10. Dave
I think we’ve got to recognise that grime is the most important contemporary music in this country. There’s a similarity to punk, ‘cos punk was a lot about what was happening at the time; a social comment, about riots, and other things that were happening in the UK. I think that the people that are doing that now are the grime artists. That’s why we should have a great respect for them. We don’t know where it’s going – that’s what’s interesting about it, it’s evolving.
Dave is supremely talented, and I’m very interested to see where his music will go. He won the Mercury Music Prize in 2019, so that was great, to see a grime artist getting the recognition they deserve. The only thing that worries me is that I feel that the music business – I hate that word "industry", it makes it sound like it’s a factory, churning out the same thing – I don’t think it’s attracting enough of the financial backing that it once did. In order to help artists really get off the ground, they need investment.
It strikes me that new artists, whether grime, drill, whatever it is they’re playing – they’re not getting that push, and that investment, that you’ve got to have that behind you if it’s really going to happen for you. All the managers who helped, if you like, the rock and pop people of the past, now realise there is not the money that there needs to be in music. I think a lot of them have gone off towards tech companies. That’s what we’re missing. It isn’t the musical talent – the talent is there, it always is – but the necessary management behind them. Those guys, the guys with good business brains, are good at raising money and helping artists build their careers. They’ve realised that this is an uphill struggle nowadays, and we’ve got a lot of very anodyne pop music which is not really changing the world.
