Stoked PR

Earlier this year Tinchy Stryder found himself at a London event Alicia Keys had organised to raise funds for her charity, Keep A Child Alive. “Everybody was having dinner, and I looked around me and I realised who was there. Sol Campbell. Swizz Beats. That guy who does those shoes that my girlfriend goes on about all the time.” He searches for the right name. “Christian Louboutin. I was looking at him, thinking, woah dude, you don’t know what you put me through! But then I started thinking, for me to be in the mix with all those people, knowing where I come from…” His voice trails off in wonder, then he laughs. “I thought, this is real deep, man.”

You might reasonably suggest that that considering all that Tinchy Stryder has achieved, he shouldn’t be particularly surprised any more. The story of the Prince of Grime’s rise to chart topping success is extraordinary. In 2006, with his career apparently in the doldrums after an initial burst of interest in his crew, Ruff Sqwad and a couple of guest appearances with The Streets, he accepted the invitation to appear at a grime night in that legendary hotbed of urban music, Norwich. After the show, the club’s promoters, Archie Lamb and Jack Foster, asked to manage him: he agreed. The two managed to secure investment in the rapper’s career from a variety of unlikely sources – a local priest, a variety of elderly relations and Archie’s father, who happens to be the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk and the chief parliamentary and political advisor to deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. The unlikely trio – two middle class English white boys from East Anglia and a Ghanaian-born rapper from one of Tower Hamlets’ less salubrious estates – toured the country in Archie’s father’s car, slowly building up a following, releasing an album on their own label, (Takeover Entertainment), establishing a clothing line called Star In The Hood. Eventually, the work paid off. The single ‘Stryderman’ made the Radio One playlist in early 2008. Island Records signed him. The follow up ‘Stryderman’, ‘Take Me Back’, went to Number 3: when it did, Tinchy was still at the University Of East London studying for a degree in digital arts and the moving image. A third single featuring  N-Dubz, ‘Number One’, went to Number 1, as did ‘Never Leave You’. His second album, ‘Catch 22’, debuted in the charts at number 2 and went gold. He founded his own publishing company, Takeover/Cloud 9, through EMI. Furthermore, he got his degree, and moved out of home, although the latter apparently hasn’t been an unequivocal success: “I don’t cook, man,” he sighs.

And yet, extraordinary things keep happening to Tinchy Stryder. The Star In The Hood label initially began as a few t-shirts designed to promote his similarly-titled debut album, an ironic comment on how, at the time, “people from where I’m from thought that because my video was on TV, I was getting paid every time it was shown”. They started selling them to fund their tours, Tinchy kept wearing them in his videos and onstage and their popularity grew and grew and Rihanna was pictured wearing one after Tinchy supported her on tour. The Star In The Hood range expanded to include jackets, poloshirts, womenswear, and is now being stocked in up to 100 stores nationwide in the UK, in addition to a number of stores internationally.  “I was driving around Shepherd’s Bush roundabout the other day”, Tinchy says smiling, “and I saw this big billboard for Star In The Hood. It’s crazy man.”

Furthermore, news of his success not merely as a rapper but as an entrepreneur reached the ears of Jay-Z, with whom Tinchy signed a joint venture called Takeover Roc Nation, a worldwide 360 degree entertainment company handling management, merchandise, records and live appearances for its artists and moreover, the first European joint venture Jay-Z has ever signed. “They’re cool people, man,” he says. “Jay-Z is the main person I’ve always looked up to in music, even away from him becoming a businessman and owning everything around him. They say we remind them of them when they first started. They always say that me, Jack and Archie, we’re young, people are scared of what we’re gonna do next and that’s how they felt when they were coming up.”

What Tinchy Stryder did next was embark on a nationwide sell out tour, perform on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury and release the follow up  album to ‘Catch 22’, ‘Third Strike’, which produced  ‘Game Over’, the biggest underground-crossover hit  of the year, featuring Tinie Tempah, Chipmunk, Example, Professor Green and Devlin.

2011 has already seen Tinchy Stryder release  top 5 single, ‘Spaceship’,  (which saw him team up with Dappy again), and a collaboration with Dionne Broomfield, ‘Spinnin’ for 2012’ – the official Olympics Torch relay song. Later this year Tinchy will release the Calvin Harris produced ‘Off The Record’, the follow up single to ‘Spaceship’, and the second cut to be taken from Tinchy’s forthcoming fourth studio album (due for release in Spring 2012).  This Autumn will also see MOBO nominated Tinchy present BBC 3’s backstage coverage of  the MOBO Awards alongside Dappy, and feature on the release of  a cover of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ for this year’s Children In Need..

There’s also the live show to consider, not least Tinchy’s forthcoming ‘Rollercoaster Tour’– an intimate run of UK shows (kicking off in Liverpool on 9^th November and ending in London Scala on 13^th), where Tinchy will perform past hits alongside showcasing exclusive new material from his forthcoming studio album.  “Before, when I had to perform, I used to love being in the studio, but live, that bit of nerves was there. I’d want to get it over and done with. Now, when the show’s over, I don’t want it to be. Before, because of the scene where I’ve come from, it’s always been an MC and a DJ, and I wanted to keep to that. But now the music’s grown, I can hear it turning live now. When I supported Rihanna, I could see how playing the songs with a live band brought something new out of it.”

He says he’s watched his audience change over the last year. “My main core is probably teenagers, more girls than boys.” He laughs. “That’s not a bad thing. But now I can see it crossing over to people who are older. People realise there’s more to it. I’ve always liked things like that. I never wanted it to be, like, yeah he’s the sickest MC or whatever the first time people heard me, because once people are classing you like that already, where do you go from that? I like people thinking, yeah, he’s alright and then it growing, and then people thinking, yeah, I didn’t know he could do that.” He laughs again: the sound of a man who’s heard people say that a lot over the past few years.