Jay-Z

Jay-Z's favourite UK rapper, BackRoad Gee is coming to Wireless — and it's been quite a ride to get there.

“I’m waiting on the call from Adele,” he laughs. “I know how it feels first hand, so I felt it was only right that I went out there and I marched [with] the people.” “I’ve got PTSD from the police,” he says, saying the manifold times he was singled out as a young Black man growing up in London left a lasting mark. “I made a decision that day that I was going to stop doing what I was doing away from music. “I didn’t want to sell drugs anymore,” he explains, rapping the song’s key message to me: “Alhamdulillah I’m free, my vision is clear, I can see.” He vowed to turn his life around when he left prison, but says keeping to his vision was challenging. “The police had it in for me, but they probably couldn’t get what they wanted,” he says. but I feel like there are a lot more bad police than there are good.” “There were little things out there that offered little opportunities, but nothing that could really help a man become a man and sustain life.” I’m the chosen one and that’s the way it had to be,” he deadpans. Then at secondary school, we’d all be in a circle, and I’d bring out the Walkman, put on an instrumental and we’d do [rap] battles right there in the playground.” “I used to take a couple of orders from my areas, take these bars and remix them, making them my own. BackRoad, who plays the second weekend of Wireless festival at Finsbury Park on July 8, has been making music that fuses the Congolese heritage of his parents with the grime he grew up with on the streets around various parts of London (he lived between Tottenham, East Finchley and Stratford) since he was a kid.