It would be easy for Skream to rest on his laurels. The dubstep pioneer isn’t interested in looking backwards though. Over the course of his 25-year-plus musical career, the south Londoner has increasingly pushed a genre-agnostic sound. This has reached its apex on his new album, ‘Skreamizm 8’. Felicity Martin finds the producer and DJ in a thoughtful, yet playful, mood. “I can’t do anything else,” he laughs. “Can’t even put up a fucking shelf…”

'‘Ello yous, hope you’re alright. It’s a bit scary right now, innit?' says Skream, in his conversational south London drawl. It’s taken from ‘Thinking of You’, the outro to ‘Skreamizm 8’, the vocal culled from a Voice Note he recorded in the midst of lockdown and never cleaned up, to keep it raw. It was targeted at kids going through adolescence and the struggles that come with that, made exponentially worse by events being locked off. 

“I just had a feeling of how shit growing up can be, socially,” he explains over a pint and tacos at a King’s Cross pub owned by his mate. “There’s the line: ‘Don’t worry, these probably aren’t going to be your friends in 25 years.’ And it was… because my son was starting secondary school and it was just a message like, it’ll always be alright in the end, try not to worry.”

Skream has just been to hear the album in spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, a technique that creates a 3D soundscape when listened to on headphones or speakers. He’s clearly chuffed about the experience, grinning widely to reveal a missing tooth. ‘Skreamizm 8’ is the first ‘Skreamizm’ instalment in 10 years, but he hates the word ‘album’. “It adds so much pressure to everything,” he says, explaining that – for his mind, anyway – it’s an EP.

Now 37, Ollie Jones has been involved in music for at least 26 years. He’s known for being one of dubstep’s originators and for his later disco and house sets. He’s also renowned for being a notorious party animal. Where other music stalwarts jumped out of the game or have faded into obscurity, Skream has stayed consistent with an overwhelming work rate, an ear for future sounds and for the tight friendships he’s made within the industry. It’s why lockdown worried him so much. “I can’t do anything else! Play tunes and make tunes, that’s literally all I can do. Can’t even put a fucking shelf up.”

His role in the creation of a genre that went from dark London clubs to arenas in the US has been much mythologised. Skream started DJing aged 11 and not long after began hanging around at Croydon’s Big Apple Records, where his brother worked. You could hardly blame him for skiving off school: his school was shit, “really shit”. The West Wickham Catholic college was run by an ex-nun who stole up to £500,000 from the grant-maintained institution. “Suddenly there was paparazzi everywhere and [the school] was on the front page of every newspaper in the country,” he recalls. It was even the subject of 2006 BBC drama-documentary ‘The Thieving Headmistress’.

Big Apple, situated in “non-trendy” Croydon, was where he first met Benga, Artwork, Hatcha and the other music enthusiasts who were congregating around the FWD>> club night, dedicated to the sounds that were weirder and darker than what was being played in the garage raves. 

“It was an iconic place, it was just buzzing all the time,” Skream says. He’d already been working there for a year when his school’s work experience programme began and he picked Big Apple for his placement – he had to go through a pretend first day while being monitored by a school staff member.

While he wasn’t allowed to touch the till, Skream was tasked with making ringtones for tracks that were created in the shop’s studio, which was owned by Artwork (fun fact: Skream made the official ringtone for Daniel Bedingfield’s ‘Gotta Get Thru This’). When the store eventually closed, Skream cried. “Because it was the only place I felt normal. Whether it was an office worker coming in on their lunch break, a builder, or DJs – you met so many people. Being behind the counter at such a young age, I got treated like an adult rather than a kid.”

Everything in his life became about music. In his lunch break he’d visit the second-hand record store behind the shop, digging through Indian and African records to find stuff to sample. He and Benga were creating tracks on Fruity Loops and the PlayStation, “in creative competition, but it was friendly”. They’d ring each other up on their house phones for hours, playing parts of tracks to one another before running back to their individual workstations, newly inspired. Hatcha used to send tracks to Neil Jolliffe, who ran FWD>> with Sarah Lockhart, letting them play on his voicemail before hanging up so Jolliffe wouldn’t know who was behind them. 

“Then there was this buzz going round that it was these two 13-year-olds who were doing something new,” Skream says. Eventually ‘The Judgement’ came out in 2003 on 12-inch, a warped, moody joint record that proved the pair were “vinyl-worthy”.

He and Benga thought they’d made it (“we were like little rock stars; it was a dream come true”) before they gradually started doing their own things and exploring their own sounds. Then in 2006 Skream released one of dubstep’s most recognisable tracks: the warbled semi-verse-chorus structure of ‘Midnight Request Line’, before a few years later hitting the big time with his chart-scaling remix of La Roux’s ‘In for the Kill’. By this point, he was touring the world, loving to travel and meeting people on the way. Together with Benga and Artwork, they became dubstep-pop supergroup Magnetic Man, with their eponymous album in 2010 reaching number 5 in the UK album charts.

Eventually, as dubstep became more testosterone-fuelled and indebted to big drops, Skream distanced himself from the sounds, drawing upon house, techno and disco when he DJed. It didn’t help when he was misrepresented by the Daily Star, who chose to frame his words in the headline: ‘Dubstep is DEAD’, when he’d just been talking about his personal choice to step back from the genre. “I got death threats and shit,” Skream says. “Why would I talk about my own baby like that?!” It proved to be a setback too, blocking the move he wanted to make into the house realm as all the attention was on his thoughts on 140bpm.

Over the years since, Skream has unleashed a stream of slamming house and techno cuts – for example, Michael Bibi and Jackmaster co-productions ‘Otto’s Chant’ and ‘The Attention Deficit Track’, while playing slots in Ibiza flagships and festivals worldwide. His ‘Open to Close’ party series in 2016 and 2017 championed the all-night-long set, allowing him to go deeper, earning a loyal audience. Still, there were people who’d just yell at him to play dubstep. They still do. “It’s not their fault, though,” Skream admits, “it’s only when they hear I’ve been playing dubstep sets at certain festivals” – the old school set he did with Rusko at EDC in 2019, for instance. “I try to put out a statement about it, otherwise people drive me fucking mad. I could do it every weekend, but I’m not into nostalgia. I want to go forward, you know?”

‘Skreamizm 8’ was originally going to be a dubstep album. Then he scrapped the whole thing, determined not to do something that looked to the past. (In the background, his manager plays a great-sounding unreleased Coki and Skream collaboration from his phone). “I thought this one felt more honest, because it was actually what I was writing.” But, although forward-looking, it’s also a retrospective record in some ways: ‘Funky Sailor’ features former Roll Deep member Trim and a lurching oboe line, a nod to early grime and pirate radio, as well as Skream’s love of UK funky. “It’s gonna be massive,” he says in between mouthfuls of rice. “I’ve been playing it for two years now, but it’s changed over time.”

In the vast stretch of time in lockdown when clubs were shut, Skream began inventing new genres, finding it easier to experiment without the pressure of making club bangers for the following weekend. He made a massive number of tunes – 425, he thinks. “I was doing Eski hardcore, which was old grime synths over really fast pounding hardcore beats. I’ve got a whole album’s worth of it.” He describes another style he’s worked on: afrobeats with old school underground UK basslines, “which were really sparse and minimal, really dark, real UK music”. He used a recent set for London’s HÖR takeover to showcase these sounds, with deep, resonant bass cutting into zero gravity vocals. He calls it “FWD>> bassline”.

As well as the lockdown angst that’s filtered into ‘Skreamizm 8’, there’s a track written for Skream’s late friend Jamie Roy, the Scottish DJ responsible for ‘Organ Belta’ who passed away last year aged 33. ‘Not Ready Yet’ was written the day he died, while another track is named ‘Roy the Boy’ after him. “It’s all quite melancholy to a degree – a lot of them are end-of-the-night tracks, [so I] can’t really play them early. But I like it as a... Not a concept record, but it’s a very honest record.” Elsewhere there’s heartstring-tugging garage, ravey breakdowns and trance-inspired synths, further proving the genre-less field in which Skream now operates.

Rather than the kind of A-list producer or vocal features that he could quite easily pull, the album has cameos from newer talent such as garage newcomer Bklava and Barbados-born Lagoon Wavey, plus his mates, the rave duo Prospa. Relationships have been an important part of Skream’s trajectory, and still are, from long-time friendships with the likes of Seth Troxler to newer pals such as Ewan McVicar. He’s recently been going b2b with Interplanetary Criminal and dubstep newcomer Hamdi, and championing Manchester’s Ghoulish. “I like doing my bit,” Skream explains. “I hate the idea of people thinking the industry’s full of arseholes. I had good people around me [when coming up], and sometimes the DJ world can feel like everyone’s a cunt, basically. I just try to help people out.”

Music aside, Skream wouldn’t be Skream without his well-documented love of a good party, from his highly-memed throwing of a CDJ into the crowd at SXSW in 2013, to Annie Mac saying he was more hardcore than the Sex Pistols. “I think sometimes people are focused on partying rather than actually how hard I work,” he says. “They think I’m a party animal or whatever, when people forget that Monday to Friday I’m a parent. I’ve had to cancel a few shows this year due to health reasons, and another due to personal reasons, but other than that I’ve probably missed about ten gigs in 20 years or something. And I’ve played probably over 1000 gigs.” 

What do his kids think about his music? “My daughter loves it, yeah. My son, he – I don’t think he likes the music, but he sent me a really nice message saying: ‘I think it’s amazing that you get to live your dream.’”

A couple of weeks after we meet, Skream announces on Twitter that he’s going sober. “Tonight’s my first show in 20-odd years without having anything in my system,” he writes, saying he feels “jittery” about the prospect. “Let a few things in my personal life slip and possibly some things in my career where I just wasn’t on the ball,” he clarifies, although adding: “Not saying I’m never gonna have a party again, but for the meantime this is my choice.”

To celebrate the album coming out, he’s planned a bumper weekender at fabric in October. Alongside a host of other guests such as Kode9 and an Oblig takeover, it will see Skream and Benga play together for the first time in around 10 years. In 2015, Benga opened up about having a mental breakdown, saying he had developed bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and that he would be retiring from music. This will be the first time he’s played a show since 2016. He’s been doing well recently, Skream says. “Really good, really positive. I’m excited for him.” He grins about the prospect of their onstage reunion. “But it’s not gonna be an old school set. He’s been working on a lot of new music, and obviously I have. I think it’s gonna be a bit more electro-y.” 

For a record store obsessive who came up in a tight-knit community, it’s easy to see where Skream’s love of collaborating and continual quest for evolution has come from. “I’ve got a track with Jamie T, a full-on indie track,” he reveals. “It’s hard because when you’re doing a project you’re tied to that, so you can’t really release anything else. But I wanna get stuff out – I might start releasing music under my kids’ names, you know – just get it out there! 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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