The Times Magazine 31photographic studio in Dalston
and Headie One, aka 26-year-old
Irving Adjei, has just turned up,
only two hours late. He’s with
a posse that includes managers,
stylists, two men who smoke joints
in the corner, and one friendly
fellow whose sole job appears to
be to remove fluff from his boss’s
tracksuit with a lint roller. Adjei, a
boxer-like presence in a chunky gold bracelet
and silver watch, sips on a Hennessy and
apple juice, gets a last-minute haircut and
poses for photographs with a French bulldog
called Deja. So far, so much to be expected
from a rapper on the up.
Headie One – the name comes from
schoolfriends thinking his head looked like a
50p coin – is the breakthrough star of drill; a
moody variant of hip-hop that has taken off in
Britain over the past few years and received a
lot of negative press along the way, due to its
associations with inner-city gang culture and
knife crime. The Canadian superstar Drake,
who duetted with him in July on the Top Five
hit Only You Freestyle, named Headie One
“the best drill artist in the world”. He has
had hits with fellow British rap heavyweights
Stormzy and Dave, he was a major draw at
last year’s Glastonbury festival and his new
album, Edna, is set to be one of the landmark
releases of 2020. None of the above may
sound particularly surprising – until you learn
that Adjei only got out of jail in April. And
that was his fourth time there.
He was first sent to jail aged 17, for
drugs and knife possession. In 2014 he was
sentenced to 30 months after being caught
with almost £30,000 of heroin and cocaine at
Aberdeen station. In January this year, three
weeks after appearing on Stormzy’s hit album
Heavy Is the Head, Adjei was sentenced to six
months for carrying a knife. He was let out
early for good behaviour, just in time to record
that Drake duet.
Popular music has always glamorised the
outlaw. It’s appealing to hear about tales of
misadventure and the easy money that comes
with it, but Edna gives insight into the rather
nastier realities of life on the margins with an
authenticity most rappers can only dream of.
Set against frequently melancholic music that
doesn’t conform to any rap clichés – there
are touches of ambient, gospel, even baroque
classical – the album invites us into Headie
One’s world, and it isn’t particularly pretty.
Rapping in a heavy north London accent,
Adjei captures the details of the criminal life
with novelistic drama, and through that paints
a visceral portrait of the prison experience.
Even if you hate the idea of a convicted felon
using tales of crime and punishment as a
vehicle for stardom, it is impossible to deny
the artistry and truthfulness here. office in the basement of the studio, where
for the next hour or so he tells me, in a quiet,
reserved fashion that suggests a deep shyness,
his life story. Edna is named after his mother,
who died when he was three, leaving Adjei
and his elder sister to be brought up by their
father on the Broadwater Farm estate in
Tottenham, which became synonymous with
urban decay in 1985 when riots led to the
death of PC Keith Blakelock, and again in
2011, when the killing by police of Broadwater
resident Mark Duggan was the spark for riots
that spread across the country.
“There was actually a big family atmosphere
on Broadwater Farm,” says Adjei, who keeps
eye contact to a minimum until something
makes him laugh, at which point the interior
shutters go up and he lets you in. “My dad was
working all the time, so me and my sister were
with cousins and aunties and the estate was
a big playground. We had our local shop, a
recreation park, a football pitch... It was a
proper community and a safe place, because
everyone looks out for each other. There were
negative things going on as well – but not to
each other, if you get what I’m trying to say.
The only danger was from outsiders.”
Adjei’s early childhood sounds like an
inner-city idyll; playing football and knock down
ginger, watching wrestling on TV, knowing
everyone you bumped into. “It was a kid’s
dream really, with three parks and everything
you needed. The primary school was a three-
minute walk out of the estate, so that was
literally my life. I hardly left Broadwater Farm
until I went to secondary school.”
Rapping came early, with Adjei and his
friends trying to come up with rhymes from
around the age of ten onwards. Later in
adolescence it developed into “street stuff
to get at people, disses and responses and all
that”. At 16 he fell in with the Star Gang, a
musical offshoot of Broadwater Farm’s long-
established street gang Tottenham Mandem,
and from there he got involved in county lines
drug trafficking, where young recruits are sent
out to rural areas and small towns. It’s what
he was doing up in Aberdeen back in 2014.
“That’s a very complicated topic,” says Adjei,
eyes shifting ever further into the distance,
when I ask about his part in county lines.
I’m about to remind him that I’m a journalist
seeking to hear his story, not a detective
looking to convict him, when he continues,
“At a certain age we get involved in different
things and it becomes dangerous to be outside.
[County lines drug dealing] was my way of
staying safe and keeping out of the area.”
Was it exciting? “It’s boring. You do get a
sense of these places, like Scotland being cold,
but there’s horrible stuff you’ve got to deal
with and consequences that put you in a
deeper hole, and pull you in a downward
spiral that becomes harder to escape from.A
GETTY IMAGES
‘IF WE’RE GOING TO RAP
ABOUT OUR LIVES, THIS
IS WHAT IT WILL SOUND
LIKE. IT’S NOT GONNA
SOUND LIKE GOSPEL’
Performing alongside Dave in Brixton, November 2019From the video for his 2018 track Know Better“You think we like being around these
crack pipes and needles, staring at all this
dirty money?” he asks on Breathing, a lament
on his former career as a county lines drug
runner. “You ain’t ever made a birthday cake
from digestive biscuits,” he announces on Ain’t
It Different (“That was very popular in prison,”
he tells me), while elsewhere come tales of
being stuck on B wing with lifers, staying silent
in interview rooms, making scrambled eggs
in kettles and having post-traumatic stress
disorder triggered by the sound of sirens. As
to his political views, they are laid bare on
Mainstream Rapper. “Labour or Conservative,
I ain’t got a preference/ The only thing to
consider is two thirds off a sentence.”
When the shoot is over, I manage to get
Adjei away from his people and into a little