If anything has made Dylan Mills Dizzee of late, it’s the downward spiral. That this celebrated grime pioneer embraced the EDM and rave-pop world of Calvin Harris and Armand Van Helden in the late ‘00s gave him monster hits in Bonkers and Dance Wiv Me but largely dislocated him from grime’s grittier second wave. Now, a decade on from his last significant batch of hit singles, his 2020 album E3 AF, along with his legacy, has been overshadowed by a 2021 conviction for assaulting his ex-fiancee that has made ‘Rascal’ seem too polite an alias.
Last night’s high-profile return to the London live arena, then, seemed an attempt at both damage limitation and career reboot. The curtain lifted on Dizzee sitting in the corner of a cube of yellow screens to recreate the sleeve of his Mercury winning 2003 album Boy in da Corner and, over ninety energetic minutes, he proceeded to perform the record in full to mark its 20th anniversary. Plus a brief diversion into his “early, early” pirate radio era alongside JME and D Double E, his screens transformed into east London tower blocks.
