As a kid growing up in East London, Kojey Radical would wake up every Saturday to the bustling sound of the market setting up on the street where he lived. The scraping of poles on the ground, the slamming of van doors, the screaming of offers, and the gently growing cacophony that is people of all sorts of languages striking up all sorts of conversations. It was a typical London market in the late 90s/early 2000s; the type where you could find Playstation games, fish, and washing up liquid in the same ten yard stretch. “I’ve lived in this house my whole life, and now it’s hard to compare London to anywhere else,” he tells me. “It just gives you this certain edge, do you know what I mean?”

It’s hard to put that London edge into words; it’s more of a vibe, an aura, a rough around the edges goodness than a concept that can be explained. But you can feel it reverberating through Kojey’s music. On his 2016 EP, 23Winters, he has a searing and ruthless honesty about his bars, but then he puts them over beats that aren’t afraid to have fun and groove in their own industrial way. Now, having just released his politically charged new EP, In Gods Body (featuring Ghetts, Obangjayar and more), in September, his tracks feel more urgent and important than ever. It’s a refreshing distortion of UK hip-hop that pierces through at a time when London is dominated by grime and grime only. 

“I think hip-hop is one of the only musical genres that allows you to never reach a boundary,” he tells me over the phone. “The whole point of hip-hop is to challenge it to grow and get better, and become something new. If you don’t, it becomes static. The reason why hip-hop is still as important now as it was back in the 80s is because it is constantly being challenged. It’s constantly being asked to develop.”

 This mental thrust to always push forward comes from his creative origins: the worlds of art and poetry. A shy kid at school, he saw the poetry he would write as more of a laugh than a serious thing. Then one day, local poet Suli Breaks came to his college and performed for the kids. “Everyone was going crazy for it and I remember turning to my boy and going, ‘I could do that’.” The next day, Kojey came to the canteen area with some poems and started performing them. “People were loving it.”

He then studied fine art and illustration at university, and it taught him how to articulate his imagination and turn thoughts into substance. “Art influenced so many parts of my creative process” he explains. “I think there’s a barrier a lot of people have between themselves and their imagination; like a dialogue that they don’t really engage in.” During his final year at university, his motivation to draw began to wane so he tried to bring his project – a book packed with short stories and diverse characters – to life as music instead. “I remember linking up with an artist called Jay Prince, going to the studio and showing him this book that I had made,” explains Kojey, “and him just looking at them and being like... ‘Yeah, I get it.’”

““I think hip-hop is one of the only musical genres that allows you to never reach a boundary. The whole point of hip-hop is to challenge it to grow and get better, and become something new. If you don’t, it becomes static. The reason why hip-hop is still as important now as it was back in the 80s is because it is constantly being challenged. It’s constantly being asked to develop.”