AJ Tracey

“You can't dwell on disappointment. You've got to take the positives and keep looking ahead.”

“At the end of the day, the only way that I was able to thrive was by people giving me a chance, not being close-minded.”

“But everyone asks me who my dad is and I will never reveal it. It's too much ammunition for the internet.”

“I play 'Fortnite', I play 'FIFA', I'm trying to get into 'NBA' a little bit.”

“I'm doing super quality control. I'll have five tunes that I think are all good - before I would've put out all five tunes but now I'm just putting out that one out of the five that I think is the banger.”

“When I put my first project out ages ago, I didn't want to show anyone my emotions. Now I think it's better for people to understand how I am as a person and let them relate.”

“Honestly, I always think it's cool when artists name their first album after themselves. It's confident it just means like this is me, this is my project, here you go.”

“Everyone asks me about why I care about anime and football so much, but that's because anything dark that happened in my life, those two things would make me feel better. I just used to sit in front of the TV and watch football and breathe a sigh of relief. You know what I mean? It's another world. An escape.”

“Some things you never really fully understand unless you are actually black and you experience how it feels when someone treats you differently based on your skin colour.”

“I want to showcase my talent, I'm not just a grime MC, I'm an artist.”

“Once upon a time Americans didn't want to listen to Canadian rap and now Drake's the biggest rapper in the world.”

“As a kid, I loved Air Force Ones - but they were so expensive. I always had to save up for ages to get them. Now I can call the Nike guy and be like 'can you send me ten pairs?' and they'll be here the same day.”

“When it comes to politics, unless it's an issue that's really close to home and you feel strongly about, I just don't think you should really talk about it.”

“I have a personal relationship with Dizzee Rascal - I know him, he's cool - so this is no disrespect to him or any other British rappers who tried to make it in America, like Wiley and Tinie Tempah, but the type of music they were making to be accepted over there - it doesn't translate.”

“I'm half-white and half-black. No-one will ever say I'm white, but all the road men think because I'm mixed race that I can't be bad because I'm light skin. It's crazy.”

“People need to realize that because black people have been established in the U.S. for a lot longer than in the U.K., the culture's a lot more embedded. We will get there with how comfortable they are with rap in the mainstream, but we're way behind them.”

“People ask me, how was university; I say it was boring and it wasn't for me. But if you wanna go, that's cool. I'm not out to lead people astray, but everyone has their vices.”

“I know as quickly as people come up you can go down and I'm just trying to enjoy it and experience things that I never got to have, that's all it is.”

“I used to send out emails to producers to collaborate and they'd give me nothing, not even a response. As soon as I started popping off, out they came!”

“Even if it's a song I know isn't gonna do that well, I'm dropping it as a piece of art, so I always want sick visuals to go with it.”