Skip to main content

AJ Tracey: ‘I had to do everything on my own’

2019 has been the UK rapper’s breakout year. He talks about how drum’n’bass informed his style – and why Boris Johnson is ‘a very small man’

"Yo, it’s the hyperman set, AJ Tracey, live and direct!” Roll down a car window or scroll the radio dial over the past few months and Ladbroke Grove, the no-frills garage tune by the west London rapper, will have no doubt been making the speakers shake. Tracey’s track, with its pitched-up sample from soul singer Jorja Smith, cut through all the season’s Latin-flavoured pop, functional house and endless Ed Sheeran singles and still sits, unbudged, in the charts, a feelgood summer hit that refuses to accept that autumn is here.

Tracey, whose real name is Ché (after Guevara) Wolton Grant, though he usually goes by his stage name, has been having a breakthrough year. In February, he self-released his debut album, which has since become the second-biggest album of 2019 by an independent musician; to cap it off, he’s playing two sold-out nights at the 10,000-capacity venue Alexandra Palace next month.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WgbJNE
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more