Dave: "Black is confusing … where does the line start and stop?" | The music

BBefore meeting Dave, rapper, musician, singer, songwriter, winner of the award, directly in Number-Oner, irregular and regular 20-year-old from Streatham, I am allowed to listen to his new album. This is a big deal. In fact, it's so bad that Dave's public relations join me when I listen – not to watch my reaction, but because the album was kept in such a secret that he has not heard it yet. no more. We sit, notebooks out, while a nice woman named Ruby from Dave's management team plays the 11-track album from her laptop.

Dave's album is also a big problem because in the last four years, he has gone from an unknown 16-year-old rap sensation to a platinum-record artist who, to date, has not released as singles (11, not counting the special appearances of other people), plus two EPs, Six Paths and Game over. His fans are clamoring for this record, bombarding him with social media for over a year.

Although Dave – full name David Orobosa Omoregie – is generally considered a rapper, he also produces pop, grime and Afrobeat: hits like No Words (starring MoStack) not only illustrate his gift for a song, but also his decent singing voice; Wanna Know only came out five weeks before Drake remixed him and added a verse; Funky Friday, along with Fredo, beat Calvin Harris and Sam Smith to finish first overall last year.

But it's his thing less poppy, more serious than I like. His lyrics are lyrical and technical, intelligent and moving, with a melancholy heart that does not just come from minor chords that he plays on the piano. Many of his songs seem almost overwhelmed with pain. The Question Time, which addresses directly to Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and David Cameron, goes through the funding of the NHS, Trump and Grenfell, and earns him an Ivor Novello. My 19th birthday is unfortunate and complicated: "You are told that the heart of the house is at home, but my heart is pierced."

There is sun, but also in the shade, sometimes in the same passage: the hangman of last year (my favorite) is beautiful, economical – "between the stop and live it, I'm sitting in the heart of it "- and have a little jozzy outro that makes you laugh when you hear it. (In the video for Hangman, Dave's friends do just this: the shoot was the first time they heard the track and when they play, they start to laugh and dance.)

Whatever it is: the album. Entitled psychodrama, the cover features a Dave's blue board, head in flames (blue) – appropriate images for an artist who has so many shots in the head. Fraser T Smith, veteran of Stormzy and Adele, is a producer; Other producers include 169 longtime collaborators (who worked with Headie One, Big Zuu, Jme) and Nana Rogues (Tinie Tempah, Drake).

After hearing it, Ruby, the RP and I, as well as the head of the public relations company, all jump in a taxi Observer office for the interview and the photo shoot. This morning, Dave was at designer Ozwald Boateng's studio, getting dressed for a suit, and we were told he would be late; In fact, he is already sitting quietly in reception with his friend Justin (Juss), who accompanies him everywhere. Dave's two directors also introduce themselves. By the time we enter the photo studio, we are eight. ("More than when we had Kendrick Lamar," says someone later.) Among this mad crowd, Dave himself is discreet, polite, cap and puffed. He is not impressed by the leanness of the photo studio. He has a serious face, a calm voice. When he smiles, he shows stubborn metal teeth, but it makes him look even younger. If you give him a compliment, he says "thank you" and puts a fist on his heart.

Once everyone stops activating and leaves the photography studio, we sit on high chairs and discuss psychodrama. Doing it, said Dave, took him a lot. (He works hard on his songs: he called them "gold or silver, something rare or precious.") He started it on January 23, 2018 (the opening date of the year). album) and completed it last month. So, a year. A year when his life was rather busy – Hangman came out early, Funky Friday in October, plus he appeared on U Can Stand Up in Avelino and tried a bit of theater – and he felt transformed to the end. He hopes the progression is clear: "From the beginning, when I was more reluctant to talk, until the end, it's embracing the idea that it's okay to educate yourself a bit about yourself."

You can call psychodrama a concept album: the first title is called Psycho, the last drama, and throughout the voice (played) of a psychotherapist – or "psychodrame-thiste", as Dave tells me – talking to Dave as he was in session, encouraging him to express himself on his problems. The album has a structure in three acts: the act that it defines as being "the environment"; act two "relations"; act three "social compass".

Act one, then. Dave in his environment, as represented by the tracks Psycho ("I'm not psycho, but my life is"), Streatham (self-explanatory) and Black. Black is the first single from the album, it's powerful; both angry and celebration, with strong lines. "Black replaces your mother because your father is gone … You do not know the truth about your race, they erase it … Representative of countries that did not even exist while your grandmother lived" ( Some Radio 1 listeners complained of Black's "Negativity", DJs Annie Mac and Greg James trapped them.) Dave recorded it near the end of the album process: he had wanted to create a catchy melody, but he instead wrote a darker instrument (he usually works on the music before the lyrics: it defines his mood). The words took him a bit of time because he did a lot of research, including talking to a Ghanaian friend who had traced his family tree (the friend found out he was, in fact, Egyptian).

"This track is my experience," says Dave. "I, south of London, black, Nigerian, that's what I rely on mainly. It's a good representation of what I associate and everything I think, but I do not think it's universal for all the experience of Blacks, because there are too many races and dynamics different in the race of blacks. For a Senegalese black who grew up in France or a Jamaican from New York, it's a completely different relationship with being black and how you could be accepted into that culture or world. Everyone's experience is different. Especially black women and men. "

Despite his research, even now he is not sure. "Black is confusing. Where does the line begin and stop with what is black and what is not black? He feels that society brings all blacks together, and he wonders how attentive people are. "Metis or imaginable people from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh might say you are black, but your features are so black that you have smooth hair and a sharper nose. , or such. It does not matter what people can see, whether it's black Africans, black Jamaicans, black British, black Americans … they just say it's one thing. "

Back to the album. Act two, the middle section, is eye-catching and poppy. Act Three is interesting, with some pieces reminiscent of Streatham, but with a more specific idea: "You see a gangster, I see insecurity." There is an 11-minute piece called Lesley that looks like a movie in song form: "A story of someone who completely loses his character by being with someone who does not do him any good," says Dave, and then Voices, the penultimate track, which I suppose was about a relationship – "I fell in love with optimism" – seems to be about Dave himself. this track is metaphorical, "he says," but it is a constant hunt for happiness. So when I say, "All my life, I hear voices when I sleep and they say to me, 'You're everything I need,' that's all I need. Inner happiness. What everyone is looking for "

Drama, the last track, is slightly separated from the others. It contains a recording of a phone call from Chris, the youngest of Dave's older brothers, who is serving a life sentence. "The concept of psychodrama actually comes from the type of therapy Chris had in prison," says Dave. "The idea of ​​the album, everything is based on him, and this song is a conversation between him and him." In the song, Dave uses Chris' words to create the lyrics. Chris mentions life on the edge, like a house on a cliff, with which Dave runs; and "forget the other brother who was even bigger, we were numbers that were just trying to figure out if we could be a number," he says, so is Chris.

The words that stick to me, I say, are the following: "I do not have the vision of a marriage or alliance, of world domination in music or anything at all. Obsessed. And "I've learned all the time that the separation issues I've described are probably the reason I've had a hard time feeling anything. "

"Well," he said, "that's the truth."

Although they are close now, when they were growing up, Dave and his brothers were not, in particular. Ben was eight years older than Dave and Chris five. So they were always at different stages of their life: one in high school, one in high school, one in primary school. Their father was not there to bring them together – "I did not have the chance to have memories with him" – and their mother often worked day and night, as a nurse and housekeeper, to support his family.

Dave was a serious academic academic and when I ask him about childish things – hobbies, posters on the wall – he just can not answer me. "I would not have thought of getting a poster," he says. "I had somehow existed. I was in this long trance of waking up, going to school, coming back. I have never really had an extravagant crazy personality, I only found out when I was 15 or 16 years old. "

In fact, his mother decided not to let Dave go out after school from 11 years old. It was then that Chris had been sent to prison (he had participated in the assassination of Sofyen Belamouadden), followed by Ben, for robbery, a few years later. Dave's mother reacted by keeping her youngest son at home as much as possible. (Chris agreed, he phoned Dave to check.) It was difficult for Dave, not just because he did not go out socially. He visited his brothers in prison – they were displaced everywhere – and absorbed the trauma of his mother. "I do not know how she felt," he says now. "Too many different things." He grew quickly, even though he thought it would have happened anyway, simply living in London.

"It's not the same as having a friend in prison," he says. "Where it's my brother, the impact it has on my mother, on the rest of us, the impact on all that's good … I never want to sound like I'm talking about jail and to cry or mope. But it was definitely a huge training effect for all of us. The adventure was difficult for everyone involved. "

Trapped inside, young Dave tried a bit of hitting and took out a piece at the age of 13. ("Everyone hated him," he says laughing, so I retired, 13 to 15 years old, was my departure. "Then, at the age of 14, his mother offered him a digital keyboard and he decided to learn to play, he liked movie soundtracks, cartoon tunes, and he loved trying to make music, so he challenged his friend Kyle to learn the piano with him Every week, they each chose a piece – Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, or a song from an anime show – then followed the score online, learned it, practiced it and were arguing over who was playing the best song, Dave was playing the piano four or five hours each night, encouraged by his music teacher at school. (He's still close to Kyle and Kyle plays on psychodrama.)

At the age of 16, the first day he attended Richmond's sixth university (where he studied philosophy, ethics, law and sound design), Dave published a freestyle on the Bl @ ckbox rap station. A few months later, he was on the influential SBTV of Jamal Edwards; a year later, sampled by Drake. His life has changed.

Last summer, when Ben was released from prison after four years, Dave was able to give him money. He had nothing when Ben came in. Now he is considering buying a new house for himself and his mother. "I was always going to move with my mother," he says. "It was always going to happen." He wants her to give up work, but she will not do it. Not until she's 60 (she's 55 now).

There is a lot going on. Dave tried comedy, which he liked although he had trouble adjusting to it at first. "I hated the lack of flexibility," he says. "They come to get you at 5 in the morning and you have to be there, you have to make up, make costumes. If you are late, there are people you answer. It's like being in school again. And other things, like getting used to the fact that you're actually a very small part of a big moving image. Or, I have spent all my life looking in the lens of a camera. And then, we can not look at the goal.

He's starting to have football. He supports Manchester United, because his brothers have already taken Chelsea and Arsenal, and have managed to stand up against United's recent match against Paris Saint-Germain, when he created a piece with AJ Tracey about Thiago Silva, a PSG player. "I'm really more connected to football than people think. So I'm very worried and I have to leave Twitter. "

As you can guess from his issue Question Time, Dave is interested in politics. He is funny and engaged in Brexit (he voted Rest, because of the European Court of Human Rights). He has friends who voted to quit – "Kyle did it! Wasteman! "- but he understands why. "Everyone pretends," he says. "You could say, 'That's the best thing for the country,' but it's not about what's best for the country, it's what's best for you." Inside the country. "He also sees it in domestic politics." You could say, "I'm going to vote for Labor because they're going to make the public sector a lot more funded and blah-blah-blah." Really, that will make it easier for you life. But if you make tens of millions of dollars a year, you know that if a member of the Labor Party is voted, you risk a heavy tax, so you support the other group. "

And perhaps not surprisingly, he is considering penitentiary reform.

"When you get rid of it, we're all humans at the end of the day," he says. Where evil is done, evil must be punished, but there are many things I see. The prison hosts many normal people, many male family members who have been caught in a difficult situation or in a dark place. I do not think a moment in people's lives should define them. Within the limits of reason: I emphasize it. It is difficult because it is case by case and some people do not want to hear about reform with certain crimes. But the people who are in these positions [in prison] need an incentive for reform, and sometimes support needed to get out of their own lives and improve and become more functional members of society. If everyone is on the same page, that's the end goal for the people who are doing the wrong thing, is not it? For them to go out and do no more harm.

When he was younger and he had problems, Dave himself followed a few therapy sessions. He understood why, but as he gets older, he thinks the therapy "is not necessarily in the form of a person sitting with a notebook. Maybe it's a friend you call in the night. He used to fight, or want to talk about it online, but he's a little easier with himself now. He cut the Internet chat, explaining on video platforms. He is clear in his words, he thinks. I agree: Dave's words are beautiful. His art explains his life, sometimes in a way that he does not understand perfectly.

"Sometimes I sit down and say to myself: do I regret it? Do I regret it? 'And I have the impression that everything is like a snowball, you know? If you regret something, it's because it just means that it's something that has affected you enough to think about … There is a reason for everything to happen. "

He quotes me from another rapper about the Garden of Eden. He likes these words. "Because everything would not be everything," says Dave, "if the Garden of Eden was right".

Psychodrama is published Friday on Neighborhood. Psychodrama: the tour begins in Dublin on April 9 and ends in London on May 3