Born and raised surrounded by gangs and drug dealers in South London, it’s been a hard-fought battle for Kid Bookie to break free from the underbelly and make it on his own terms. Ahead of his new album Songs For The Living // Songs For The Dead, we go back to his old haunts to learn just what it took to survive and how these experiences inform his music today…
Kid Bookie was once paid a thousand pounds to look after a dog. The offer came from a guy in a flat somewhere over there, he says, waving a lazy arm in the direction of a concrete conurbation in Abbey Wood, in furthest South East London. As it so happened the guy in question is a relative, a local drug dealer of whom he speaks in disparaging terms, while the flat was a ‘trap house’ at which powders and pills were stored and sold. At the time, Kid Bookie was on the bones of his backside. In keen need of funds he said, ‘Sure, why not, I’ll look after the mutt for a bit.’
“When I got her, it was bad,” he says. “Her hair was all matted and she stank like she’d never been washed even once.” The dog, a doleful-eyed cocker spaniel named Eden, showed signs of having been mistreated. “She was nervous as hell,” he remembers, “like, she flinched every time anyone even came near her.” In a matter of moments, it was decided, unilaterally, that taking care of the stricken animal would be anything but a temporary arrangement; in fact, the young man born Tyronne Buddy-Lee Ike Hill was now Eden’s new owner. Pick the bones out of that. “I just knew, straight away, that there was no way she was ever going back that flat,” he says.
This story says rather a lot about Kid Bookie. Despite a life that was once almost overwhelmed by the darkness at this edge of town, his heart never really belonged to the thug life. As if to prove the point, KB pulls his phone out of the pocket of his tight white trousers – as always, the battery is low; inside of 10 minutes he’ll be asking if anyone has a charger he can borrow – to reveal a photograph of a dopey and happy looking Eden. “I love her,” he says, “I just adore her so much.” In other words, if the will is strong enough, love and kindness can prosper, and endure.
As Kid Bookie’s new album, Songs For The Living // Songs For The Dead, hovers into view, on an early Friday afternoon on the exit ramp of summer, Kerrang! is given a tour of ends past and present. Even allowing for a forgiving glaze of sunshine, this corner of Abbey Wood, where he currently lives in a rented house, is displeasing on the eye. Amid the shadows cast by any number of brutalist multi-storey tower blocks forged in grey concrete, the quietude of its streets and walkways suggest that some kind of human-slaying apocalypse has occurred during the seven-minute cab ride from the Elizabeth Line. A smattering of cars passing by on the road below the flats are the only real signs of life.
“What relationship do the kids round here have to what’s going on in Central London?” Kid Bookie says, repeating the question he’s just been asked. “It’s a different planet.”
His childhood and teenage years, meanwhile, were spent in Woolwich, a locale which today is being tarted up – you might say gentrified – at a rapid pace. But for all the signs of encroaching gentility, while taking the air along streets busy with new-build apartments with fawn-brick facades, remnants of the past remain on the scene.
“That guy’s a drug dealer,” Kid Bookie says after crossing paths with a pleasant man whose face is face with both tattoos and an evident delight at having seen the local music-maker for the first time in an age. A step or two north, KB re-introduces himself to a haggard-looking middle-age gentleman resting his bones on steel railings above a tributary leading to the Thames. “Yeah, I used to see you around here all the time,” he says, to no avail. Nothing doing in those memory banks. It’s not clear that the man, a heroin addict, remembers what he had for breakfast.
Time was, he “used to feel very uncomfortable” around these parts.
“I didn’t like walking around a lot,” he says. “I didn’t like being seen because every time I was seen, there was an issue. Back then I was very loud” – he still is loud, by the way – “and I was very antagonistic. I was very, I don’t know, explorative. And that didn’t come just from being outside, that came from me testing boundaries as a human being. I’d provoke responses from people, just because it’s my nature to get reactions.”
A polite young child selling homemade plastic ‘crystals’ emerges from a block of flats. “They’re a pound,” she says. “You get four.” Our interviewee smiles with a kind of paternalistic approval. “Girl’s gotta hustle,” he says.
Aged 15, Kid Bookie left the family house he shared with his parents and his sister (Lovelle, a contestant on the second series of The Voice) in order to set up home with an unstable young woman he wrongly believed was carrying his child. His then-partner would threaten suicide when displeased; sometimes she would seek to harm herself in an alarming manner. Careering through life like a pinball, he joined a gang, the Cherry Orchards from nearby Charlton, whose membership included people who are now dead or in the Big House on murder raps. He was keeping company with serious dudes who engaged in fierce disputes with other hardcore individuals from whom they were differentiated only by the postcodes of the streets on which they lived.
“There was a gang from around Kidbrooke and Eltham who were rivals of people in my area,” Kid Bookie recalls. “Things were bubbling up for a little bit and I was riding about with older guys who were about 26 when I saw two people I had a problem with. My jump-start mentality was that I was going to get out of the car and run towards them. I picked up a pole and started shouting, ‘Oi!’ And as I started running towards them, they just pulled out knives.”
He found himself cornered. As his assailants began slashing away with Sheffield steel, KB’s fellow gang members ran away. With murder in the air – “they wanted to kill me,” he says, “there was no doubt about that” – the time had come for fight or flight. Six-foot-plus and built like a light-heavyweight, the sheer force with which the imperilled young man broke free caused his attackers to flee the scene. Collapsing on the ground, he was stitched up at a local hospital. Fourteen years later, in Woolwich, he shows Kerrang! the scars inflicted on that dangerous day.
“I’ve had a lot of trauma in my life that I haven’t really processed,” he says. “But at the same time, I also think that I don’t care.”
As well as much else, Songs For The Living // Songs For The Dead provides a sterling rebuke to the increasingly popular claim that multiculturalism has failed. A smorgasbord of styles and techniques, its svelte form dances gracefully across 10 songs that unite the otherwise disparate forces of metal crunch, acoustic tenderness, pop choruses, hip-hop bars, and more. Kid Bookie may bear the literal scars from his past life, but he also carries with him the varied sounds of a vast city. As one might expect of a music-maker whose past collaborators range from Slipknot’s Corey Taylor and Billy Martin from Good Charlotte to rap artists such as Tech N9ne and Twiztid, this melting pot melee is brought together with colourful cohesion.
“Rock and rap [mixed] together can be extremely corny,” he says of the pitfalls of his trade. “There’s a lot of people who come in the game because they’re looking for an outlet, and they’re like, ‘I’m just going to rap on rock.’ But they can’t make it work. It’s not an easy thing to do.”
At first, though, he faced confusion. As the mixed-race child of a Nigerian mother and a father from Bermondsey, Kid Bookie’s early day love of loud rock music failed to gain widespread approval from fellow pupils at a local school, who thought it peculiar that a student would pitch up to class with a guitar and a skateboard. “You get beat up for doing rock music round here,” he says, “especially in them days… Standing out got me beat up way too many times.” Along with the bruises came the deeper feeling of not being cool at a time in his life when “being cool was the pinnacle of acceptance”. Seeking to assimilate, he rethought his public identity. Those irregular edges that set him apart from the crowd, well, they just had to go.
“I became addicted to toxic relationships,” he says, “so the people I was hanging around with typified the kinds of relationships I was getting into at that time. It was a far cry from who I really was, but it was consistent with the environment I was in… I didn’t want to be bullied. So I cut off every part of myself that was really me. But I tried to keep certain elements of myself, such as charm and humour and the zaniness of my thoughts. But I was neck deep in the shit of my environment… so all of a sudden, I’m learning how to spit bars. I didn’t like grime and there I was suddenly learning its nuances of spitting in beats and spitting in pockets. And I guess that’s what it did for me, it put me in the realm of understanding how to be a rapper. Not a grime person, but a rapper.”
“Slipknot was my gateway to everything”
Sounds a bit heavy, doesn’t he, this Kid Bookie kid. Him and his CV that reads like the kind of document with which a dog-whistling tabloid newspaper could run riot. Or one of those hard right TV ‘news’ channels on which swivel-eyed lunatics froth with all kinds of hollow fury. In 21st century Britain, such stories are easily spun.
“I do not consider myself a victim of life’s persecutions,” KB would like you to know. “I do not see myself as a victim.”
In point of fact, Kid Bookie is actually a bit of goofball. Strolling around South East London, this font of unbidden stories exudes likability and kindness. Directing an index finger in the direction of a pool of stagnant water, he points to the spot at which a kid named Drew drowned when a bunch of young boys, KB among them, went swimming by the floodgates. And do you see that house over there? Well that’s where a woman used to live – hell, now that he thinks about it, she might still live there – who doled out sexual favours to schoolboys. Kid Bookie is quick to point out that while he wasn’t one of her callers, as a 14-year-old, he did, um, enjoy a sexual encounter with a teenage girl at a different address on the same street. As to matters relating to his present personal life, he admits to being broken-hearted after very recently being given notice to quit by his long-term partner, the excellent Polish born alternative pop singer Òlah Bliss. This separation, he very much hopes, will prove to be only temporary.
“You can put that in the piece,” he says. “I don’t mind.”
Kid Bookie says the words “spit bars” as if he’s spitting out snake venom sucked from a wound in his own flesh. At first he hated rap – even today he speaks unkindly of grime, its uniquely British variant – which is strange considering the fluency of his flow on Songs For The Living // Songs For The Dead. It’s stranger still when one learns that his father was a rapper trading under the name MC Raddick who, in the dim and distant, had hopes for a career as a professional musician. Only trouble was, life got in the way of the dreams of Raymond Hill. His son believes that his mother, Anthonia, disabused her husband of the idea of a life in the arts, not least because the couple had their first child when he was only 17. Seeking to avoid such love-filled obstacles, KB is childless.
“My parents were very positive, per se, in their love, but as I got older I realised they’d been arguing for 20 years and they liked each other less and less as the years went by,” he says. “But they presented a united face for the sake of the family. My mum is an African woman so I guess pride in her family is a strong ideal for her.”
Less so for her son. As Kid Bookie decoupled from the nest, his relationship with his dad became strained and at times, even, estranged. During this period, he sought role models in the shape of 20-somethings with driving licenses and criminal records; not father figures, exactly, but certainly the kinds of older influences any sane parent would wish their son to avoid.
But in the absence of verbal guidance from Raymond Hill, the corrective upon which his only son relied was the powerful auditory memory of a paternal record collection that included Nirvana and Aerosmith. Even when buried under layers of teenage contrivance, it seemed the rock’n’roll never quite died. In time, Kid Bookie made his way to Iowa – the Slipknot album, not the state – the gateway drug that led him to System Of A Down, in one direction, and blink-182 in the other. Once again, he picked up the guitar. He let go of a life that wished him dead. He was on his way.
“I was helped by realising that I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing, anyway,” he explains. “I didn’t like the music I was making; I didn’t like the people I was around. I was altering who I was to fit shapes that were never made for me. But you have to reach back to who you were before all those influences took over. And who I was [before] felt like the best version of me. Tapping back into that changed my life. I became the person that I wanted to be, or the person I’m going to be. And that starts with music.”
“When music’s great you take inspiration and put it into your own box and add your identity”
And on it goes, this riot of improvised energy. Sometimes he makes up words that would give autocorrect a nervous breakdown. He mixes clauses and tenses with an abandon that make transcribing his interviews quite the challenge. It’s not always easy to keep him on topic. Oh look, here’s a tree from beneath which, as a schoolboy, he ran off with a duck egg after persuading himself that its mother had come to harm. He took the egg home, incubated it beneath a pillow next to a heated radiator, before watching in wonder as a duckling was born at a quarter past three in the afternoon while he was playing videogames. Realising he was perhaps not quite the ideal long-term parent for a newly born waterfowl, after two days, Kid Bookie returned the animal to its nest.
“I want to be a marine biologist,” he says.
Okay.
“Did you know that studies have shown that orca have many different alphabets? They’re advanced creatures, man.”
If they’re so smart, how come they keep getting stuck in fishing nets?
A snort of derision. “That’s humans, man. We fuck things up.”
Guess so. But at least the direction of travel for his own life has moved from darkness towards light. Never mind the sheer force of will with which Kid Bookie absented himself from those dangerous days of the past, he’s also re-routed his music in a way that has turned his old world upside-down. The lying is over, as are the false promises of braggadocio and bogus self-esteem. Time was, KB “didn’t want to be king of the misfits, [he] wanted to be the king of the bad guys”. But then the time came to put away childish things and understand that he had things the wrong way round. The misfits, you see, are the cool kids, the creative kids, the kids who give life its spice. Their scene is where the real action is, and where Kid Bookie clearly belongs.
“Today, I’m still antagonistic, but in a different way,” he says. “Being in the music industry, I’m able to challenge the status quo by prodding and making people think. So I’ve taken that nature from my past, into my present, and made better use of it. This is the place to practise rebellion and influence change. It’s a place to break a mould even if no-one knows it’s there to be broken. When I was younger, I believed that the badder you are, the more people will respect you. But it’s not real respect. It ain’t real, man. I guess I’m an empathetic non-psychotic person because, while I can be both tentative and extreme, I’m not a psychopath. I’m an artist.”
What’s more, and better still, Kid Bookie no longer worries about being cool.
“And that,” he says, “is the coolest thing of all.”
Songs For The Living // Songs For The Dead is released September 13 via Marshall Records
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