In the six years since he started releasing mix tapes and EPs, Bugzy Malone has established himself as one of grime’s brightest stars – and its leading voice from outside London. The Manchester MC’s last two EPs, both self-released, reached the Top 10 in the UK album chart, and his latest, King of the North, hit No 4 when it came out last week.
But Malone’s ascent to this throne has been a hard one, and the lasting legacy of poverty and dysfunction looms large in his lyrics. Now 25, Malone (real name Aaron Davis) grew up in a family torn apart by, as he puts it, “career criminals”, spiralling into a spell in prison in his teens, before being rescued first by boxing and then finding the courage to make music.
“I had a really strong start,” Malone remembers, “I spent a lot of time being creative as a child – painting, drawing and writing poetry. But there was a breakdown in my mum’s marriage. It was quite an abusive relationship; the household was an abusive environment. There was so much negativity going on at home [and] that energy [was] dragged into school. You find yourself trying to figure out: where do I fit? And the kind of kids you end up relating to are other kids from dysfunctional backgrounds – the younger criminals.”
That sense of not belonging was exacerbated by the family’s financial hardship. “I can remember watching MTV Cribs – these amazing houses – and looking around my house where there was no carpet on the floors. You feel hopeless, and that can manifest itself in all kinds of emotions: sadness can turn to anger, and anger might turn to aggression.”
This negativity, exacerbated by his criminal circle, led to his jail time. “It was a wake-up call: you have spent a bit too much time off the rails. I just thought: I need to figure out my talent and push it.” His athleticism meant he was a natural fit for boxing, but “my dysfunctional background kept catching up on me” and he struggled to maintain focus. “Music was more fitted to my temperament. If you were feeling sad and down in the boxing gym, you’d get hit more than you would on a normal day. If you’re feeling sad and down and you’re sitting in front of a computer with beats, you might make the best song you’ve ever made.”
In conversation, there’s an understated, reflective calm to him, which makes it easy to believe that music started as a form of catharsis – perhaps even therapy. His lyricism began as a written journal, a means of “getting things off his chest” as a youth, and evolving into songs laden with narrative. This, more than grime’s spiky abrasions, bravado and jumpiness, is what gives Malone’s music its appeal: a depth of content and unflinching gaze at the realities of a life lived as a struggle. It doesn’t take long for humility to surface: “I was standing in the dock and my mum couldn’t look at me … Now they call me an MC / Master of Ceremonies / But time is the master / ’cos time will turn all this to a memory.”
“Eventually, I got the confidence to put it out there and let people hear it,” he says. “I don’t mind stripping it all back and just being like, ‘You know what? Here I am.’” He goes on to namecheck his song Pain, which he says was wrapped up in “bad anxiety … stuff that I’d never even verbalised before. You suffer from trauma from the things that you’ve been through because you come from a poverty-stricken background. There are a lot of us like that.”
He initially downloaded free beats online, drawn to the high-speed, lopsided tempo of grime. “I’ve done stuff over [non-grime] rap beats and it’s easier to describe deeper stuff, but at the same time I found it quite slow. I could only speak about a certain kind of emotion. Whereas young grime producers were young, street guys and they were expressing themselves in a way that would resonate with you. You’d think: whoever was making this beat was feeling aggressive, sad, lonely, low – and that’s how I’m feeling right now.”
Word of mouth spread with each mix tape, leading to his first chart placing in 2015. He says each project is born out of a responsibility to offer “more of the truth”, something he says he owes to his fans; on the title track to King of the North he forgoes self-aggrandisement for an intimate conversation with them, shouting out their support at every opportunity. “There are a lot of people out there who feel like they can be successful because they see me be successful,” he says. “I have to show them the human version of myself; I can’t create this demeanour where they almost look at me as if I’m superhuman.”
Grime perhaps offers a context for a marginalised, disfranchised young black men to empower themselves with bulletproof personae. So Bugzy Malone identifies, instead, with the superhero with no superpowers: Batman. One of the tracks on his latest offering is called Bruce Wayne and his Batman range of sportswear is flying off the shelves at JD Sports. When we get into the topic, the metaphor runs deeper than I expected. Be it confronting dysfunction, advocating a city that hasn’t always reciprocated you the love you show for it, or working on your abilities to better yourself through sheer grit and determination, the Batman comparisons are compelling. Malone is a perfect fit for grime’s Dark Knight, haunted by his past, but perfecting himself as a route to liberation. “I’ve found my craft now,” he says. “All I have to do is master it.”
So Manchester is Bugzy’s Gotham, a city he feels both proud of and protective over, as demonstrated by his one-man campaign to turn the 0161 dialling code into a personal brand, constantly shouted out on stage. When I ask about the significance of Manchester in his narrative, the motivation is clear: 200 miles away from London, he felt far away from “the industry” despite believing that he “was as good as these guys, better even. When you’re coming from outside London, you know, you better be something special if you expect people to take you seriously. I broke the mould; I made it possible.”
As with all kings and superheroes, one of the biggest concerns is how to cope with pressure. For Fire in the Booth, the high-profile MC showcase hosted by BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ Charlie Sloth, Malone faced down the high stakes of entering grime’s citadel as “an outsider” and the risk of going home a failure. But his episode has more than 10m views, the most in the series to date. “The hardest thing about being successful is constantly believing, and that’s something I’ve managed to do,” he says. “As a kid, there would be bad arguments at home, and I’d run away up to the subway tunnel and sit and think. I used to tell myself: I want to be a millionaire, I want a great career. I’d be upset – crying – but that’s what I conditioned myself to think over time: the answer for me was always success.”
His success and visibility has perhaps been boosted by “healthy competition” as seen in a well-documented beef with Tottenham rapper MC Chip. Rumblings suggest a similar conflict with grime’s man of the moment, Stormzy. But while people are still wrapped up in the ins and outs of who said what and why, his eyes are on other sights, stating that he’s “miles ahead” of beef. “That’s my job and my obligation,” he says. “As a positive person, you keep it moving into the next stage.”
So with everything falling into place, what exactly is next? “I’m coming into grime to break ground and to entertain in ways that other people are scared to do,” he says, the confidence swelling once more. “I know what’s next. Because I’m sat creating it.”
King of the North is out now on Ill Gotten Records. Jeffrey Boakye is the author of Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials, and the Meaning of Grime, published by Influx Press.
