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.
If his intention was to remind us of his foundational influence on modern grime, it worked. Two decades on, this formative amalgam of UK garage, big beat and British hip-hop sounded crisp, undated and still fizzing with ideas. The loping Arabian beats of Sittin’ Here, tumbling up against the corroded metallic assaults of I Luv U and Cut ‘Em Off. Fix Up, Look Sharp, built on its cavernous groove, and Dizzee’s operatic theme tune Jus’ A Rascal, the ring cycle of UK rap. Lines about Dizzee’s struggles to control his violent tendencies on 2 Far haven’t aged well, but much of this twenty-year-old record sounded so contemporary that you’d assume Dizzee must have hired DJ Dorian Gray for the night.
The experimentation and emotional scope deployed by Stormzy, Skepta, Kano and Dave were rooted here, on a record that tempered machismo with vulnerability, bravado with uncertainty and aggression with self-reflection. It was an expertly paced set too: each time the barrage of rabid beats and panic raps began to drag – on, say, the fake rappers diss track Wot U On? – along came the proto-Jamie T Jezebel with its lovely plucked string melody. Or Do It!, accompanied by visual tributes to lost rappers and DJs, portraying grief as a pounding intensity.
In the wake of such a multi-faceted full-album experience, it felt a bit of an (admittedly fun) travesty that the O2 really came alive for the encore of electro-pop and EDM hits: Bassline Junkie, Dance Wiv Me, the Balearic cheese of Holiday and a final Bonkers, a rave banger played, by the sound of it, on a battalion of military motorbikes. Culture might well decide this boy needs a lot more thinking time in the corner but, in the meantime, he won’t be letting us forget his influence.
