In November 2017, a London collective called 1011 – pronounced “ten-eleven”, after the W10 and W11 postcodes – released their Next Up? freestyle video on YouTube. They bragged and threatened over haunting beats, their verses emblematic of UK drill’s raw appeal to a global generation listening and gossiping online. At the time, I worked as an education mentor at an inner-London academy while volunteering at two community centres. Suddenly, all the boys I worked with were talking about the skippity-skip flow of the group’s 17-year-old frontman, Digga D.
Nearly six years later, I meet Digga in Wembley. He has since become a youth cultural phenomenon, topping the UK album chart and scoring three Top 10 singles. “I’m tired of hearing about it,” he says when I mention Next Up?, which was removed by YouTube in 2018 on request from the Metropolitan police after it had been watched more than 11m times: the force claimed it was inciting violence. This summer, an edited version of the song surpassed 100m streams on Spotify. “I wanna tell you: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it.’ But, keeping it real, I don’t really think about it. I appreciate it. I’m grateful. But now what?”
