Kojey Radical will never look down

Kojey Radical is the cover star of Huck 82: The Music Issue. Grab your copy here, or from all good newsagents now.

Cashmere Tears should have been a turning point for Kojey Radical, but Covid-19 swept the planet and he was robbed of the chance to tour the album. Arriving at the tail-end of 2019, the jazz, funk and gospel-flecked offering was a breakout moment for the East London rhymer, but the chance to reach its full potential was halted by no cause of his own. It was no flash in the pan, however, for his next project, Reason To Smile, brought him a second chance: built on a lot of the good will its predecessor built up – and a fanbase eager to catch him live – Reason To Smile found him on bigger stages than ever before and booked to appear on top podcasts and TV shows alike. 

Now presenting his new album, Don’t Look Down, Kojey still has all of that wind in his sails. His fandom has grown, his profile bigger and broader, but there is one thing that still eludes him: awards for his music. For an artist with both critical acclaim and widespread appeal, Kojey has rarely won the awards he’s been nominated for — including Best Hip-Hop Act at the 2022 MOBO Awards, and the Mercury Prize for Best Album that same year. ​“I want revenge on all of them. I’m pulling a coup,” he jokes. ​“Sonically, I’ve been making Grammy music, but that’s not what it’s about. There’s the industry of music, and then there’s the music itself. Music is going into the random jazz bar at 11pm. It’s being there, sweating, singing, dancing. That’s music. The industry is: ​‘Does this person know that person? Have we done the four remixes?’”

Comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s hard to get a grasp on progress in such a topsy-turvy field, where successful artists fail to chart and relative unknowns win major awards. ​“I just assume certain things are happening or certain things are normal because other artists, in my mind, are bigger than me,” he says. ​“I’m thinking it’s normal to get into the Top 10, let alone Top 20. It’s normal to sell out this and that and then I’m looking around and my sister’s explaining it to me and she’s like, ​‘No, that person has never even come close to charting,’ or ​‘This person’s never got a number one in that genre,’ or ​‘This person’s never been nominated for that award.’”

With the various hurdles that limited the success of Cashmere Tears – or at least held him back from capitalising on it to the fullest – maintaining focus and not becoming resentful was a conscious battle he had to fight. ​“That was the one thing from the observation seat of almost not being the star,” he said. In fact, he was in danger of feeling like he wasn’t good enough, like an athlete forced to watch his contemporaries thrive while he sat on the sidelines. Even then, to his credit, Kojey was able to find the positives: ​“Being on the bench at first, it gives you time to watch the game. It was like, a lot of people get consumed by everything, and they get lost in themselves. Then, when it’s not that way anymore, they feel like a completely different person. I was a completely different person, and I never wanted it for myself. I almost tried to keep myself as humble as possible. But at the same time, I think it made me forget how much I’ve done within music.”

Nowadays, with the benefit of hindsight and experience, there’s a sense that Kojey isn’t really that concerned with accolades and that side of things quite as much. Fatherhood and maturity have helped him recalibrate his priorities. Music, now, has a deeper purpose. On the one hand, it’s about self-actualising, articulating his deepest fears, exorcising his problems, and gaining a deeper understanding of himself. ​“At the baseline of every album I make,” he explains, ​“there’s an element and a conversation about mental health and just being able to speak candidly.”

On the other hand, it’s about looking outwards, about making connections. Not in the self-serving way the industry encourages, but in a way that brings him fulfilment as an artist. ​“I think of myself as somebody that can be received by everyone,” he says. ​“So in the same year that I will do a Nines album, I’ll do a Paloma Faith album. I feel like they can hear me in both worlds, and I’m honestly comfortable in both worlds too.” That versatility and ability to fit in anywhere, he believes, comes from his upbringing in East London, where countless different communities mingled together. ​“I’m an East End lad,” he says with a smirk. ​“That’s how we move.” 

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Meanwhile, in the family home, he was learning drive and ambition, if not a passion for music. ​“I wouldn’t say I grew up in a creative household, but I grew up in a household that didn’t stand in the way of creativity, even when they didn’t understand it. Maybe because I was the youngest, there wasn’t as much pressure on me to be the doctor or the lawyer or whatever. The pressure was to be successful.” He was allowed to pick his field, even an unconventional one like music, but there was one condition: ​“Be the best at it.” He toyed with visual art, even considered being an animator at one point, but by 2012, he’d found a community of poets, singers and musicians in disparate genres, but all coming together as a community. Miraa May, Mahalia, 808INK, Ray BLK, Samm Henshaw, Bakar – somehow, they all found common cause together. ​“Genre-wise, playlist-wise, if you just woke up today and went on Spotify, there’s no way for you to link any of these people together, but me and Samm Henshaw used to ride pennyboards together through Shoreditch until he broke his arm.”

Over a decade later, much has changed. Almost everyone from that Shoreditch set has gone on to enjoy huge success, rising up festival line-ups, inking sponsorship deals, and reaching millions of fans with their music. For Kojey, it’s a question of balancing humility and counting his blessings. With that in mind, does he see himself as a UK rap G.O.A.T.? ​“That’s a good question,” he says, thoughtfully. ​“I do. I absolutely do. I think I spent a long time mumbling my own achievements. I think, in a way, that was a tactic to keep myself humble, so I didn’t get lost in this thing and I can do it for a long time.” 

For a while, Kojey didn’t even consider himself a rapper. Even now, whenever he sees himself ranked (highly, of course) among the country’s best rappers, he has mixed feelings. ​“If a beat’s on, I’m rapping. I’m just going to rap. But also, I don’t get that sense of needing to posture as a rapper. So maybe I miss out on the freestyles that I should have done, or I don’t do the sets that I should have done. As much as you could have bangers or whatever, tune-wise, a lot of the time people are solidified by that one random verse that they put up somewhere.” 

Part of that positioning, he suggests, could be down to the way he first presented himself to the scene and to the world. He’s less self-critical these days, but he does question some of his earliest efforts: “[My freestyles] were too sporadic. I would do one Hardest Bars freestyle, come back two, three years later and I’ll do a GRM freestyle. Then also, because I didn’t know how to rap at first, a lot of my earliest opportunities on these things, I was terrible.”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kojey came from a spoken word background. For much of those early years, he was quite literally learning on the job. ​“I was drawing, painting, skateboarding,” he explains, ​“but I was also listening to riddims, collecting music and stuff. I was a weird little kid just doing shit. I found poetry, and through poetry, I found music. That then led me to be like, ​‘Okay, how do I make my poems more rhythmical? How do I rap?’ I’m learning that out loud while everyone’s looking at me like, ​‘This kid’s super interesting. He’s different,’ or whatever. Cool. ​‘Let’s put him on the BBC.’ Cool. ​‘Let’s put him on this. Let’s put him on that.’ I’m practising the whole night before how to stay on beat, bro! Lyrically, no one ain’t talking to me, but I needed to figure out how to deliver that the right way.”

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“I was good at putting a concept together in its totality,” he continues. ​“My EPs, my mixtapes, my bodies of work, and they were cutting through. Anytime I dropped an EP or a mixtape or whatever, they were cutting through and people thought of them as albums.” Kojey’s ability to structure an album, to lay out its arc and build a cohesive narrative, is sharper than ever on Don’t Look Down. On this LP, he speaks of the heights he’s achieved, rubbing shoulders with Nicole Scherzinger and attending Fashion Week parties, but having the weight of fatherhood, the fluctuations of the music industry and expectations placed on him. One wrong move and who knows what could happen?

Most of the album takes place in a party, where the hedonism envelopes him before he steps out to face the sunrise and the crash back to reality. While a lot of Kojey’s previous projects have been politically charged, Don’t Look Down deals with the politics within: an angel on one shoulder, the devil on the next. The politics of navigating through a world of flashing lights that would take anyone a while to get used to. ​“You don’t realise how long you’ve been inside yourself, inside your own mind, inside your own bubble,” he says. ​“And so you step outside yourself and you’re like, ​‘The sun’s coming up.’ And then even though the sun’s coming up, Bossman still has to raise the shop shutters; his life didn’t stop because you were mashing yourself up and getting loose and trying to forget everything, diverting the things that are important. The world keeps spinning. And then, within that, you realise, ​‘Oh, I missed my boy’s graduation. I wasn’t there for the wedding,’ because I’m indulging, I’m living. So you’re going back to those people in hopes that there’s still a relationship there, in hopes that these people will welcome you back into their life. And, sometimes, they don’t.” 

As a man in his 30s, wrestling with fatherhood and trying to have it all figured out, he’s quick to admit that he doesn’t necessarily have it figured out, but, he cautions, this isn’t self-pitying. He hints at the bad decisions that could have led him to hiding away and pleasure seeking, but that was never him: ​“I wasn’t lost. I knew where I was the whole time. It was just a bit murky in the way. It was murky because I made it murky. I saw the water when it was clear and I said, ​‘That might look better with some tequila in it.’”

There’s no self-doubt now, and he is super-focused. Any trepidation has gone, and with a successful run from Cashmere Dreams through Reason To Smile that’s sure to be repeated with Don’t Look Down, he has every reason to believe in himself. ​“It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in myself, per se, but I just always thought there were people so much bigger than me. I’ve been in the game longer or have more followers, clout, stream, whatever. And if they couldn’t, why would I be able to do it? But then… I did it.”

Joseph ​‘JP’ Patterson is the founder of TRENCH and the editor-in-chief of Complex UK. Follow him on Instagram.

Don’t Look Down is out September 19 via Atlantic

Additional credits:

Styling by Way Perry

Makeup by Bianca Simone Scott

Assisted by Emily Bulford

Hair by Vee Vickers