Iain Harper's Blog

In the early 2000s, grime MCs poured out of pirate radio sets across East London, their voices bleeding from tower block frequencies, recognisable by flow and cadence alone. You memorised their bars, learned their rhythms, debated their rankings on MSN and in school corridors. But you had no idea what they looked like. In a genre built on persona, territory, and the precise postcode you claimed, this was a strange gap. The music existed in sound form only, and the exuberant personas behind the lyrics were mysteries to anyone outside their own immediate endz. Then a young man from Bow borrowed money from his nan to buy a camera, and the genre gained a face.

The record shop village square

To understand Risky Roadz you need to understand Rhythm Division, the bright blue record shop at 391 Roman Road in Bow that functioned, during the mid-2000s, as grime's unofficial parliament. Its walls were plastered with stickers, its shelves stacked with garage and grime white labels, a PlayStation sat in one corner, turntables in another, and music played without pause from open to close. Wiley came through. Skepta came through. Dizzee Rascal came through. D Double E, Kano, JME. Everyone came through.

Lady Shocker, an original member of Mucky Wolfpack and a leading voice in the Girls of Grime movement, remembers what made it different from any other shop. “Even if they didn't know you, you could take your stuff there and they would sell it. Your mix, your vinyls, whatever. They were really supporting the underground scene.”

It was basically a community hub dressed as a retail unit, and for the young people orbiting grime in East London it was the default place to go when there was nothing else to do. Walk down to Rhythm Division and you might catch MCs rolling in to do sets on the shop floor.

Roony Keefe had bought records there while at school. Then, during college he got a Saturday job, working alongside the shop manager, Sparky. Surrounded by the scene's principal figures, he had a simple revelation. “There was pirate radio, so you heard voices but didn't know what everyone looked like. Rhythm Division was like the window to seeing the people. That's what gave me the idea initially to start filming.” In his mind, if he wanted to know what the MCs looked like, everyone must want to know .

Art from limitation

The technology of 2003 now seems almost comically primitive. No smartphones with HD cameras. No YouTube or Instagram. No TikTok, no viral distribution. The world was predominantly analogue and connections were physical. You had to meet someone to give them a CD, a DVD, a white label.

Keefe called his grandmother and asked to borrow money for a camera. She sent it. He bought books to teach himself video editing because there were no online tutorials to fall back on. The equipment was basic. The transitions came from Windows Movie Maker. The shots were shaky, the audio rough, and in 2004 distribution meant pressing films onto physical discs and learning the process as you went.

None of that mattered though. The rough quality gave authenticity in a way that polished production never could. Cracked copies of Fruity Loops produced the beats. PlayStation's Music 2000 served as a production suite. MSN and Limewire spread the tracks through digital backchannels. Pirate radio carried the signal through the air. And now DVDs captured the visual element that had been missing. The aesthetic was low-fi because the world was low-fi; a community built with whatever it could get its hands on.

Faces to frequencies

What Keefe captured on those early Risky Roadz DVDs was something nobody had properly documented. The antithesis of polished music videos: MCs in their natural habitat, freestyling outside their houses, in car parks, on basketball courts, in the back room of Rhythm Division itself. A young Kano in an Adidas bathrobe freestyling late at night, cup of tea in one hand. Ghetts delivering bars on a grey Plaistow afternoon in front of a terraced house. Tower blocks, estate stairwells, Roman Road on a Tuesday.

The roster reads like a time-capsule of everyone who would define British music over the next two decades. Skepta, Wiley, Kano, D Double E, Ghetts, JME, Dizzee Rascal, Lethal Bizzle, Giggs, Bashy, Tempa T. Crews from Roll Deep to Ruff Sqwad, Boy Better Know to Nasty Crew, Newham Generals to Meridian Crew. For many, Risky Roadz was the first time audiences outside the immediate scene ever saw their faces. Tempa T's first visual appearance anywhere was Risky Roadz 2.

Keefe operated as a kind of quality control. “Anyone could come in and freestyle, and if my ear said you were alright and Sparky did too, then you made it onto the DVD. Then all these households started to know who you were.” And because he was embedded in the scene rather than observing it from outside, his subjects gave him something others could never extract. “Everyone we approached about it we knew already. That's why I get good interviews out of people. I'm not just a journalist speaking to them, I'm also a friend and they can be honest.”

The freestyles that made legends

Some moments survived the format and became permanent reference points.

On a grey afternoon in Plaistow, Ghetts (then Ghetto) stood in front of a terraced house and delivered what remains one of grime's most quoted freestyles

“At that time I felt like I was the one. The guy, the person. I felt like no one was doing what I was doing in the way I was constructing my music,” he said later. Keefe knew it in the moment. “When we filmed Ghetts' freestyle, that was my real moment of thinking, 'Yeah, this is special.' It's probably one of the most iconic freestyles in grime.”

The late Stormin's acapella Trim diss in Volume 1 survives as one of the genre's best and funniest takedowns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF6zTNz1wT

And the Roman Road cypher, from 2006's Movement Documentary, where Skepta, Wiley, Frisco, Wretch 32, and Ghetts went bar-to-bar on the street, still circulates as definitive evidence of grime's collective peak. Five MCs trading sixteens outdoors, no stage, no lighting rig, just a cheap camera rolling on a pavement in E3.

The DVD ecosystem

Risky Roadz operated within a broader ecology of grime DVDs that gave the scene its visual identity.

Jammer's Lord of the Mics, launched from his parents' basement in Leytonstone in 2004, established the formal clash format. Two MCs, recorded battle, one-on-one over grime instrumentals. The Wiley vs Kano clash that opened the series became the most historic in grime, the Godfather versus the teenage upstart, and Skepta vs Devilman on LOTM2 later became Drake's favourite clash. “At that time, you couldn't ever turn down a clash,” Jammer recalled. “That was one thing about being a grime MC.”

Troy “A Plus” Miller's Practice Hours took a different approach, more documentary-style, capturing the culture as a whole. As one of the founding DJs on Rinse FM's maiden broadcast alongside Geeneus, Wiley, and Slimzee, Miller had unrivalled access. Regional DVDs like Birmingham Mic Controllers and Midlands Roadside showed how far the movement ran outside London.

Punk's unlikely descendant

Every punk fan remembers the January 1977 issue of Sideburns fanzine, the one that printed three guitar chords and told its readers, “Now form a band.” Fast-forward to East London at the turn of the millennium and an unlikely descendant was being forged in a stew of poverty, disaffection, and a similarly belligerent self-determination.

Mykaell Riley, director of the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster, called grime “the most disruptive cultural transformation of the British music industry since punk.” The comparison might seem lazy but it goes deeper. Both genres were birthed from frustration and attacked by the political and media establishment. Punk was a threat to moral order. Grime was “violent” and “riot music.” But where punk channelled the rage of young white Britons against economic stagnation, grime gave voice to the experience of young Black Britons. The anger at systemic racism, at state violence, at being young and ignored and abandoned in the shadow of Canary Wharf's gleaming towers.

UK garage had become popular and commercial, moving away from the concerns of the young people who had created it as it became part of the dominant culture, lost to the power of industry gatekeepers. Grime was a deliberate step back underground. The hyper-speed multisyllabic phrasing owed more to jungle and garage raves, where MCs treated the voice as another percussive instrument over 140 BPM rhythms. The structure was different too. Short 16-bar verses, eight-bar choruses. As Chuck D had described hip-hop in America, grime was now CNN for its community. When Dizzee Rascal released Boy in da Corner, parts of which were created during school music classes, grime hit the big time.

With it came the attention of the Metropolitan Police who introduced Form 696, a risk assessment that in practice functioned as a mechanism to shut down grime events by requiring promoters to detail the type of music and the expected ethnic makeup of attendees. Lethal Bizzle's “Pow! (Forward)” was banned from clubs after allegedly triggering fights.

The tabloids attacked grime as promoting violence, and when the 2011 London riots hit, the genre was blamed for creating a culture of anger, as if the government’s austerity programme that disproportionately defunded and closed many community programs could not possibly have played a contributing role.

The blueprint still echoes

When Jamal Edwards founded SBTV, building what would become a media empire from his bedroom, he was explicitly following in Keefe's footsteps. “I was in Year 11 doing Information and Communication Technologies and watching the same freestyles, taken from the DVDs Practice Hours and Risky Roadz on YouTube, over and over again,” he told Red Bull Music Academy. Platforms like GRM Daily, SBTV, and Mixtape Madness picked up the format and ran with it. The “Next Up” freestyle series that launched drill artists like Digga D into the mainstream was the same format Keefe had established two decades earlier.

Watch any UK drill video now and you’ll likely see a familiar setup; rapper surrounded by friends, spitting bars directly into a camera on their estate. The visual language that Risky Roadz wrote. As Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Neef) puts it, “A lot of the biggest UK drill artists got big from freestyles. Those freestyles are essentially the same format. It's one of the distinctions that you can have between British rap and US or French rap, how vital those kerbside freestyles are to the scene, but also how they can change a young person's life in an instant.”

The corner that never left

When Skepta and JME released “That's Not Me” in 2014, the video was a conscious rejection of music industry spectacle, shot for £80 with VHS-style footage of Meridian Estate green-screened behind them. Complex ranked it the number one grime song of the 2010s.

When Skepta shot “It Ain't Safe” back on that same estate shortly after, he specifically requested that Keefe film it on the original Risky Roadz camera, equipment that hadn't been picked up in a decade. “It does feel like the old days again, everyone's got their hunger back,” Keefe said. “Skepta wanted it filmed on the old Risky Roadz camera. I haven't picked that camera up for 10 years now.” It was a deliberate homecoming, an acknowledgment that the visual identity of grime had been established in those early grainy tapes.

Looking back, Keefe wishes he had filmed more. “I wish I'd captured more pirate radio. I used to go a lot and not always with my camera. And another thing I would have filmed more of would have been B-roll. More B-roll of the estates, the buildings, Rhythm Division, as so much has now been lost to gentrification.”

Rhythm Division closed in 2010. The building is a coffee shop now. The estates have changed. But the documentary record remains, uploaded to YouTube years after the physical DVDs circulated hand to hand, still drawing comments from people discovering grime's origins for the first time. Drake became a fan. Kanye brought grime MCs on stage at the Brit Awards.

Keefe never set out to become grime's documentarian. He was a fan who wanted to be involved and embedded himself in the scene by capturing it. “That's the thing about grime,” he says. “We're all one big, dysfunctional family. We've all grown up together, 15-year friendships. It's a mad thing. And it makes you feel proud that you've had an influence in that.”

Risky Roadz: Documenting the scene's rise and reign by Roony 'Risky Roadz' Keefe is published by Pavilion Books.

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