Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage
Britain’s grime scene, once viewed as a resolutely underground endeavour with little commercial potential, has, over the last couple of years, seen all kinds of surprising success stories, from Stormzy’s chart hits to Beyoncé dancing to Skepta on her tour. Yet it is still a major milestone for Boy Better Know, grime’s most successful crew, to be headlining a festival of 50,000 people. Wireless might not be the most prestigious event this summer, but it normally draws huge US stars such as Drake, Kanye and Rihanna. This show has the potential to be a cultural moment akin to Jay Z headlining Glastonbury in 2008: a subculture moving into the British mainstream.
BBK, as their fans and merchandise call them, formed in 2005 from the embers of grime crew Meridian Gang. They have, at various points, been a T-shirt brand, a record label and a mobile phone network. But in its current form, it is an amorphous collective led by two of grime’s biggest stars, brothers JME and Skepta, as well as founding members Jammer, Shorty, Frisco and other artists from the scene who are keen to collaborate.
That means the set takes a kind of school concert format. JME runs through Man Don’t Care, a track full of impressive lyrical somersaults from his recent album, before joining Lethal Bizzle for a wild’ n’ out performance of 2004’s Pow! (Forward), a song so riotous it was infamously banned from being played in some nightclubs. After 90 seconds or so, Skepta emerges from behind an onstage public telephone box (the 00s kind, which you could send texts from) to perform That’s Not Me, his 2014 smash hit credited with reviving the genre.
And so it goes on, taking a tour through grime’s greatest hits from the past 15 years. Despite rumours of a Drake appearance, the show is thin on big guest turns. Yes, Pharrell comes out to initial screams, but his verse on Skepta album track Numbers is low on energy. Yet when lower-level BBK member Solo45 comes out to do his garish football track Feed ’Em to the Lions, there is pandemonium.
The setting is not perfect. Grime thrives in enclosed spaces and the claustrophobic crush of the crowd. It’s somewhat unconvincing hearing Skepta rap, “It ain’t safe on the block, especially for the cops” with a neon lit “PIZZA AND GARLIC BREAD” sign behind him. The necessities of a main-stage set – synchronised graphics and a strict curfew – also prevent wheel-ups (a mainstay of a grime set where a song is cut after a couple of lines and played again from the start to increase anticipation) and the kind of spontaneous freestyles that can make live grime feel like alchemy.
Still, you feel a bit bowled over by the occasion rather than the specific performances. A few years ago it was difficult to put a grime show on in London, as police would use form 696 which asked what type of music genre was being performed, which in effect closed down grime gigs hours before they were supposed to start. Now there are so many people watching JME perform tracks he only released on his Myspace that three huge screens and a disabled viewing platform are required.
Most hearteningly, the biggest hits of the night are songs that have rarely bothered late-night radio, never mind the charts. Spaceship Freestyle, a track that first emerged in 2005 as a pirate radio rip, sends limbs flying, thousands of gun fingers in the air, with home counties teenagers mugging like they were in a Snoop Dogg video. Murkle Man, from the same year, is treated in the same way the Eagles would treat Hotel California – with fireworks, special graphics and huge cheers of appreciation from the crowd. There’s a unifying feeling that everyone here must have downloaded the same mixtapes and hunted out the same YouTube rips. What was once a solo bedroom experience tonight becomes a mass congregation.
The highlight comes on the last song, Skepta’s Man, a song about staying friends with the people you grew up with and not bothering with the new ones that come as a result of fame. As the opening bars ring out, the stage is rushed with performers, friends and friends of friends. Apparently BBK had 140 people on their guestlist, and most of them appear to be on stage, all bellowing the refrain: “I only socialise with the crew and the gang.” Squad goals indeed.
