pop Music 2000 into the PlayStation and craft muscular, glitching instrumentals that sounded as if they were made on some faraway alien planet. Then, he’d play them on his radio station and distribute the vinyls to DJs. His first taste of local fame arrived by way of one of these instrumentals, called “Pulse Eskimo” (AKA “Gun Shot Riddim”), when a DJ played it at a Sidewinder club night and someone started firing gunshots part way through the set. Nobody got hurt, but the bullets announced the birth of Skepta, who, with the encouragement of grime godfather Wiley, and after police confiscated all his vinyl and CDs, began trying his hand at writing.

I always walk into the booth as a new artist. I might say on the records, ‘It’s Skepta’, but in my head I’m a new artist trying to come up

Skepta soon became a threat in the underground grime scene, known not just for his metaphor-light fusillades and the barbed lines he’d use to dismember his rivals, but also his ability to shapeshift and emulate other MCs’ styles – a comical technique that later became a staple of grime clashes. Take, for example, his legendary Lord of the Mics face-off with Devilman, the one that inspired an Instagram post by Drake in which he called the video “a true reminder that whenever you think you’re good at what you do there’s most likely 2 people out there that will yam your food”. (Drake has a tattoo dedicated to Boy Better Know, the record label Skepta founded with Jme in 2005.) Surrounded by his crew in what looks like an underground tunnel, Skepta hungrily accepts the mic and launches into a 16-bar that incorporates fake Mandarin catchphrases (“Not a Tai Omi Ay Wong Sun carrier / Devilman wouldn’t even jump over the train barrier”) to mimic Devilman’s idiosyncratic flow before delivering a brazen, impassioned coup:

How can I clash Devilman?
Devilman ain’t on my level, man
[…] In a lyrical war I can’t get beaten
’Cause my lyrics are colder than Sweden
So Boy Better Know that it’s gun season
Don’t think I’m wearing gloves for no reason
Kill Devilman and dump him in Neasden
My name’s Junior, it’s not Steven
I’ll make your jawside look uneven

To see this clash today – barbs thrown but everyone looking like they’re happy to be there, revelling in the talent of their rival while still searching for where to jab them next – is to see what feels like a group of artists discovering a language. It’s different from certain recent rap beefs, where the focus is less on technical skill and more on pulling skeletons out of each other’s deep, dark closets. “That’s what I was talking about on this other interview, and people tried to crucify me for it – but I still stand on it,” says Skepta.

“We clash from dancehall-type clashing. You watch Ninjaman and Kartel clash, and it was great vibes until Vybz hit him, then it was bad. Any time violence gets involved, you spoil it. This new kind of clashing, where you’re trying to find things out and expose each other – we had some of that, but it was more about counteracting whatever the other person said, and being clever about it. It’s not that serious. With Americans, it’s based on something different. When I see clashing in America to the point that people are getting killed or shot, I think they’re spoiling it. They’re spoiling this thing that they love, which has helped them and changed people’s lives.”

At the Devilman clash, Skepta was still young. It was 2006 and he was 24 years old, with just one mixtape to his name. “I make Nigerians proud of their facial scars / My bars make you push up your chest like bras,” he rapped on “Autopsy Freestyle” from his first tape, over a trilling sample from Wiley’s “Jam Pie” that he would later revisit for “That’s Not Me”: “I got the answer / I’m like Mr Miyagi the master.”

Even in his greenness, he was bold. It didn’t matter that he was emerging. The confidence in his lyrics betrayed an unassailable certainty in his own talent that extended far beyond his years. “When I figured out I wanted to do music, I never, ever thought I would do it on a small scale,” says Skepta. “I never thought it would be a little thing. I knew that one day I would be one of the biggest artists in the world, if not the biggest rapper that ever came out of the UK.” Who else would have the nerve to release their debut album one year later and call it Greatest Hits?

I hope I’ve left as much as I took, and opened as many doors for people on the way after me. I think that’s the true meaning of life

When he reappears on my screen, head tied with a black du-rag, Skepta is reclining on a couch in a green-lit room on the lower level of what he calls his “tower”, the building that houses both his design studio for MAINS and the new recording studio where he’s been working on, the not-apocryphal album he announced in January 2024. “Every day, I’m trying to wrap it up, but then every day I make something fresh and have to rejig the tracklist,” he says. He could really package it up and send it out on Friday, “but people keep coming to the studio, so I keep making one song and then another one, and it’s hard to put a dam in the flow when it’s all so good.” Some days, Skepta won’t get any sun at all, will shower in the tower and sleep in the tower and make music in the tower and read bedtime stories to his kids in the tower, and then it’s been four days and he realises he hasn’t left the tower.

The new record, which I am not allowed to hear and which still has no official release date, is intended to be a creative rebirth. Ignorance Is Bliss might not have received the heaps of electrified praise that was afforded Konnichiwa, but that’s only because (1) the latter was the album that finally got the ethnocentric Americans hooked on a sound the Brits have been perfecting on PlayStations since before they were old enough to drink, and (2) the trademark ferocity once directed outwards – at top-down institutional power, at corrupt government officials, at the press, at inauthenticity and undeserving rivals – was instead directed towards the artist’s inner world. “This [new] album has some lyrics I never would have said ten years ago, but I think that’s one of the reasons people like my music, innit? They’ve grown with me over the last 20 years, and I’m mindful of that when I’m writing,” he says.

Many of the changes in his life over the last couple of years have reshaped his relationship to his music, and his career. “I can feel the way that my mind is sharpening,” says Skepta, and he believes it’s leading him towards artists that bring out a new side of him. Knife and Fork will feature contributions from Lex Luger, Fred Again and M-1 of dead prez, known for his anti-Zionist activism and radical lyrics aimed at dismantling the crookedness of empire. Many of the new tracks, which Skepta produced himself, will also bear the evidence of the artist’s recent return to DJing through Más Tiempo, and have been crafted with the intellect of a house music connoisseur.

(“Whenever we want a break from travelling and rapping and touring and stuff, it’s always been Ibiza,” he says, flashing a smile. “It’s like a break to get away from rap and to just dance all through the night for a whole weekend.”) Being a father, too, has given him new eyes. “I feel like becoming a dad made me happier to create,” he says. Reading to his daughter and watching her understand words and rhyme schemes has made him feel like he’s back in school, only this time he’s the teacher and not the student sneaking in listening sessions of Heartless Crew.

Skepta has been thinking a lot about legacy, and how someone like Bob Marley has lasting records that people still cling to more than four decades after his death. “Even though what I’m doing is rap, I’m still trying to make music in that same way,” he says. “And I believe that this album, even though it’s going to have a lot of different sounds on it – I think people are going to take what they want from it and live alongside it, and I feel like it’s going to be the best record I’ve made. I always walk into the booth as a new artist. I might say on the records, ‘It’s Skepta,’ but in my head, I’m just a brand-new artist trying to come up, writing some Shakespeare-level, simple nursery-rhyme bars.”

Skepta knows he’s become a Promethean figure, spreading the word of grime to the corners of the world far less familiar with it than his own. And unlike the leagues of cynical purists online, he doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that he’s captured the American imagination. He’s more concerned with being the best rapper. “In the discussion of who’s the best rapper in the world, I think it really needs to be an international discussion,” he says. “I feel like the UK is nearly there. We need to have a clash. It needs to be a battle between someone from the UK and someone from America, because the levels are high here, you get me?” (For the record, he says he would have a great clash with A$AP Rocky.) Skepta asserted the album as gospel in a genre defined by mixtapes, loose singles and pirate radios. He formalised it, proved he could hold your attention with it. His next task is to see if, after all these years, he can still hold you, surprise you, make you push up your chest like bras.

Before his phone died and he blinked out of existence, Skepta had been gearing up for a treatise against his own fame. “I just feel like, whatever fame has brought me is what I’ve always had already, you know what I mean?” he says when I ask him to elaborate. “The eyes, the judgment – I’ve always had that. In the early days it helped to toughen me up and prepare me for now. But I don’t need it any more.” The deification still makes him uncomfortable. He tries to resist its trappings. He goes to Sainsbury’s with no security. He wants to take his daughter for a walk without someone asking for a photo. “Whenever people push me to be that kind of red carpet It-boy, I shy away from it every time. Even when I won the Mercury, I can see in my face that I didn’t want to be that guy, because you only fall down from there, innit?”

Warming to his existential thread, he continues: “I forever have my dream of going back to my normal life. When everything’s said and done, I just want to be painting in my house and occasionally DJing, going to the shop for limes and breads. I hope I’ve left as much as I took, and opened as many doors and left as many codes behind for people on the way after me. I think that’s the true meaning of life. I used to struggle with that, but I know now that it’s not really about me. I’m just passing through.”

Hair T STYLES at STYLE AND GROOM, make-up SHANICE CROASDAILE, set design SAMUEL OVERS at NEW SCHOOL REPRESENTS, photographic assistant AKIRA TREES, styling assistants JESSICA SHARP, DARLENE PARK, SOFIA PACE, set design assistant HENRY HAWKSWORTH, production JANUARY PRODUCTIONS, post-production THIJME & SZAFRAŃSKA

It is difficult, almost maddeningly strenuous, to get an audience with the King of Grime. Everyone says so and everyone’s right: the artist keeps a moat. When reporters are tasked with writing about Skepta and his skittish, swaggering music, the word that emerges most often is, by my unscholarly survey, ‘rare’. They say that landing an interview with him is ‘rare’. They identify him as a ‘rare’ talent. They write that his position in the culture, as the singular, enduring crossover star smuggling into the sunlight a genre that bloomed in the shadows; as a man who seemingly inaugurated a second-wave grime renaissance and forced America to its feet; and an artist whose output has remained inexhaustible for two decades and who seems incurably addicted to his own metamorphosis – well, they write that it’s all ‘rare’. And you would be hard-pressed to prove any of them wrong, even when it seems like they’re being obsequious.

So it’s not surprising, in fact it’s almost fitting, when four weeks elapse after the first few emails and I am still waiting for Skepta, hearing from one publicist and then another but never from the man himself. What else to expect from the hyperactive veteran MC, who is congenitally allergic to stasis? Ever since he won the 2016 Mercury prize for Konnichiwa, the only grime rapper with the honour next to Dizzee Rascal, Skepta has struggled to sit still. He has shown himself to be hellbent on continually expanding our understanding of who he is and what he can do. Skepta, you see, is an actor. (See: Anti Social, from 2015.) No, Skepta is a filmmaker and screenwriter. (See: Tribal Mark, from 2024.) No, still: Skepta is a fashion designer referencing the raves he grew up at, or an oil painter who auctioned his first creation for £81,900, or the co-founder of a house music label, or the organiser of a music festival. “I feel like now, I just want to branch out,” he told BBC Radio 1Xtra back in 2021. “I can’t be a rapper. It’s a waste of talent.”

This, to my ear, is a sly, characteristic bit of provocation, a winking sliver of indignance from an artist who has little left to prove. It’s Digga D at the top of his powers rapping “Fuck Drill” over a drill beat, or Mk.gee stretching the sonic potential of the guitar while explaining that he doesn’t relate to the instrument, or John Singer Sargent rejecting the form he’s mastered by writing he “abhor[s] and abjure[s]” painting portraits. Skepta knows the people are waiting. He has a wifi connection. It’s been six years since the release of his last studio album, Ignorance Is Bliss, which is a lifetime in an online culture that incentivises constant output and where the choice to withhold anything is a risk.

But he hasn’t just been sitting on his hands, abandoning his own promise. In August, Skepta will host the second instalment of Big Smoke Festival, which boasts big names and underground ones alike: his brother Jme and Central Cee in the former camp, Skyla Tyla and BXKS in the latter. It seems interesting to me that an artist would, at the inflection point of his career, choose to slow down his own rap releases and apply himself to showcasing the music of other people, DJing on Miami Beach and throwing a summer music festival in London. The thought seems to amuse him. “I kind of wanted to move to the side,” he says, grinning. “I don’t want to be that guy who’s just headlining all the time, when there’s other talented artists doing so well in the UK. I’ve been in the game a long time, to the point where I’ve gotta know sometimes when I’m just getting in the way.”

For years, Skepta has teetered on the brink of pop stardom, but resisted its more embarrassing inclinations. (Not without the odd misstep: some of those dance singles between 2008 and 2012 come to mind.) There is a version of his career where he coasted on the success of Konnichiwa and became the sort of rapper who mostly does brand deals, offering gritty texture to soulless US radio smashes made by flagging pop stars trying to recapture their capsized fan bases by getting hip to whatever’s hot. Instead, he’s passed the mic off to the artists he admires, and retreated to his home studio where he can work away from the gaze of the public. “I don’t care about fame,” he says. “Really. I care about art. I care about making the best song. I care about people selecting my poetry as theirs. I hate being famous. My whole thing is –” and then the old phone he is talking on dies, the image cuts out, and I, like everyone else, am waiting for Skepta again.

I don’t care about fame. Really. I care about art. I care about making the best song. I hate being famous

Skepta never really wanted to rap in the first place. All he wanted was to make beats. Joseph ‘Junior’ Adenuga, the eldest of four siblings, was born in 1982 to Nigerian immigrant parents, and raised in Tottenham among the booming soundscapes of his father’s reggae records. Barrington Levy, Gregory Isaacs and Half Pint comprised the sunny lingua franca in the Meridian Walk household where he began DJing, and which his family relocated to after Junior, aged three, accidentally set his teddy bear on fire and burned the whole house down.

It was in school that Junior was first moved by the frenzied, mutating sounds of north London’s Heartless Crew – made up of MCs Bushkin and Mighty Moe, and DJ Fonti – who are today widely credited with paving the way from UK garage to its darker, stranger child: grime. “They would be on the pirate radio stations while I was in school, and I would do anything I could to listen to them,” Skepta says. “I would hide my earphones so I could listen to them in class, because the way they were rapping on the breaks in these garage-grime songs – it was so undeniably London and so sick. I feel like that’s where I got a lot of my style from. And when I say style, I mean across the board: my music taste, my taste in art, but also my fashion style.”

In his teens, Junior was seduced by music. At home, when his parents were away, he would rig the speed control on his karaoke machine, connect it to a belt drive vinyl player and leave the front door open while he DJed, so a constant flow of people would come in and rap over his instrumentals. Later, he started going out to the clubs, where they played house music, drum & bass, UKG and the ragga jungle that cracked his world open. Those raves became a major source of inspiration for his brand, MAINS.

“I would pay attention to everything, from the way they tied their shoelaces to how they wore their hats, and the jackets and tracksuits we all used to wear,” he says. Already, he had an artist’s quality of attention. He started hanging around pirate radio stations too, which were by definition illegal and often moved locations regularly to evade discovery by the Department of Trade and Industry. This hyper-local network of radio stations was integral to the development of not just grime, but also the UK garage, jungle and dubstep scenes, and they were relentlessly raided by the same genre of government officials who later cracked down on drill and grime music events under the guise of ‘controlling gang conflict’. (Grime, like drill, is a uniquely Black, working-class genre that flickered to life in council estates and youth clubs, and is defined by unsparing narratives of street life recited over restless, jagged instrumentals.)

Eventually, Junior landed his own show, DJing on a pirate radio station called Heat 96.6 FM, where he telegraphed his trademark collages of UKG, jungle and the American rap he discovered when his father gave him a CD of Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. He would sometimes invite his Meridian Crew to do sets on the show. Meanwhile, the budding artist cut his teeth producing at home. In the quiet of his bedroom, armed with nothing but his game systems, Junior would pop Music 2000 into the PlayStation and craft muscular, glitching instrumentals that sounded as if they were made on some faraway alien planet. Then, he’d play them on his radio station and distribute the vinyls to DJs. His first taste of local fame arrived by way of one of these instrumentals, called “Pulse Eskimo” (AKA “Gun Shot Riddim”), when a DJ played it at a Sidewinder club night and someone started firing gunshots part way through the set. Nobody got hurt, but the bullets announced the birth of Skepta, who, with the encouragement of grime godfather Wiley, and after police confiscated all his vinyl and CDs, began trying his hand at writing.

I always walk into the booth as a new artist. I might say on the records, ‘It’s Skepta’, but in my head I’m a new artist trying to come up

Skepta soon became a threat in the underground grime scene, known not just for his metaphor-light fusillades and the barbed lines he’d use to dismember his rivals, but also his ability to shapeshift and emulate other MCs’ styles – a comical technique that later became a staple of grime clashes. Take, for example, his legendary Lord of the Mics face-off with Devilman, the one that inspired an Instagram post by Drake in which he called the video “a true reminder that whenever you think you’re good at what you do there’s most likely 2 people out there that will yam your food”. (Drake has a tattoo dedicated to Boy Better Know, the record label Skepta founded with Jme in 2005.) Surrounded by his crew in what looks like an underground tunnel, Skepta hungrily accepts the mic and launches into a 16-bar that incorporates fake Mandarin catchphrases (“Not a Tai Omi Ay Wong Sun carrier / Devilman wouldn’t even jump over the train barrier”) to mimic Devilman’s idiosyncratic flow before delivering a brazen, impassioned coup:

How can I clash Devilman?
Devilman ain’t on my level, man
[…] In a lyrical war I can’t get beaten
’Cause my lyrics are colder than Sweden
So Boy Better Know that it’s gun season
Don’t think I’m wearing gloves for no reason
Kill Devilman and dump him in Neasden
My name’s Junior, it’s not Steven
I’ll make your jawside look uneven

To see this clash today – barbs thrown but everyone looking like they’re happy to be there, revelling in the talent of their rival while still searching for where to jab them next – is to see what feels like a group of artists discovering a language. It’s different from certain recent rap beefs, where the focus is less on technical skill and more on pulling skeletons out of each other’s deep, dark closets. “That’s what I was talking about on this other interview, and people tried to crucify me for it – but I still stand on it,” says Skepta.

“We clash from dancehall-type clashing. You watch Ninjaman and Kartel clash, and it was great vibes until Vybz hit him, then it was bad. Any time violence gets involved, you spoil it. This new kind of clashing, where you’re trying to find things out and expose each other – we had some of that, but it was more about counteracting whatever the other person said, and being clever about it. It’s not that serious. With Americans, it’s based on something different. When I see clashing in America to the point that people are getting killed or shot, I think they’re spoiling it. They’re spoiling this thing that they love, which has helped them and changed people’s lives.”

At the Devilman clash, Skepta was still young. It was 2006 and he was 24 years old, with just one mixtape to his name. “I make Nigerians proud of their facial scars / My bars make you push up your chest like bras,” he rapped on “Autopsy Freestyle” from his first tape, over a trilling sample from Wiley’s “Jam Pie” that he would later revisit for “That’s Not Me”: “I got the answer / I’m like Mr Miyagi the master.”

Even in his greenness, he was bold. It didn’t matter that he was emerging. The confidence in his lyrics betrayed an unassailable certainty in his own talent that extended far beyond his years. “When I figured out I wanted to do music, I never, ever thought I would do it on a small scale,” says Skepta. “I never thought it would be a little thing. I knew that one day I would be one of the biggest artists in the world, if not the biggest rapper that ever came out of the UK.” Who else would have the nerve to release their debut album one year later and call it Greatest Hits?

I hope I’ve left as much as I took, and opened as many doors for people on the way after me. I think that’s the true meaning of life

When he reappears on my screen, head tied with a black du-rag, Skepta is reclining on a couch in a green-lit room on the lower level of what he calls his “tower”, the building that houses both his design studio for MAINS and the new recording studio where he’s been working on, the not-apocryphal album he announced in January 2024. “Every day, I’m trying to wrap it up, but then every day I make something fresh and have to rejig the tracklist,” he says. He could really package it up and send it out on Friday, “but people keep coming to the studio, so I keep making one song and then another one, and it’s hard to put a dam in the flow when it’s all so good.” Some days, Skepta won’t get any sun at all, will shower in the tower and sleep in the tower and make music in the tower and read bedtime stories to his kids in the tower, and then it’s been four days and he realises he hasn’t left the tower.

The new record, which I am not allowed to hear and which still has no official release date, is intended to be a creative rebirth. Ignorance Is Bliss might not have received the heaps of electrified praise that was afforded Konnichiwa, but that’s only because (1) the latter was the album that finally got the ethnocentric Americans hooked on a sound the Brits have been perfecting on PlayStations since before they were old enough to drink, and (2) the trademark ferocity once directed outwards – at top-down institutional power, at corrupt government officials, at the press, at inauthenticity and undeserving rivals – was instead directed towards the artist’s inner world. “This [new] album has some lyrics I never would have said ten years ago, but I think that’s one of the reasons people like my music, innit? They’ve grown with me over the last 20 years, and I’m mindful of that when I’m writing,” he says.

Many of the changes in his life over the last couple of years have reshaped his relationship to his music, and his career. “I can feel the way that my mind is sharpening,” says Skepta, and he believes it’s leading him towards artists that bring out a new side of him. Knife and Fork will feature contributions from Lex Luger, Fred Again and M-1 of dead prez, known for his anti-Zionist activism and radical lyrics aimed at dismantling the crookedness of empire. Many of the new tracks, which Skepta produced himself, will also bear the evidence of the artist’s recent return to DJing through Más Tiempo, and have been crafted with the intellect of a house music connoisseur.

(“Whenever we want a break from travelling and rapping and touring and stuff, it’s always been Ibiza,” he says, flashing a smile. “It’s like a break to get away from rap and to just dance all through the night for a whole weekend.”) Being a father, too, has given him new eyes. “I feel like becoming a dad made me happier to create,” he says. Reading to his daughter and watching her understand words and rhyme schemes has made him feel like he’s back in school, only this time he’s the teacher and not the student sneaking in listening sessions of Heartless Crew.

Skepta has been thinking a lot about legacy, and how someone like Bob Marley has lasting records that people still cling to more than four decades after his death. “Even though what I’m doing is rap, I’m still trying to make music in that same way,” he says. “And I believe that this album, even though it’s going to have a lot of different sounds on it – I think people are going to take what they want from it and live alongside it, and I feel like it’s going to be the best record I’ve made. I always walk into the booth as a new artist. I might say on the records, ‘It’s Skepta,’ but in my head, I’m just a brand-new artist trying to come up, writing some Shakespeare-level, simple nursery-rhyme bars.”

Skepta knows he’s become a Promethean figure, spreading the word of grime to the corners of the world far less familiar with it than his own. And unlike the leagues of cynical purists online, he doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that he’s captured the American imagination. He’s more concerned with being the best rapper. “In the discussion of who’s the best rapper in the world, I think it really needs to be an international discussion,” he says. “I feel like the UK is nearly there. We need to have a clash. It needs to be a battle between someone from the UK and someone from America, because the levels are high here, you get me?” (For the record, he says he would have a great clash with A$AP Rocky.) Skepta asserted the album as gospel in a genre defined by mixtapes, loose singles and pirate radios. He formalised it, proved he could hold your attention with it. His next task is to see if, after all these years, he can still hold you, surprise you, make you push up your chest like bras.

Before his phone died and he blinked out of existence, Skepta had been gearing up for a treatise against his own fame. “I just feel like, whatever fame has brought me is what I’ve always had already, you know what I mean?” he says when I ask him to elaborate. “The eyes, the judgment – I’ve always had that. In the early days it helped to toughen me up and prepare me for now. But I don’t need it any more.” The deification still makes him uncomfortable. He tries to resist its trappings. He goes to Sainsbury’s with no security. He wants to take his daughter for a walk without someone asking for a photo. “Whenever people push me to be that kind of red carpet It-boy, I shy away from it every time. Even when I won the Mercury, I can see in my face that I didn’t want to be that guy, because you only fall down from there, innit?”

Warming to his existential thread, he continues: “I forever have my dream of going back to my normal life. When everything’s said and done, I just want to be painting in my house and occasionally DJing, going to the shop for limes and breads. I hope I’ve left as much as I took, and opened as many doors and left as many codes behind for people on the way after me. I think that’s the true meaning of life. I used to struggle with that, but I know now that it’s not really about me. I’m just passing through.”

Hair T STYLES at STYLE AND GROOM, make-up SHANICE CROASDAILE, set design SAMUEL OVERS at NEW SCHOOL REPRESENTS, photographic assistant AKIRA TREES, styling assistants JESSICA SHARP, DARLENE PARK, SOFIA PACE, set design assistant HENRY HAWKSWORTH, production JANUARY PRODUCTIONS, post-production THIJME & SZAFRAŃSKA