Cracking straight in on a tangent- tell us a little bit about your experience on this side of the conversation – doing hip hop interviews in the 90’s. Hahahaha…. Well it’s quite nerve racking isn’t it, and it’s doubly weird when you’re doing them by phone because you’re never quite sure what the person on the other end is going to sound like, let alone be like. So you’re there thinking to yourself – ‘shit – what’s Jaguar Skills going to sound like’ and then once I’m on the line or whoever’s on the line, it so often throws you a bit. There’s that moment of awkwardness before you try and settle into some kind of rhythm. I used to really stick to my questions – you know, the wooden classics like ‘How did you get into hip hop’ right down to ‘Do you like cats’ or ‘What’s your favourite colour’ kinda territory. Problem was of course that if the guy’s answer to the first question was ‘Well, I was on Mars yeah, and I learned to rap standing on my head’, instead of responding ‘Fucking hell – you what??? Let’s dig a little deeper into the whole upside down on Mars
scenario’, I would just move straight onto his potential love for cats or the colour scheme he was feeling at the time. It may sound obvious, but actually listening really was key instead of just staying heads down on the talking points. After a while though, interviewing rappers just became really boring. You’d be talking to Memphis Bleek or someone – ask em about their album and the most you’d get was ‘Well you know man – it’s like, like, like my fucking album’. Listening or not – where do you go with that? So I decided to flip it so they didn’t know who they were talking to or what to expect, and I came up with this character – an MC called Pedigree Chum. And he had this ‘yout t’ing gwan’ ‘wot ya chattin blud, ya get me’ sort of style, and you can talk like that to American all day and they won’t have a clue what’s going on. Giving it all. ‘Tell me ya cunt – is it like propa sick den blud or is you just a bare wanka’. So you’re out and out cussing them in the questions, but they wouldn’t get it, and so seeing as I wasn’t exactly getting profound insights out of the interview anyway, at least this way I had something funny to play to my mates. It was