A biography for Stormzyhasn’t been written yet.
“My approach is just fearless. I'm not afraid to try anything.”
“Grime is still quite new. You can't expect national radio and national media to get it straight away.”
“I was MCing in the playground, spitting lyrics over mobile phones - Sony Ericsson, Walkmans, W810s, the Teardrop Nokia phones, all of that. Vital equipment! I never even had a DJ set where a DJ's playing vinyl, and I'm spitting.”
“My older sister was into grime, so she got me into it. When I was ten, I begged her to take me to my first house party, where there were decks and a mic. I ended up falling asleep standing up in the corner.”
“On the microphone, I'm not scared to step up and say, 'This is my ability, this is how good I am.' In other areas of life, I'm not so confident; I'm still adjusting to the photo shoots, all that stuff. But behind the mic, I'm fully confident.”
“People always meet me and go, 'You're so much cooler than I thought you'd be,' and I'm like, 'What did you expect me to be like?'”
“When I'm good at something, I always try to be the best at it and claim that throne. Even in school, I never let anyone say anything to me; I would always be the smartest.”
“I read so many books when I was a kid that I didn't even know were shaping me up.”
“I'm not mad into raving, to be honest. If it's not music, I'm chilling. But most of the time, it's music.”
“I would love to say I grew up on 2Pac and The Beatles, but I didn't.”
“My mum was born and raised in Ghana and has a lot of Ghanaian values and traditions and morals. All that rubbed off on me, and that's why I have a lot of love and good energy in me - that universal energy is a Ghanaian thing.”
“What I'm doing is British. It stems from the same culture as U.S. hip-hop, but the way we dress, the way we speak, the way we perform is so different. It's U.K. street culture.”
“People often link grime with other things, like street culture, and clashing, and MC battles and whatnot. But no one's ever talked in misogyny in grime. That's often linked to hip-hop, I know people talk about that is a problem in hip-hop. But not grime.”
“Bands like Little Mix do represent youth culture because loads of 16 year old girls listen to them.”
“My mum's always had big aspirations because I'm an academic. I always got good grades at school. GCSEs were just a breeze for me.”
“I'm a completely fearless musician.”
“You read a book, write a detailed review as proof you've read it, and they give you a badge. That's where my competitive nature came out. Give me the badges! I would sit in the library all day, not 'cos I loved reading, just because I needed those badges.”
“I'm on the rise and whatnot, but I'm not the man to say, 'All right, world, here's grime.' It's gonna take me, Skepta, JME, Novelist and Lethal Bizzle, to say, 'I'm sick, he's sick, he's sick, he's sick'. Not one man can do it.”
“Wiley has given me wise words a few times.”
“In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn't sit too well with them!”