Bugzy Malone interview: The way I am, it’s built into me... I didn’t really get an option

Bugzy Malone, you suspect, has steel in his bones where the rest have marrow. Though the Manucian grime artist speaks softly – much more softly, in fact, than he raps, even if his sentences are punctuated with the same heavy breaths – everything in him tells of determination, grit, perpetual motion.

Not yet media trained into blandness, he’s transparent: his tone flattens around answers he’s evidently repeating, but when excited, speaks quickly, the looping rhythms of his manc accent chattering with talk of idols, ideas and ideals, his past, what’s next.

“I got out of jail when I was about 17. You feel as if you’re behind, so it made me feel as if I had to work doubly as hard as everybody else to try and make up the ground that I’d lost.

“But,” he says, “I also looked at it that I was young, so I had time to turn everything around.”

Then still Aaron Davis, he turned to boxing. “I was at that stage in my life where I had to change something.

“I think I needed boxing as an excuse, to be busy, ‘cause if I wasn’t busy I was getting into trouble. It was my first experience of working and seeing other people working toward their dreams and stuff, so it was kind of a stepping stone.”

There’s a sense working towards a dream consumes Bugzy, that turning things around is what what he’s conditioned himself to do.

“Growing up I used to watch documentaries on people like Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson. I’ve grown up fascinated with legends and legacies.

“Succeeding is first and foremost. I feel quite responsible in the fact that what got me into this position was inspirational people… I definitely want to give back in terms of inspiring youngsters and things like that. If I fail then the inspiration that I’m giving out is null and void.”

Success has come: his EP, Facing Time, knocked Beyonce's Lemonade off the number one spot on the iTunes chart and he was a part of a stellar grime line-up at Glastonbury, which also included Stormzy, Skepta, Novelist and Kano.

Despite it, he talks with the mind of someone thinking of what’s next. He doesn't make jokes. He tells me money isn’t changing the ‘small circle of people who count’ or those around him, which seems contrary to the lyrics on Facing Time, where he raps – more than a little indulgently – about the pressure of his increasing profile (“They think fame means plenty of money/And a glamorous life/But fame is a jail.”)

Still, it’s clear he cares for work – he feels the weight of it: “I think being an artist is freedom, and that’s the most important thing. I think an artist’s full potential is being completely free, so that’s what I intend to do.

“I just want to break ground. I said it from a while back, my whole ambition is to elaborate on grime. I’m someone who’s turned their life into a work of art, so in the midst of doing that, I’m taking that to the next level. I’d like create artwork coming out of Britain that the world can appreciate, it’s just one big growing process, everything’s just getting bigger and bigger and better.

Things getting bigger is a reoccuring theme with Bugzy. Mindful of the future, he talks about fashions changing and tastes moving on, and there's a sense he doubts anything is secure. Yet he mentions ideas and directions as passing comments, running forward with himself, giving every indication of a man not standing too long on one platform in case it crumbles beneath him: “There’s a bigger picture. I don’t really worry about myself. I think when you’ve got a bigger picture, I don’t think you’ll let yourself down, I don’t think you’ll go too far in the wrong direction.”

Why grime? “Grime is a British platform, our rap music. It doesn’t make sense anywhere else, and it was just the first kind of music I was involved with. Before I went to jail and I was young walking about the streets, that’s just what we’d do, come up with grime lyrics and we’d come out and spit them to each other, so it’s just where I started off.”

His take is often strikingly graphic: ‘Between like '91 and '99 there was a gang war and violent crime/My uncle's face got torn out by the pellets of shotgun like Frankenstein’. He insists he’s “documenting a true story, so as shocking as it might sound, it’s real.”

Though beefs with other grime artists have been some of his most popular output, he's dismissive of them, marking them as useful for progressing his career. It’s his everyday observations which feel painfully relatable (‘The man said 12 pounds for two tickets, then there was an awkward silence/She had to pay me into the cinema, and at that point I was frightened, do I tell her that I fell off, or do I lie?’).

“What I’m trying to do is create something quite musical that anybody from any walk of life can buy into, but it still kind of drops with that grime feel.”

His father features heavily too. He goes quiet when I ask what kind of man he is: “Good question”. A pause grows. He draws the air. “I don’t know.”

The pause keeps going, Bugzy measuring out his words and weighing them up. “I just think that… now that I’m an adult I see that life is very hard, so growing up I was quite vulnerable to anything kinda happening to me, so I think that’s what made me quite upset that I didn’t get the support that I would have liked…”

“When you’re put into a position of survival because you don’t have something, then it’s put into instinctively, it’s kind of built into you. So the way I am, it’s kind of built into me, as opposed to being a choice like ‘I’m going to be like this for a certain reason, I didn’t really get an option. It is what it is.”

It is what it is: and he’s off, to shoot a video, to write more, to Wireless, on to the next one, on to the next one.

Bugzy Malone’s new EP King of the North out July 14. He plays Wireless Festival Sunday July 9. Tickets are on sale at ticketmaster.co.uk

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout