SBTV20 PHASE TWO ANNOUNCED
Phase one was the origin story. Wiley, Roll Deep, Chip, Tinchy, Scorcher. The founding-era grime names who were there when Jamal Edwards was still a teenager in Acton pointing a camcorder at whoever was spitting hardest that week.
Headie One is on the bill. So is RV, the Tottenham partner he made his name alongside before going on to become one of the defining voices of UK drill. Rimzee is there too, one of the most respected voices in UK road rap. These are artists whose sound came after grime, out of a scene that took the template SBTV helped build (film it yourself, put it online, don't wait for anyone to let you in) and ran with it in a completely different direction.
Then there's Frisco, Boy Better Know, a reminder that the grime story didn't stop at the first wave. Mak 10, the Nasty Crew DJ who was there in the pirate radio days and is now taking grime to crowds in New York and Toronto, people who drove in from other cities to hear it. Tinie Tempah, who went from the London underground to a number one with "Pass Out" in 2010 and showed the industry what a British rapper could look like at the very top of the charts. Big Zuu, who now has a BAFTA for cooking on television, which is not a sentence anyone would have predicted when he was clashing on YouTube.
8SYN, who many will know as One Acen, has rebranded and gone deeper into his own culture and Afrobeats. That fits the night better than it might look at first. The scene Jamal filmed was never one sound. It was a generation of young Londoners, many with roots everywhere from West Africa to the Caribbean, working out what British music sounded like when they made it.
And Shola Ama. She was in the charts in the nineties, years before Jamal had his camcorder. Her name on this poster says something about who this night is really for. The SBTV audience didn't appear from nowhere. They grew up on British R&B, then grime, then everything that followed, and the lineup now reads like a timeline of it all.
SBTV 20 is putting three decades of British Black music on the same stage, connected by one kid who believed in people before the industry did. There is a final phase dropping soon!