"Take a dollop of Fresh Prince, mix in a generous helping of Cassette Playa, add a pinch of Hadouken!, crush in the fashion section of Super Super magazine... Voila! That should be enough to make those idiots forget that we're releasing a song about summer two months after summer in the UK ended."
Yeah, so, er, I quite like the video for Wiley's new single, "Summertime", I think. There's still no getting away from how awful the song is though.
I spent the day with Wiley and Scorcher in a tiny two room studio on an industrial estate in Chorlton, near Manchester earlier this week. They were up there together recording Scorcher's new album (that whole thing about them having "beef" seems to have been totally fabricated), which Wiley is producing a lot of.
Wiley, always quick to save a few quid where possible, informed me Chorlton was a good place to record owing the "cheap studio fees, innit". The fact they were paying to stay in the executive suite of the swanky Manchester Hilton didn't seem to bother him though.
Wiley spent most of the day sat in the reception area drinking Lucozade and playing songs from his new album on his laptop. From what I heard, expect an album of sub-par "Wearing My Rolex" clones.
Meanwhile, Scorcher was in the studio with a middle-aged engineer he kept referring to as "Mr Beardyman" and "the pirate" recording a couple of new tracks. The most memorable of which was an ode to rock stars in which Scorcher name-checked such rock gods as Guns N' Roses and, er, Oasis. While laying down verses, every now and then he'd hold his Blackberry in the air and shout "Blackberry power" for inspiration. Apparently he spent a year trying to get a Blackberry on Pay As You Go but eventually had to give in and get a contract, making him, as far as I know, the first grime MC ever to get a phone contract.
A couple of months ago I told you that Ny had vocalled Wookie's "Gallium". Above you can hear the result. Pretty epic, right?
Strangely, the odd bit of this new funky stuff seems to be taking a turn towards bleep from the early 90s—all eerie, bass heavy, quite pounding 4/4 beats with tinny syncopated percussion. (Check the amazing "Monopoly Refix" by D Malice for an example of what I mean.) Last night I was listening to brothers DJ Mak 10 and Marcus Nasty on Rinse FM and they played this one song that sounded like a tribal version of something that could quite easily have been made by LFO in 1991. I think Mak 10 pretty perfectly summed up the collective thoughts of everyone listening when he said: "I don't even know what this music is, I just know it's messy, it's crazy."