LOGAN SAMA

interview: Dan & Alex
photos: Alex

After linking in the surreal Eurodisco setting of McDonalds on Oxford Street we're whisked into EMAP's nearby London headquarters, the home of Kiss FM and also the home of Logan Sama, grime's kingpin DJ, whose Monday night shows have become a cornerstone of the scene. Irrespective of what you think of The War Report specifically - the weekly run-down of who's sending for who in the scene - there's no denying the significance of the word 'report' in the context of Logan's show. Miss it, and you know you're late on something. If the RWD Forum and Rinse FM are grime's rolling news service, its BBC News 24, then Logan's show is the News at Ten - everything you need to know, and every tune you need to hear, condensed into one programme.

We sit down for the interview in what seems to be the waiting/chill-out area of easy-listening station Magic FM (also owned by EMAP), surrounded by Wi-Fi hotspot, X-Box 360 consoles and vending machines - a typical modern media 'fun zone' that could not be further away from grime's - and Logan's - roots on pirate radio.

In spite of fickle Reynoldsian defeatists, in this interview we present the ultimate realist's guide to grime's present and future.

How did you start at Kiss? Did they approach you?

A guy called Chris Blackley, my first producer, wanted to hear a copy of the CD I did in September 2004, so I sent him one over... I didn't record any demos, they got me in to record a cover show in January for a guy that did like weird, techy house music. And my listening back figures were like 150% of what his were.

I made sure people knew about it, because it was a good look for the scene. Whenever anyone gives the music a chance, it's very important that we perform, and don't underachieve. And the shows went well, and they gave me a show - I think it was April or May, 2005. And since then, they've seen the response, and the specialised, dedicated fan base there is - it's not just casual listeners, it's people who actually listen to grime. So they bumped it forward to 11 on a Monday night, and it's still going really well.

So they've been supportive then? Or is it simply that they can't argue with the figures?

The thing that always amazes me is that it was Kiss that approached me. Choice FM don't have a grime show, 1Xtra don't have a dedicated grime show, and here's Kiss - which is meant to be the most mainstream, commercial station there is in the capital, and they're the first station with a dedicated grime show. They've never tried to tell me how to do my show, or fuck with the format or anything. Its amazing.

Have they ever found anything you've played a bit contentious?

They've never had problems with anything I've played, they've never told me not to play a song again, they've never told me anything except when I've had a guest in live and they've used bad language, and they've asked me to tone it down - they've been perfect, I can't speak of them highly enough for that. My show on Rinse was a vocal-based show, and that's still what it is now, informing the listener.

Do you ever see a grime show in a prime-time slot, like Westwood's?

Maybe, in like five to ten years, but not anytime soon. I wouldn't want to do my show any earlier than when I do it now, to tell you the truth. It's nice to be off the radar, 11-1am is quite late, so people who hear the show are into that kind of music, it's not casual, people flicking through the dial who might be potentially offended by what I'm playing. I'm sure 9-11 on Saturday on Radio 1 would be good, but right now the music doesn't deserve it. Not yet anyway.

What needs to happen for grime to see mainstream success?

It just needs to be more consistent. Next year's going to be better - you're going to see albums from Dizzee, Wiley, Lethal, Roll Deep. If they go well, then there'll be more media interest, more interest in general. Just being in the public eye will help.

Someone said to me that Wiley had a strategic plan that involved doing Roll Deep stuff one year and Boy Better Know the next, and alternating.

Well, Wiley plans don't span further than about 30 days. [laughs] Unless he's some super, super evil genius and he's tricking the whole world, including himself.

2006 has felt like a slow year

Of course, but 2006 has seen the emergence of a lot of great talent. Look at all the people who've come through: you've got Skepta, Bashy, Doctor... a lot of people who are capable of making music people are going to care about in the mainstream. It's good man.

It does feel like there's a next generation who are coming through.

Yeah, and hopefully they can follow through. I don't want 2007 to be a year where people are like "well, I had a go in 2005, now let's try again in 2007" - I want to see new names coming through. I want to see Skepta and JME get a chance, I want to see The Movement get a chance, I want to see Jammer get a chance. A chance to make music for people outside the little box we're in.
I'm not saying I want to see people trying to make music to get in the Top Ten, in the charts, because that's just a fluke. Expectations are very high. I think we should be realistic, and just try and get albums out, on a budget, to make a profit, and then move on to the next album, building and building. You can't expect a scene that's got hardly any infrastructure to be massive, overnight. The scene, realistically, from when it fully broke off from garage, it's about five years old. I don't think expecting it to be a massive, global dominating force in five years is realistic.

Would you have expected some of this year's releases to do better? Like you said you'd want Jammer to get a chance but he put out the Neckle Camp album this year.

[Straight Necklin'] was done in exactly the same way as everything else though. People have different names for their stuff, but that whole thing of 'I'm working on a mixtape', 'I'm working on an album' - if they come out through the same channels then they're the same thing: people are just putting out underground CDs. I think it's a shame that so much music will be wasted from 2006, because there's some fantastic music that's been made, that will unfortunately go to waste because they'll never be heard by a wider audience, except by people going back and searching back in time. I think some of the music made in 2006 will go down as real collector's items, because there just so limited and so rare.

But I think naturally it will evolve - look at the Boy Better Know series: JME started off doing just one CD because he had a bunch of tracks lying around, and now it's like a big thing where he's sold 3,000 units on the first day of release, it was in HMV straight away, they're putting big orders in for it.


And that's how the infrastructure and the music will start to develop?

It's like an amorphous, constantly changing thing that naturally evolves - it's like a protoplasmic creature that changes shape - it's not something that anyone really has a grand design for. It's like someone does something over here, and there'll be a big flash, so everyone will just look over here and just follow. And you end up just following all the flashes that work, rather than all the flashes that fail, and it ends up being like natural selection.

People know that the mix CD game is doing really well, and there wasn't really one a year ago. Roll Deep are selling t-shirts now, Jammer's t-shirts are selling really well. People are starting up labels. I've just started up my label [Adamantium] now and I'm looking to sell vinyl at an affordable price. Rather than looking at vinyl as a medium to sell music I'm looking at vinyl as something which has a functional value. I think people buy vinyl to DJ with rather than to listen to music. If you want to listen to music now you can get it for free through Limewire or Soulseek, so if you want to sell vinyl you have to do it at an affordable price to accommodate the functional value of it.

It's good to hear that because with the shift towards mix CDs this year, there's hardly any vinyl coming out, which makes it hard for DJs

Well vinyl still sells. The thing with vinyl is it's cyclical - if you don't put vinyl in the shops no-one's going to go back to the shops to buy any more. The way it used to be with garage back in the day is you used to be able to go to a record shop and they'd give you a stack of new releases every time you went in.

It was like that with grime as recently as last year
Well it's gradually slowed down. Now there's like four labels that put out vinyl - you've got Southside, Dumpvalve, my label, and I can't even think of who else off the top of my head - and a lot of stuff on whites. There's nothing to follow: I've got so many records in my house [from back in the day] that are shit - from Public Demand and Locked On, which I just used to buy because they were on Public Demand and Locked On. I used to follow the brand because they had power and a strong history. Now obviously I'm not looking to put out a bunch of shit records on my label, but it's good to have that kind of brand recognition, labels that are continually going to put out stuff. I've just put out some new TPs and I'm going to put some more out in December. Literally yesterday I was in Uptown and someone came in and said 'have you got anything new?' and the response was 'have you got this, this and this?', and I thought those records were reasonably new, and the guy said 'nah I've got all them'. And I thought that was good to see, that someone was coming back to the shops like that.

Are you worried that because there's not enough new vinyl coming out, that there's not enough new grime DJs coming through?

Well first off it's always been easier to be an MC than a DJ anyway, because to be a DJ, you need to spend £700 on a pair of Technics, £150 on a mixer, you have to spend at least £50 on a pair of headphones, before you even have anything to play. And a lot of these kids are poor - or they'd rather spend the money on weed and Nike. Most pirate stations have CD decks now as well. But there is no slow down in the production of music, it's still as prolific as it always has been. Now I'm obviously in a position to get new tunes off of everyone, I'll play five or six new tunes a week.

There's loads of new beats all the time, there's so many producers about that are making good stuff. It's just not coming out, and obviously that's a problem. And I don't think it's killing off people wanting to be DJs, because regardless of whether there's loads of records coming out, where are you going to play those records? There are hardly any pirate stations left, there are no raves. The only reason I mix records together is because I came home from watching DJ EZ mixing records together and wanted to pretend to do that. That is why I DJ. There are kids who have that with Slimzee, and Mac10. But nowadays with me and Maximum, Spyro, Vectra, Bossman and Cameo, it's hard to even hear us play. In terms of platforms for being able to hear DJs, it's not as widespread as it was. There are literally just a few pirate stations.

And Rinse is 50% dubstep,

Yeah well it wasn't even listening to EZ on the radio that made me think 'I need to do that'. It was being in a rave, with 2,000 people round me, and him dropping a tune - and he could have just gone like that [mimes crossfader] and that was his whole mix. But the 2,000 people around would just go 'rah!' and it's an experience, it's an emotional experience that you want to hold onto and try and recreate. Sitting in your house smoking weed, listening to Rinse, or even listening to it on the stream and chatting to your friends on MSN, that's not going to make anyone want to mix. It's not going to bring any new DJs in. There's got to be more outlets for people to play out, because the live experience is something you can't download, you can't bootleg, and you can't replicate.

It's why I love playing Sidewinder, or anywhere, I don't care. I'll play Dirty Canvas for £40, just because it's nice being in a room playing to people who like what you're there to play.

With the change to CDs as well, Buying a CD from a shop, and burning a CD in your computer has no difference in functional value. So the only people who are going to buy CDs are people who are basically making a donation to you on behalf of you making music. People who go out and buy Boy Better Know CDs, when they know full well they can download it on the internet, are donating because they think JME is a great artist, and they want to have the CD in their house to look at, to put on their shelf, to appreciate the amusing sleeve comments he puts in there...

CD sales are going down anyway, the charts are changing, it's going to be ringtone downloads and video downloads as well.

Surely all these free giveaways can't help, like for example Tunnel Vision 1 & 2 going online for free before release?

Do you know what the two best-selling Tunnel Visions were?

The first two?

That's right, and it's because it spreads awareness. Giving out freebies is good if firstly you're not giving away full quality, and secondly it's actually a good product. In the 70s, 80s and early 90s you had radio play, and people were taping off radio. Playing music on the radio is giving it away for free anyway - you are listening to the music for free. Now if people are just going to download it and listen to it for free, then fair enough. But if it's good, it'll sell.

The Tunnel Vision situation was they were leaking anyway, and doing it officially just drives them towards where you want them to go. I don't want to drive everyone off to Limewire and Soulseek, I want to drive them onto Wiley's MySpace, I want to drive them onto my MySpace. I don't want people to think 'ha, I'm stealing it' - have it, and if you like it then feel free to go and buy a copy.

Why aren't there any grime raves in London?

Becuase there are not enough promoters who know how to put on grime raves.
There's a reason Straight Outta Bethnal isn't back now - they could have found a different venue. The headache Chantelle Fiddy got from putting that event on... she put so much time and effort into that event, and it was completely thankless - she got no money, she made no profit. She got moaned at by artists that weren't booked, and by artists that were booked, and by people that wanted to come in, and by people that didn't want to turn up. If someone had come along with a new venue she probably wouldn't want to have to deal with that headache. I respect the fact that she even put the time in in the first place.


So it's going to be a big headache for anyone else who attempts it as well?

It is! And you know, that's why there's no grime raves. Because people can book Mr Resident DJ, offer 2-for-1 on WKD and Smirnoff Ice, play r'n'b and pop hits all night long, and make a shitload of money with no problems except a few drunk people fighting each other. And that's why they put those events on. You get dancehall nights because that's an established genre, and I think we're going to have to go down that route. Having more people come up, and having more people making money through record labels, and more people getting media interest, therefore bringing in more people from a demographic which has more expendable income, which means that slowly grime will be worth more, which means there'll be more interest in booking people.
At the moment, people don't want to put effort into grime, because it's hard and thankless work. You're dealing with a lot of unappreciative people, a lot of disorganised people, who aren't making the job easy for themselves. There's a lot of ignorance, there's a lot of intolerance against the music... I personally have not seen, in the past three years, a serious violent incident in a grime rave. I've seen them at house raves, I've seen them at hip§hop raves, I haven't at a grime rave. Honestly, I swear down, I have not seen that.
The way I put myself across, the way I turn up and present myself, the way I run my label - I try and make it so it counteracts that ignorance. Even so much as doing stupid things like going to a rave in a suit. I like challenging peoples' perceptions. If they see someone who's reasonably well-spoken, upper working class guy who turns up reasonably well dressed to a rave, then, well, cool. They can't say everyone turns up in a hoodie.

Does there need to be a more organized, professional attitude in the scene on the whole?

You know what, artists are never going to change, they're like that everywhere. You get mad, disorganised artists in every form of music.

So is the solution better management?

It's better management. Better organisation. Artists shouldn't be doing their own organisation, but right now they have to.

Who do you think is really pushing the scene forward right now?

Everyone I play on my show. My show is a platform for pushing people past the underground into the mainstream. I'm not here to break the biggest MCs on road each week. And then there's people like Kano who need their tunes played on the show. I think we need to support our own and play the people that are legitimately big. You go to a rave and the people who get the biggest reaction are Boy Better Know, Roll Deep, Kano, Dizzee Rascal, The Movement, Doctor, Bearman, Jammer - massive reactions.

You have to bring through new people, but you have to support the people that are already there as well. There's no point bringing through new people if there's this glass ceiling that no-one's getting past. I want to see people getting signed - that's what my show's for. Even back on Rinse I was the first person to support Skepta, the first person to play 'Serious' regularly on my show, I was the first person to support Doctor properly, Bearman as well, Jammer – 'Merkle Man' - I was the one who broke that tune... Playing stuff that gets big is me doing my job properly.

You promote war bars on your show and with the War Report CD as a way to generate hype and excitement, but does there need to be more varied and in-depth content from MCs?

I don't care if someone wants to do a song about shanking your mum, I just care if it's a good tune. Look at hiphop - in-depth content in hiphop doesn't sell.
Dizzman was on my show, and I said 'you can do a tune about guns and drugs, but do it in an interesting way'. Take a new spin on it - don't just talk about what guns you've got, and what drugs you've sold, because those bars have been written. Take a tune like In Love With The Game by Scorcher - it's an interesting take on it. You can write about anything you like. You can write a tune which says 'It's the merkle man, come to your ends and circle man' and people will like it! That's not in-depth content, but that's still one of the biggest records in my box now. You know what the biggest record in my box is right now? Fucking W-A-R. Or Pow! Nonsensical lyrics, about nothing. But they're fucking good records. That's why I love grime, there's room for people to do all sorts. You can do fun and catchy gimmick records like Bearman, party records like Jammer, a mixture of the two like Wiley and Skepta, you can do the overly lyrical, technical stuff like Ghetto, Wretch and Scorcher are doing. The wider it is, the more there is to pick from.

What do you think about dubstep's explosion in the last year, and whether there might be lessons there for the grime scene?

Dubstep has got business people at the top that are more organised - Sarah is very organised, Geeneus is quite organised - when he answers his phone. And you don't have the language barrier. Dubstep's exploding widely - firstly abroad, and secondly outside of a certain cultural demographic. Anyone can feel bass. If someone's spitting bars about their everyday life, you have a cultural barrier there - unless you want to sit down and properly analyse it, it's and effort. People go 'dubstep is well-made grime'. [Collective rolling of eyes.] Some dubstep records are engineered awfully. Some of them are made on Fruityloops still. I don't give a shit if a record is mastered well or not, all I care about is the reaction it gets when I play it in a club. How technically well-made art is doesn't matter, it's art. Why would you want to analyse it on its technical merits, it's not an exam.
My fucking white label of Pulse X still has the hiss from the AV-out cables from the Playstation they took it off to record it onto CD. You can hear it! The 'bawm's are all distorted. That record sold over 10,000 copies, it was fucking massive. Half of So Solid's first album was produced on Music 2000, they then took it into the studio on a memory card to re-engineer it. That album sold over 1,000,000 copies. Personally I like jump-up stuff, and if I get that out of a technically well-made record then cool, if I get that out of a record that's been made on Fruityloops and not mixed-down properly so be it.

Do you still listen to Rinse a lot? What do you think about the changes there?

I don't listen to Rinse a lot. In fact I don't really listen to grime music a lot.

That's going to surprise a few people. What do you listen to?
I like swing from the 60s - a bit of Dean Martin. I'm a big Nirvana fan. I like mid-90s weird electro breakbeat stuff, like early Chemical Brothers, and the Crystal Method. The Prodigy before they turned shit. I like lots of different stuff... I like 80s synth-pop ballads. I'll listen to anything... other than grime, because it fucking does my head in every day. If you worked in McDonalds would you want to go home and cook burgers? I like listening back to myself mix though. I like picking the holes and learning where I need to improve.

Tell us about Adamantium.

Adamantium exists as a company to allow some of the fantastic music that's made in this grime scene to be available to listen to. Because when I started doing my show I would say about 80% of the tracks were unsigned, and 50% of them never ever came out. And that's terrible: why am I playing this music on such a big platform if you can't buy it? It's a waste of time, it's ridiculous. Thankfully there's other labels set up now as well. But yeah why I started it... I'd put out music on vinyl that's available on CD already, just because I know people need vinyl. Take 'Good Old Days'. I was like 'shit, it's not on vinyl, it's a massive track, people like it, they want it, so press it up on record.' Vocal and instrumental, another vocal and instrumental on the other side, knock it out at £2.50 unit price to the shops, £5 on the rack, goes on to sell 500 copies - so, y'know I can't complain.
I'm very focused on trying to learn as much as I can from the music industry, so each project I do I treat as a learning experience. So the Scorcher CD, I learned from that about sales sheets, HMV, effective marketing, timeframes, plugging. It was my first CD, and we were all in the dark really, we had no guidance.
I'm trying to get records out every month now. Obviously also I did The War Report, which is still waiting to surface on CD, cause it's pretty difficult to get out CDs for free. That's going to be a double CD now because I've got another batch of dubs, probably half of them are from Wiley as well.

So The Business is going to be coming out, it's going to be two discs: one disc is going to be me doing my Funkmaster Flex, 'here's loads of new tunes and I'm going to shout over all of them' thing. The second disc is going to be a juggling CD, 'here's what I play out in a club', just quickly in the mix. I'm going to try and get them out as soon as possible. They're all going to be movie-themed.

Really?

Yeah they're all going to be British movies - I love British movies.

You said on your show you're hoping to get it out by the end of the year?
Yeah I'm hoping. Again, I want to put it out for free, I want to do 3,000 copies. It's going to cost two grand, which means I need to get two grand off companies - which isn't a lot of money, to be honest. Unfortunately, because it's not a lot of money, people are like 'well, maybe we shouldn't bother with it then. If it's only a small thing, maybe it's not worth our attention'. It's difficult, because again not a lot of people are looking to invest a lot of money or a lot of time into grime.

Unfortunately I can't go to companies and say 'it got a 35-page topic on the RWD Forum', even though that's an absolutely enormous amount of interest in something.

It means nothing to people who don't already know about it

Yeah, and it's the same thing with grime in general. People don't know about it. All they understand is daytime radio and normal media coverage. They don't understand that there's this whole generation of people who live outside of pop music and daytime mainstream media. I think there's a big gap there. There's a lot of ignorance towards quote unquote 'urban music' - I don't like to call it 'black music' because we don't have that sort of segregation over here: this music isn't black music, it's UK street music.

You mentioned getting signed - do you think there's only a certain amount of success that can be achieved through independent channels?
I think right now there's no infrastructure to support independent channels - there are no big independent labels, they don't exist.

So you wouldn't encourage people to take the JME route?

Well Boy Better Know recordings is literally JME, in his house, on his computer. That's not like a Tommy Boy or a Def Jam. That's JME doing his own artwork, his own production, he goes and gets his own studio time, he will take it down to Jetstar, he will go and collect it, he will take it round the shops - you may as well just call it JME. It's not a traditional record label, he's just doing it for himself. And that's a problem, because I don't think artists should be doing it for themselves, they should be producing art.
That was the problem with Wiley, no-one knew how to deal with him, because we've had a whole generation of record labels now who have not really cultivated artists. I think in general over here A&Rs don't really know how to build up artists. They can sign massive indie bands who have a huge nationwide following already - 'let's snap them up' - wicked. But they don't like to cultivate new talent. And again I don't really blame them, because it requires a huge amount of effort and a huge amount of time, and there's not a guaranteed return. 'Oh, Roll Deep only sold 70,000 records, let's leave that and sign Arctic Monkeys, they sold 600,000 in their first week'. That's the mentality.

They did something right with Dizzee,

Yeah, they did good with Dizzee. Dizzee was the golden child, I think. I don't think it would have happened again with another artist after Dizzee, because they used a lot of marketing that was based around 'new and exciting!', and you cannot repeat that. After you've heard the story of Dizzee getting kicked out of all his classes and only going to music, you don't want to hear someone else's story about getting kicked out of school. Dizzee's a fantastic artist, Boy In Da Corner's a fucking amazing piece of art. The strategy used on him wrote itself. And it can't be replicated unfortunately, as shown with Kano - they had to use a different format. Kano's naturally charismatic and a fantastic lyricist as well, but he didn't catch fire as much as Dizzee did, he didn't sell as much as Dizzee did, because it wasn't the new, exciting thing anymore. They didn't really market the whole scene - it was just 'here's Dizzee, he's new and exciting, come on hipsters, come and buy him'.

Which worked

It worked for the first album, started tailing off for the second album - it didn't sell as much, there wasn't as much interest. Stand Up Tall, however - it came on the back of Boy In Da Corner, and got into the Top Twenty, and that was literally a PlayStation tune. It was real, proper grime. I was so happy that record did well. But off the back of that nothing happened! And that irritates me. And then 'Pow' came through, a real, genuine grime record - off the back of that: nothing. So that's why I sometimes think they were flashes in the pan, I sometimes think they were just flukes. I don't try and look at that too much, because it skews the graph. I have to look at the proper normal distribution, use the bell curve.

So ultimately, you see a long game?

Yeah. Five to ten years. I don't think the next generation of artists need to look at getting signed and doing 200,000 units. want to see them doing 50-100,000, successfully, and not having to spend a lot of money to do it. I want to see people building on that, I want to see people making a profit off their CDs, labels turning a profit as well, money re-invested into the scene for events, tours, merchandising, compilations: so there's loads of extra revenue streams for the artists, so they can actually make a living out of it. That's what I want to see happening, I don't want to see the music on Top of the Pops and everyone in the Top Ten, and turning to Bizarre in The Sun and reading about Scorcher or JME and which bird they lashed that week [laughs]. I want to see the scene building slowly and sensibly and realistically. That's what I'm looking for.