Wretch 32: “Combined, we make colossal moves...”
As the elder statesman of Black British hip-hop, Wretch 32 takes us through his career highs, his track with Little Simz, and the deep connection between fashion and rap
In the early noughties, Wretch 32 walked into a music scene that was experiencing a boom in Black British subgenres — garage, grime, UK hip-hop. “We started seeing the So Solid Crews, and the Dizzee Rascals” he says, his head clearly swirling with the landscape of abundance that presented itself to him as a school-leaver, whose early forays in music had been writing and rapping bars to his friends and remixing songs on a big computer in the ICT room. “I got better and better, so my love for it grew.”
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Some friends in his local area in Tottenham had formed a collective, Combination Chain Gang, airing songs on pirate radio station Heat FM. “They were like, ‘Yeah man, we know you write, we know you rap, come join us, we’re just doing grime.’” It quickly became clear that for Wretch, born Jermaine Scott Sinclair, this was less muck- ing around and having fun, and something more serious. “I was working on the crew’s mixtape, my own mixtape, the mixtape that was coming out after that mixtape. Everyone could just see that I was really in it.”
Seven mixtapes and six studio albums later (a seventh will be released next year), Wretch has become something of a luminary in the British rap scene. He speaks to me from the offices of Def Jam Recordings in London, which he joined in 2020 as a creative director of its 0207 label. Getting here wasn’t easy. The same year Wretch released his first mixtape, he also had his first child, at the age of 21. This, inevitably, created significant financial barriers for making music, he says. “Get the buggy, get the cot, or do the video. It was always a choice. You wanna provide for your kid, but on the other foot you want to invest in the career that’s gonna provide for your kid. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.” He recalls difficulty without any bitterness or chagrin, but with triumph and gratitude.
Despite the odds being stacked against him, Wretch’s career continued to flourish, with different variants emerging over its course. With his music, he feels as though he is continually getting a new lease of life: “We always get second and third and fourth wins,” he says. “Initially coming out of the gate was a couple of freestyles or a mixtape, then it became “Traktor” (his 2011 breakout single which was Gold certified) and all the commercial success.” The following year saw him collaborate with Cheryl on “Screw You”, and then win Best International Act at the BET Awards.
Being so focused on the positives, Wretch initially says he can’t identify a low point in his career. Gradually, he starts reflecting on his disappointment at being snubbed by the MOBOs in 2012. “I remember thinking, ‘Rah, I’ve had three top fives, a top five album, I’ve gone gold, and I can’t win at the Black awards show?’ I prob- ably wasn’t nominated for a Brit because they thought, ‘If you can’t clean up at your own awards, you can’t get one here’. So that felt like a low. In hindsight, though, it’s just something that happened. I started making music to get a reload, not to get an award. When people are rapping my lyrics back to me, that’s the reward.”
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In 2015 came Wretch’s now-famous ‘Fire In The Booth’ session — a six-minute freestyle rap on Charlie Sloth’s Radio 1Xtra show, which has been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube. “What was significant about that was I was bringing in an artist no one was familiar with to work on a joint project: Avelino.” Wretch at this point was established and Avelino was a newcomer. He says that people enjoyed the Karate Kid-esque competition between the two: “Daniel-san and Mr Miyagi going at it lyrically”. “Avelino drops a mad first verse and it’s like let’s see if Wretch can still go with the young bucks!”
With time and variations in sound, and movements in and out of the mainstream, there are tensions between artistic integrity and commercial appeal. Wretch says that “there will always be people who are like, ‘I prefer when you made this and that’. But I’ve always felt the love. We come from being underground and you have some success and now you’re able to fly the flag and represent for the whole scene, which for some artists can feel overbearing, but I wore that as a badge of honour.” Details about his upcoming album are still under wraps, but from early single “Black and British” with Mercury Prize winner Little Simz, it appears that flying the flag for Black Britain and the urban underground is the motif.
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“Black and British” muses on identity, heritage, and family (his father was an activist during the Broadwater Farm riots, and his own christening featured in a 1998 documentary about the Broadwater Farm Estate). He says that the track was born from a frustration at British racism — the 2018 Windrush scandal and the racist back- lash against footballers Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka for missing penalties during the Euro 2020 final. “It was about channelling that frustration and working out what I wanted to say: what did I learn from these things? And it opened up a conversation about what it is to be Black and British. Does the identity even exist?”
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If Black British does exist as an identity, it’s well captured by the artistic industries which Wretch collaborates with and champions. In the track’s music video, he’s wearing a blue suit by British-Jamaican designer Bianca Saunders. Wretch has also walked the catwalk for Black British fashion labels Labrum London and Ahluwalia, moments he’s found “beautiful”, especially as he re- called his first London Fashion Weeks in 2011 and 2012 as being “not the most diverse space.” “It kind of reminds me of coming through in the rap game but the fashion version — that’s the energy I get from them.”
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He sees this new dawn emerging in other industries too, and thinks these thrive on collaboration. He’d love to work with artist Yinka Ilori, famed for his motley use of colour, whose own collaboration with The North Face he found exciting.“His mind is just sick!”, says Wretch. “I’m excited about art, the Slawn [designer and artist Olaolu Slawn] is coming through. Look at it like it’s a web. You’ve got fashion, music, The Kitchen and Supacell — so that’s TV and drama. All these things are attached and when combined we make colossal moves.”
This feature was taken from our Winter 2024 issue. Read more about it here...
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