Post by Paula on Jul 12, 2005 20:18:21 GMT -5
Ghetto blasters
They've had two Mobo awards and a number-one hit. But will they ever escape the guns'n'drugs underworld they moved through before the pop dream came good? Andrew Smith meets south London's So Solid Crew
Sunday November 25, 2001
The Observer
Shots rang out and a man collapsed in a heap near the dance floor. Another lay slumped, bleeding profusely, in a doorway near the toilet. It was 3am at the Astoria theatre in Charing Cross Road, central London, and another garage music club night had ended prematurely in violence. Upstairs in a changing room, So Solid Crew contemplated the next day's headlines. The controversial south London hip-hop/garage collective had been on stage celebrating their singer Romeo's birth day when the trouble kicked off, but had been quickly hustled away by their security guards, who feared the next bullets would be for them. The most exciting thing to happen in British music for years, So Solid had soared straight to number one with their first chart-eligible single. Their potential had been recognised with two prestigious Mobo awards, but the guns'n'drugs underworld they'd moved through before the pop dream came good had followed them in off the streets.
Or perhaps they'd simply brought 'the streets' with them. The inventory goes like this: one member was shot in the leg after a scuffle outside a nightclub in May, while in August, another appeared at the Old Bailey on charges of possessing a gun and making threats to kill; then, last month, a third was convicted of breaking the jaw of a 16-year-old fan who had spurned his advances. The group's leader, who goes by the name of Megaman, had previously spent four months on remand, prior to being acquitted of attempted murder. The paranoia and implied threat in their lyrics is something other than empty posturing.
At a glance, it looks as though So Solid Crew cynically court their reputation as bringers of trouble, emulating some of the US hip-hop stars they grew up in awe of. After all, the only reliable formula in pop culture is that notoriety = sales. With a claimed 30-strong membership, based mostly around the rough Winstanley Estate in Battersea and ranging in age from eight to 26, they have frequently been likened to the cartoonish Wu Tang Clan of New York. The funny thing is that, the closer you get, the clearer it becomes that bigger and more chilling truths lie behind both the trouble and the words.
Two days after the Astoria fracas, Megaman sits in his manager's office in a small and nondescript east London business centre. He's tall and broad and dressed in an expensive-looking tracksuit and sheeny Nike trainers to match, and his gold jewellery sways as he moves with slooowwww south-of-the-river goodfella nonchalance. There's something reassuringly theatrical about the fact that he won't give his real name and begins by answering questions elliptically. He calls me 'blood', the US hip-hop code for 'mate', and wields the phrase 'back in the day' like an old war horse. I find myself thinking, 'Back in what day? - you're only 22.' I ask where he lives now that the cash is flowing, and you could roll a pretty big spliff in the time it takes to formulate a suitably bardic answer. Let's just say that I know this for a fact.
'Um... I live in, um, sowff . South, bruv... South is my known area to be livin' in.'
Last week's events at the Astoria were blown up, 'twisted', by the media, he insists, although I am eventually left with the impression that his ire is mostly reserved for any suggestion that he and his crew ran away from the threat. Garage music is still primarily an underground phenomenon; an accessible, highly rhythmic mix of existing club forms such as ragga, jungle and techno. It, and the scene around it, is very black, very aspirational and celebratory. In London, it has suffered from the rise in internecine, mostly drug-related gun crime on the streets, as rival gangs know that they can find each other at the 'raves' and settle scores on the spot. Not long ago, a young man named Marcus Hall was beaten to death after leaving a So Solid show in Luton. Megaman's unconvincing contention is that So Solid Crew, being among the first to make a splash in the mainstream, are catching the fire for other people. Press him further and things start to get properly interesting.
A discussion of his formative years is illuminating. 'At the end of the day, I used to be at war with a lot of people, as youths going around doing the wrong things. I've been in trouble with the police quite a lot. I have been to jail before for something that I didn't do. And I came out and I got not guilty and everything. And I changed my life.'
He doesn't say this boastfully. I ask about the attempted-murder charge and am told that someone beat up ('squashed') his younger brother, and was then subject to a near-fatal attack themselves. Everyone thought it was Mega and his So Solid crewmate, Face. He'd been at home with his 'baby mother' - Caribbean for the mother of his child, a girl who is now five and whom he obviously adores - when police came for him.
'I was going to leave. Then I said, "You know what, I don't care. I don't give a f**k whether they come or not. Because there's certain other things that I want to do in life."'
Being under 18, he and Face spent most of their four months on remand at Feltham. With so many friends already there, the stay wasn't arduous. Nevertheless, it had a profound effect on his thinking. Previously, he'd survived by 'doing the weed, and other little things' (which he declines to specify), but now he recognised that in this milieu, you could never be fully in control of your life. Your enemies could set you up anytime. And you couldn't live in untaxed twilight for ever. Best to keep away, then, to 'set your own business'.
So Solid Crew are among the first generation of black Britons whose parents are likely to have been born in the British Isles and, in this way, their story is an important generational tale. Megaman's mother is a Londoner, but his father was from Grenada.
'My dad was a dread,' he grins. 'They were both rebels, man, they were both in the same s*it I was in, but not as deep. It wasn't so dangerous then; there weren't so many guns.'
He spent a lot of time around his devout, church-going grandparents. He thinks they spent too much time trying to block out the world on the estates around him. In the end, he rebelled against that. Asked about his memories of school, he becomes defensive - it's the only time that he does - saying: 'I had a brain at school. You think I could come up with an idea or a vision like this if I never had a brain? But there was stuff that drew me to the wrong things.'
He claims to have been expelled from the Ernest Bevin School in Tooting two weeks before GCSEs, so left with no qualifications at all. I look up the stats on Bevin and find that three-quarters of pupils leave with fewer than five GCSEs in a typical year. He talks about it with barely suppressed anger.
'A lot of teachers wanted me out of that school, cos of my attitude and stuff. But, at the same time, most of the teachers in that school were a bunch of bulls*it. You get me? If they didn't like you, they wouldn't teach you anyway, they wouldn't bother. In the fifth year, they put all the bad guys in one class. How the f**k do you expect us to learn there? You know? How the f**k can you go on like that with people's lives, man?'
He finds his cool again. 'But I'm OK now.' So what was the 'stuff' that drew him into trouble? 'Oh, man. Girls and fighting. Every day I woke up to fight.'
Why? 'I don't know. That's how I was as a child, man. Every day I woke up to fight. There wasn't nothing else out there for me. I wasn't looking to make money. It was about fighting and girls and that was it.'
It was only after he came out of jail that he thought 'money', he tells me. He repeats the word several times, enjoying the ring of it. 'And then you got no beef, no problems, unless you f**k with my money. You get me?' I assure him that I have no such intention.
'So that's when it started to change. A lot of my niggaz that I used to roll with back in the day are in jail and when they come out, you're going to see those niggaz coming out of the woodwork, but doing constructive stuff. And that's who I'm representing now. Nothing here's inevitable: you can put yourself in the ghetto and take yourself out of it. This is an organisation that's going to be so unstoppable soon, even more than people think it is. It's going to be so dangerous that people won't even want to test the situation...'
Wait. And just when everything was going so well. What do you mean by 'dangerous', Megaman? 'We're dangerous already. I'm talking about on the streets and off the streets, blood. I ain't gonna go deeper than that. But people out there know. You understand? And when more people come out of jail, we gonna be even more dangerous, you get me?'
Do you really want to say that? It's going to sound like a challenge to some people... 'I don't care. I don't worry about nothing, blood! Let people take it as a challenge. You have to listen to what I said. The main point of that is, I am doing my own thing. I ain't causing no trouble. I'm on my patch. I ain't disrespecting no one else's. Leave me be, blood. Don't underestimate the situation. Cos we ain't losing it.'
Who wants to take it away from you, Megaman? 'A lot of people are talking, man. They're talking loud, so we can hear.'
Who, exactly? I depart realising that, although I've lived in 'his patch' for 15 years, I have no idea what he's talking about - is he saying all this for effect? Two things stay with me, though. The first is the simplicity of his reply to a question about his ultimate goal: 'Business stable. Family stable. Kids stable. That's all I'm interested in.' The second is his instinctive inability to own the label 'British', when asked what he considers his cultural identity to be.
The following week, a photo shoot affords the opportunity to see So Solid Crew operating en mass. It's a cold day and complaints about the studio temperature begin immediately, most particularly from Face. I offer him my gloves, which he accepts with a toothy smile that turns into a snarl as the afternoon progresses. The senior members - Mac, PDS, Asher D - tend to be the most voluble and articulate, and sit ribbing each other and playing dominoes. Others, like Megaman's brother Swiss, a producer, and Skat D (aka Darren Weir), who assaulted the fan and - probably on instructions - avoids me like the plague, are taciturn and withdrawn, and their attitude gradually radiates outward.
Remarkably, only the singers are very late: the musically talented but geographically challenged Romeo got lost and ended up in Tottenham, while Lisa Maffia (yes, her real name) swishes in like a fabulous, hour-late ray of sunshine, waving a Gucci make- up bag and half-full bottle of Moët & Chandon. She is accompanied by the Crew's 26-year-old, shade-wearing eminence grise , G-Man, who refuses to go in front of the camera and offers a blunt, 'No, man, no interviews,' when invited to offer a few words for posterity. So the world will just have to wait for his views on the euro.
What I want is a voice I trust to add flesh to Megaman's assertions. I sit down with Morgan, a gangly, quietly-spoken 19-year-old. He started out as a runner with the organisation, before unexpectedly finding his niche as a producer. The details of his life up to now hold for nearly everyone I speak to. He grew up on the Winstanley, surrounded by music and three brothers, four sisters. 'One brother and one sister's with my mum,' he explains, 'but we all got the same dad...' who makes and repairs jewellery in Brixton market. School was 'all right, but I should have behaved myself and worked harder', and he left with no idea of what he wanted to do. 'I was just making money off the street,' he shrugs matter-of-factly. His pleasure and pride in what he does now is palpable and he talks enthusiastically about the changes he sees for the next record.
'This album's what we're going through now, and if you hear a bit of hatred... it's changing now. It's a different life. I'm thinking about maintaining it for the future, for the kids and that...'
He has two kids, a one-year-old girl and a boy who was born in February, he says, adding, with a chuckle, 'And that's me done now. I got one boy and one girl and that's it.'
More detail comes with DJ Dan Da Man, 19, and the MC Asher D, who's 21. Quiet and thoughtful, Dan was raised in Battersea. Most of his family, he says, are English, though his mum was born in Jamaica. He smiles as he tells me that she's an estate agent and stops as we move to his dad, who's 'not around'. Again, school was 'all right'.
'But I think school's up to you, innit? It's important, but I didn't know that and at the time I was taking it for a joke. My family's fine, got money and stuff, but we're still in the ghetto.'
I tell him that, for me, 'ghetto' has always summoned up images of sprawling Bronx projects or LA townships like Watts and Compton. I don't think of us as having ghettos. He shakes his head.
'Everywhere's got a ghetto.'
Asher, real name Ashley Walters, is one of the Crew you'd bet on to succeed in the long term. He grew up around Brixton, but now lives in Peckham. His mum, who is head of personnel at Hackney Council, was born in London, but his grandparents are from Guyana. 'And my dad... I don't know my dad. He's a different guy, I don't really chat about him much. I have five half-brothers on my dad's side, little kids. I try to look after them.' He has two young children of his own, a son and daughter, aged two and seven months respectively. 'So this is partly for me, partly for my family, because no one else in my family has ever done what I've done. I've broken the barriers. It feels good. I know I can help my brothers now. I speak to them like I'm a wise man. I just want to be safe, not mad rich - just to be safe is good, man.'
He sounds measured and calm, free of Megaman's Boyz N The Hood hyperbole. When you look into, say, Skat D's eyes, you're not surprised to learn that he is capable of breaking a girl's jaw, but in any other circumstances you'd be astonished to find Asher standing at the Old Bailey accused of threatening to kill someone with a gun, as he is being forced to do. His lawyers have warned him not to talk about the specifics of the case, but he offers some context.
'People know my views on that stuff,' he says. 'A lot of people are trying to follow us. People that we don't want to follow us. They want to do bad things to us and have made threats that they're going to do things to us. But we've been lucky.
'There's thousands of guys out there like us. Not violent, but had to do their thing on the street to make money to survive. We didn't get lucky. We had a talent and we put ourselves in the position where we can excel - fast. And we did it. And people hate a man for that. I don't mean just words. They hate enough to do things to hurt you. The streets are violent. They watch you. I can't get out of my car and run into a sweet shop and be in there more than two minutes. If you're seen, that's it. I don't go to Brixton any more. I can't stop in Brixton. I'd love to go to Stop Gap to get a bagel, but I can't.'
You mean for fear someone might hurt you physically?
'Yeah. When you feel like that - that paranoid - it's hard . People call to ask me to go out and I say, no I'm not going anywhere. I'm scared. f**k it. If we want to go out, we have to go with 30 of us. Everybody says, "That's the price you pay." But a lot of artists, bands, whatever, don't get this. They don't pay this sort of price. This is the proper price, the raw price.'
He and Dan laugh.
'I mean, we're laughing now cos we're here and we're safe, but when I get out, I get in a cab and I have go back to Peckham and it's back to my own paranoia.'
There's a song on the new album called 'Hatez', and the single, 'They Don't Know', with its refrain of 'why you really want to irritate me?' Is this what they're about?
'Yeah, we talk about people we know that are hating us, letting them know that we know they're there and won't be easy targets. Until all this stuff stops happening, what else are we gonna talk about? That what's on our minds. We want to come out of that life and we're taking the steps to do it. It's gonna take another album to get that out of the way, before we can be... us.'
Ultimately, Asher is optimistic, though.
'Everyone just needs to unite man, stop the foolishness and the guns and violence and fighting and do what you're good at. Don't matter if you're black or whatever anymore. I don't think so, anyway. Back in the day, it was harder. My mum's always telling me: "You're black, you have to work 10 times as hard and go to school and rah rah rah..." But now, it's relaxed a little. There are lots of black people up there. Lots of Asians up there. If you got the talent, you can go through now, boy.'
Incidentally, it's a little-acknowledged fact that So Solid Crew does contain a few white members.
I've been in a side room talking to the open and instantly likeable MC Mac, who grew up on the estate and has known Megaman since he was five. He described the mix of elation and discomfort that has followed So Solid Crew's success more succinctly than anyone.
'Its very uncomfortable,' he explained. 'You have to go to see your people discreetly. Everyone knows what car you drive and when you're coming. And you've got a bigger picture of the world, but theirs is still small, so it's nothing to them to try and take what you've got. And if you retaliate, you're losing your big picture. It's hard to keep looking forward when you're having to turn around to keep an eye on them all the time.'
And, at that point, I understood the contradictions attending that first meet with Megaman. He's in a bind. The aura of threat might very well feed his vanity, but it also keeps the crew seeming 'real' and credible - which is everything on the underground - and looking like a tough target for those who would do them harm. On the other hand, it worries the world he needs to move into if he's to progress. If you're American, it's OK. But this isn't. The 'ghetto' Megaman describes is as much a state of mind as a physical location and, according to him, it's not easy to walk away from once you've been there. Will So Solid Crew manage it? From what I see, it will be a miracle if they all do.
I step from the side room into a rapidly changing situation. Lisa, seated near the lens of photographer Fiona Freund, is sweet as pie, but the boys, led by an increasingly irascible Face, have turned surly. I watch Freund and Megaman get into the only argument I've ever seen conducted over a tartan sofa throw, which I think may have started as a joke. Swiss spits, 'Don't touch me!' when she gently tries to indicate where she wants him to go in order to be seen. You get the impression that some of them don't like being told what to do, much less by a woman, and the more mature members remain silent as the few simply refuse to co-operate.
They have turned into that class of bad boys Megaman described earlier, with Freund as the reluctant teacher. Eventually, Face, protesting that he was in the right place until Skat D moved in front of him (ie 'It wasn't me - it was him!'), gets up and puts his MC talents to use in a rant you could roll several spliffs through. Then he stalks out, leaving the rest to follow. Asher comes to shake hands. Lisa seeks out the photographer to apologise. And it's over. Thank God. Hell, I don't like photo shoots, either.
They've had two Mobo awards and a number-one hit. But will they ever escape the guns'n'drugs underworld they moved through before the pop dream came good? Andrew Smith meets south London's So Solid Crew
Sunday November 25, 2001
The Observer
Shots rang out and a man collapsed in a heap near the dance floor. Another lay slumped, bleeding profusely, in a doorway near the toilet. It was 3am at the Astoria theatre in Charing Cross Road, central London, and another garage music club night had ended prematurely in violence. Upstairs in a changing room, So Solid Crew contemplated the next day's headlines. The controversial south London hip-hop/garage collective had been on stage celebrating their singer Romeo's birth day when the trouble kicked off, but had been quickly hustled away by their security guards, who feared the next bullets would be for them. The most exciting thing to happen in British music for years, So Solid had soared straight to number one with their first chart-eligible single. Their potential had been recognised with two prestigious Mobo awards, but the guns'n'drugs underworld they'd moved through before the pop dream came good had followed them in off the streets.
Or perhaps they'd simply brought 'the streets' with them. The inventory goes like this: one member was shot in the leg after a scuffle outside a nightclub in May, while in August, another appeared at the Old Bailey on charges of possessing a gun and making threats to kill; then, last month, a third was convicted of breaking the jaw of a 16-year-old fan who had spurned his advances. The group's leader, who goes by the name of Megaman, had previously spent four months on remand, prior to being acquitted of attempted murder. The paranoia and implied threat in their lyrics is something other than empty posturing.
At a glance, it looks as though So Solid Crew cynically court their reputation as bringers of trouble, emulating some of the US hip-hop stars they grew up in awe of. After all, the only reliable formula in pop culture is that notoriety = sales. With a claimed 30-strong membership, based mostly around the rough Winstanley Estate in Battersea and ranging in age from eight to 26, they have frequently been likened to the cartoonish Wu Tang Clan of New York. The funny thing is that, the closer you get, the clearer it becomes that bigger and more chilling truths lie behind both the trouble and the words.
Two days after the Astoria fracas, Megaman sits in his manager's office in a small and nondescript east London business centre. He's tall and broad and dressed in an expensive-looking tracksuit and sheeny Nike trainers to match, and his gold jewellery sways as he moves with slooowwww south-of-the-river goodfella nonchalance. There's something reassuringly theatrical about the fact that he won't give his real name and begins by answering questions elliptically. He calls me 'blood', the US hip-hop code for 'mate', and wields the phrase 'back in the day' like an old war horse. I find myself thinking, 'Back in what day? - you're only 22.' I ask where he lives now that the cash is flowing, and you could roll a pretty big spliff in the time it takes to formulate a suitably bardic answer. Let's just say that I know this for a fact.
'Um... I live in, um, sowff . South, bruv... South is my known area to be livin' in.'
Last week's events at the Astoria were blown up, 'twisted', by the media, he insists, although I am eventually left with the impression that his ire is mostly reserved for any suggestion that he and his crew ran away from the threat. Garage music is still primarily an underground phenomenon; an accessible, highly rhythmic mix of existing club forms such as ragga, jungle and techno. It, and the scene around it, is very black, very aspirational and celebratory. In London, it has suffered from the rise in internecine, mostly drug-related gun crime on the streets, as rival gangs know that they can find each other at the 'raves' and settle scores on the spot. Not long ago, a young man named Marcus Hall was beaten to death after leaving a So Solid show in Luton. Megaman's unconvincing contention is that So Solid Crew, being among the first to make a splash in the mainstream, are catching the fire for other people. Press him further and things start to get properly interesting.
A discussion of his formative years is illuminating. 'At the end of the day, I used to be at war with a lot of people, as youths going around doing the wrong things. I've been in trouble with the police quite a lot. I have been to jail before for something that I didn't do. And I came out and I got not guilty and everything. And I changed my life.'
He doesn't say this boastfully. I ask about the attempted-murder charge and am told that someone beat up ('squashed') his younger brother, and was then subject to a near-fatal attack themselves. Everyone thought it was Mega and his So Solid crewmate, Face. He'd been at home with his 'baby mother' - Caribbean for the mother of his child, a girl who is now five and whom he obviously adores - when police came for him.
'I was going to leave. Then I said, "You know what, I don't care. I don't give a f**k whether they come or not. Because there's certain other things that I want to do in life."'
Being under 18, he and Face spent most of their four months on remand at Feltham. With so many friends already there, the stay wasn't arduous. Nevertheless, it had a profound effect on his thinking. Previously, he'd survived by 'doing the weed, and other little things' (which he declines to specify), but now he recognised that in this milieu, you could never be fully in control of your life. Your enemies could set you up anytime. And you couldn't live in untaxed twilight for ever. Best to keep away, then, to 'set your own business'.
So Solid Crew are among the first generation of black Britons whose parents are likely to have been born in the British Isles and, in this way, their story is an important generational tale. Megaman's mother is a Londoner, but his father was from Grenada.
'My dad was a dread,' he grins. 'They were both rebels, man, they were both in the same s*it I was in, but not as deep. It wasn't so dangerous then; there weren't so many guns.'
He spent a lot of time around his devout, church-going grandparents. He thinks they spent too much time trying to block out the world on the estates around him. In the end, he rebelled against that. Asked about his memories of school, he becomes defensive - it's the only time that he does - saying: 'I had a brain at school. You think I could come up with an idea or a vision like this if I never had a brain? But there was stuff that drew me to the wrong things.'
He claims to have been expelled from the Ernest Bevin School in Tooting two weeks before GCSEs, so left with no qualifications at all. I look up the stats on Bevin and find that three-quarters of pupils leave with fewer than five GCSEs in a typical year. He talks about it with barely suppressed anger.
'A lot of teachers wanted me out of that school, cos of my attitude and stuff. But, at the same time, most of the teachers in that school were a bunch of bulls*it. You get me? If they didn't like you, they wouldn't teach you anyway, they wouldn't bother. In the fifth year, they put all the bad guys in one class. How the f**k do you expect us to learn there? You know? How the f**k can you go on like that with people's lives, man?'
He finds his cool again. 'But I'm OK now.' So what was the 'stuff' that drew him into trouble? 'Oh, man. Girls and fighting. Every day I woke up to fight.'
Why? 'I don't know. That's how I was as a child, man. Every day I woke up to fight. There wasn't nothing else out there for me. I wasn't looking to make money. It was about fighting and girls and that was it.'
It was only after he came out of jail that he thought 'money', he tells me. He repeats the word several times, enjoying the ring of it. 'And then you got no beef, no problems, unless you f**k with my money. You get me?' I assure him that I have no such intention.
'So that's when it started to change. A lot of my niggaz that I used to roll with back in the day are in jail and when they come out, you're going to see those niggaz coming out of the woodwork, but doing constructive stuff. And that's who I'm representing now. Nothing here's inevitable: you can put yourself in the ghetto and take yourself out of it. This is an organisation that's going to be so unstoppable soon, even more than people think it is. It's going to be so dangerous that people won't even want to test the situation...'
Wait. And just when everything was going so well. What do you mean by 'dangerous', Megaman? 'We're dangerous already. I'm talking about on the streets and off the streets, blood. I ain't gonna go deeper than that. But people out there know. You understand? And when more people come out of jail, we gonna be even more dangerous, you get me?'
Do you really want to say that? It's going to sound like a challenge to some people... 'I don't care. I don't worry about nothing, blood! Let people take it as a challenge. You have to listen to what I said. The main point of that is, I am doing my own thing. I ain't causing no trouble. I'm on my patch. I ain't disrespecting no one else's. Leave me be, blood. Don't underestimate the situation. Cos we ain't losing it.'
Who wants to take it away from you, Megaman? 'A lot of people are talking, man. They're talking loud, so we can hear.'
Who, exactly? I depart realising that, although I've lived in 'his patch' for 15 years, I have no idea what he's talking about - is he saying all this for effect? Two things stay with me, though. The first is the simplicity of his reply to a question about his ultimate goal: 'Business stable. Family stable. Kids stable. That's all I'm interested in.' The second is his instinctive inability to own the label 'British', when asked what he considers his cultural identity to be.
The following week, a photo shoot affords the opportunity to see So Solid Crew operating en mass. It's a cold day and complaints about the studio temperature begin immediately, most particularly from Face. I offer him my gloves, which he accepts with a toothy smile that turns into a snarl as the afternoon progresses. The senior members - Mac, PDS, Asher D - tend to be the most voluble and articulate, and sit ribbing each other and playing dominoes. Others, like Megaman's brother Swiss, a producer, and Skat D (aka Darren Weir), who assaulted the fan and - probably on instructions - avoids me like the plague, are taciturn and withdrawn, and their attitude gradually radiates outward.
Remarkably, only the singers are very late: the musically talented but geographically challenged Romeo got lost and ended up in Tottenham, while Lisa Maffia (yes, her real name) swishes in like a fabulous, hour-late ray of sunshine, waving a Gucci make- up bag and half-full bottle of Moët & Chandon. She is accompanied by the Crew's 26-year-old, shade-wearing eminence grise , G-Man, who refuses to go in front of the camera and offers a blunt, 'No, man, no interviews,' when invited to offer a few words for posterity. So the world will just have to wait for his views on the euro.
What I want is a voice I trust to add flesh to Megaman's assertions. I sit down with Morgan, a gangly, quietly-spoken 19-year-old. He started out as a runner with the organisation, before unexpectedly finding his niche as a producer. The details of his life up to now hold for nearly everyone I speak to. He grew up on the Winstanley, surrounded by music and three brothers, four sisters. 'One brother and one sister's with my mum,' he explains, 'but we all got the same dad...' who makes and repairs jewellery in Brixton market. School was 'all right, but I should have behaved myself and worked harder', and he left with no idea of what he wanted to do. 'I was just making money off the street,' he shrugs matter-of-factly. His pleasure and pride in what he does now is palpable and he talks enthusiastically about the changes he sees for the next record.
'This album's what we're going through now, and if you hear a bit of hatred... it's changing now. It's a different life. I'm thinking about maintaining it for the future, for the kids and that...'
He has two kids, a one-year-old girl and a boy who was born in February, he says, adding, with a chuckle, 'And that's me done now. I got one boy and one girl and that's it.'
More detail comes with DJ Dan Da Man, 19, and the MC Asher D, who's 21. Quiet and thoughtful, Dan was raised in Battersea. Most of his family, he says, are English, though his mum was born in Jamaica. He smiles as he tells me that she's an estate agent and stops as we move to his dad, who's 'not around'. Again, school was 'all right'.
'But I think school's up to you, innit? It's important, but I didn't know that and at the time I was taking it for a joke. My family's fine, got money and stuff, but we're still in the ghetto.'
I tell him that, for me, 'ghetto' has always summoned up images of sprawling Bronx projects or LA townships like Watts and Compton. I don't think of us as having ghettos. He shakes his head.
'Everywhere's got a ghetto.'
Asher, real name Ashley Walters, is one of the Crew you'd bet on to succeed in the long term. He grew up around Brixton, but now lives in Peckham. His mum, who is head of personnel at Hackney Council, was born in London, but his grandparents are from Guyana. 'And my dad... I don't know my dad. He's a different guy, I don't really chat about him much. I have five half-brothers on my dad's side, little kids. I try to look after them.' He has two young children of his own, a son and daughter, aged two and seven months respectively. 'So this is partly for me, partly for my family, because no one else in my family has ever done what I've done. I've broken the barriers. It feels good. I know I can help my brothers now. I speak to them like I'm a wise man. I just want to be safe, not mad rich - just to be safe is good, man.'
He sounds measured and calm, free of Megaman's Boyz N The Hood hyperbole. When you look into, say, Skat D's eyes, you're not surprised to learn that he is capable of breaking a girl's jaw, but in any other circumstances you'd be astonished to find Asher standing at the Old Bailey accused of threatening to kill someone with a gun, as he is being forced to do. His lawyers have warned him not to talk about the specifics of the case, but he offers some context.
'People know my views on that stuff,' he says. 'A lot of people are trying to follow us. People that we don't want to follow us. They want to do bad things to us and have made threats that they're going to do things to us. But we've been lucky.
'There's thousands of guys out there like us. Not violent, but had to do their thing on the street to make money to survive. We didn't get lucky. We had a talent and we put ourselves in the position where we can excel - fast. And we did it. And people hate a man for that. I don't mean just words. They hate enough to do things to hurt you. The streets are violent. They watch you. I can't get out of my car and run into a sweet shop and be in there more than two minutes. If you're seen, that's it. I don't go to Brixton any more. I can't stop in Brixton. I'd love to go to Stop Gap to get a bagel, but I can't.'
You mean for fear someone might hurt you physically?
'Yeah. When you feel like that - that paranoid - it's hard . People call to ask me to go out and I say, no I'm not going anywhere. I'm scared. f**k it. If we want to go out, we have to go with 30 of us. Everybody says, "That's the price you pay." But a lot of artists, bands, whatever, don't get this. They don't pay this sort of price. This is the proper price, the raw price.'
He and Dan laugh.
'I mean, we're laughing now cos we're here and we're safe, but when I get out, I get in a cab and I have go back to Peckham and it's back to my own paranoia.'
There's a song on the new album called 'Hatez', and the single, 'They Don't Know', with its refrain of 'why you really want to irritate me?' Is this what they're about?
'Yeah, we talk about people we know that are hating us, letting them know that we know they're there and won't be easy targets. Until all this stuff stops happening, what else are we gonna talk about? That what's on our minds. We want to come out of that life and we're taking the steps to do it. It's gonna take another album to get that out of the way, before we can be... us.'
Ultimately, Asher is optimistic, though.
'Everyone just needs to unite man, stop the foolishness and the guns and violence and fighting and do what you're good at. Don't matter if you're black or whatever anymore. I don't think so, anyway. Back in the day, it was harder. My mum's always telling me: "You're black, you have to work 10 times as hard and go to school and rah rah rah..." But now, it's relaxed a little. There are lots of black people up there. Lots of Asians up there. If you got the talent, you can go through now, boy.'
Incidentally, it's a little-acknowledged fact that So Solid Crew does contain a few white members.
I've been in a side room talking to the open and instantly likeable MC Mac, who grew up on the estate and has known Megaman since he was five. He described the mix of elation and discomfort that has followed So Solid Crew's success more succinctly than anyone.
'Its very uncomfortable,' he explained. 'You have to go to see your people discreetly. Everyone knows what car you drive and when you're coming. And you've got a bigger picture of the world, but theirs is still small, so it's nothing to them to try and take what you've got. And if you retaliate, you're losing your big picture. It's hard to keep looking forward when you're having to turn around to keep an eye on them all the time.'
And, at that point, I understood the contradictions attending that first meet with Megaman. He's in a bind. The aura of threat might very well feed his vanity, but it also keeps the crew seeming 'real' and credible - which is everything on the underground - and looking like a tough target for those who would do them harm. On the other hand, it worries the world he needs to move into if he's to progress. If you're American, it's OK. But this isn't. The 'ghetto' Megaman describes is as much a state of mind as a physical location and, according to him, it's not easy to walk away from once you've been there. Will So Solid Crew manage it? From what I see, it will be a miracle if they all do.
I step from the side room into a rapidly changing situation. Lisa, seated near the lens of photographer Fiona Freund, is sweet as pie, but the boys, led by an increasingly irascible Face, have turned surly. I watch Freund and Megaman get into the only argument I've ever seen conducted over a tartan sofa throw, which I think may have started as a joke. Swiss spits, 'Don't touch me!' when she gently tries to indicate where she wants him to go in order to be seen. You get the impression that some of them don't like being told what to do, much less by a woman, and the more mature members remain silent as the few simply refuse to co-operate.
They have turned into that class of bad boys Megaman described earlier, with Freund as the reluctant teacher. Eventually, Face, protesting that he was in the right place until Skat D moved in front of him (ie 'It wasn't me - it was him!'), gets up and puts his MC talents to use in a rant you could roll several spliffs through. Then he stalks out, leaving the rest to follow. Asher comes to shake hands. Lisa seeks out the photographer to apologise. And it's over. Thank God. Hell, I don't like photo shoots, either.
