I set myself a challenge this year. I wanted to get back to the passions I had when I was a child.
I wanted to get back to the essence and enjoy typing out stories from the tips of my fingers.
Growing up, I would always write stories and screen plays - not even thinking about where each letter would take me - but since I hit adulthood and started working with tonnes of creatives I started judging everything I wrote and giving up after the first page as I always felt I could do better.
So, Hi - This is going to be like therapy for me. I want to update you guys with the stories behind the stories I record and give people a wider picture than the short form content I put online.
The first story.... How this all happened?
That seems like a good place to start....Right?
Don't Flop - It was my first taste of the world of social media. We started before YouTube was even a thing.
We would go down to hotel car parks and subway tunnels and throw events for small groups of 10-15 people. The crowd was made up of the cliches of backpacker hip hop fans, probably only there because they wanted to celebrate knowing about something that not many other people did. Old school hip hop was the original breeding ground of hipsters in that respect, Loving everything that no one knew about and instantly turning on the exact same thing and hating it the moment a crowd caught on.
And a crowd most definitely caught on.
In a fairly innocuous event in Brixton we threw a battle that would change our career paths entirely.
We paired a young kid from Manchester against an Ex-Teacher from Peterborough. On the card it didn't stick out and on the day, as fun as it seemed, it definitely didn't seem like a battle that would change everything, it seemed like a great don't get me wrong, it just didn't seem like something that would be our first viral success.
It came out early January and capped at around 13,000 views. But, then something weird happened. Reddit picked the battle up and posted it as 'Young Chav gets bodied by his teacher' and everything went a bit crazy.
I remember standing on stage recording TTT - to the test ten - and every other second there would be an announcement -
'It's hit 100,000 views'
'It's hit 500,000 views'
'It's just passed a million'
After that we had flocks of people coming to events. We could throw an event with no known names on it and still get over 300 people in the building. Then we were on festivals and travelling the world to put on events in towns in America, Australia and Europe.
Suddenly, I had to quit my fairly legitimate career in Networking and IT support to film grown men shouting in each others faces and creatively calling each other negative names in rhyming form. Explaining that to my grand mother at christmas was difficult, even trying to explain it to my friends and people close to me was difficult.
I think everybody thought I was mad.
I quit my job and went to live on my friends couch in London. I was sure this was going to be a career. If you asked me why I thought that or how it was going to be a career, I don't think I could answer it. But something deep down told me that it was all going to work out.
Dropping from a stable salary to a hip hop salary was horrifying. I had got far too used to skating through the month and going broke in the final week, suddenly removing that and going from one chunk of cash that could last a month to getting scraps here and there was definitely a culture shock. It was also a shock to my diet and my waist band.
I'm glad to be able to finally say it was worth it. It didn't seem it at the time but it's true... If you really want something and you can put up with the rough patches then you will get what you want in the end.
Even if it is recording people calling each other names in poetic form....