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GAIKA interview: 'Stopping drill music is not going to stop the stabbings'

Smashing the system: Gaika talks Corbyn, Grenfell and Windrush
Smashing the system: Gaika talks Corbyn, Grenfell and Windrush

We’re living in this era of the ‘hostile environment’,” says Gaika Tavares, the Brixton-born musician and artist who wants his debut album, Basic Volume, to demonstrably “shift the status quo”.

It’s a phrase that makes you sit bolt upright: an infamous catch-all for enforcing steep immigration targets drilled into the Home Office by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. It has been aired repeatedly recently as the Windrush scandal broke, and the Prime Minister was forced to apologise after hundreds of Commonwealth citizens were told they were living here illegally because of a lack of official paperwork.

“It manifests itself in many ways,” says Tavares, who goes by the name GAIKA professionally. His father and mother arrived in the UK from Jamaica and Grenada respectively. “The other day I came to Stansted airport and I had some bags and a laptop in the line for immigration — not even customs — when a guy pulls me out of the line and says: ‘Where are you coming from?’ I said: ‘Barcelona’. He said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I live here and I was born here’.”

He was questioned for five minutes, and felt like he was being singled out for his ethnicity — especially as everyone else in the line was returning from the same music festival.

“So is this where we’re at? That you’re pulled over before you even get to customs, with a British passport in my hand? It feels like there’s been a shift in what it feels like to be from an immigrant family.”

Rootlessness and the ties that bind are at the beating heart of Basic Volume. The polymathic Tavares is breathtakingly accomplished technically and creatively: Gothic dancehall and industrial synths underpin his resolutely anti-establishment message, with nods to gun and knife violence.

“London music always has an edge, whether it’s punk, grime or drum & bass. It’s not the sunny music you get in Spain. It has this steely edge. It’s a frustrating place. And the music becomes an outlet for a lot of people.”

Cressida Dick can do one, as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got to look at what’s happening to these kids that makes them not value their lives any more.

His message is public: Grip, a track that “salutes” youths armed on the street, is an appeal “to that kid, with a gun in his hand, to say it isn’t the way. But I’m not trying to tell him it’s his fault.” The system is the problem. “Stopping drill music is not going to stop the stabbings,” he says. “[Met Commissioner] Cressida Dick can do one, as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got to look at what’s happening to these kids that makes them not value their lives any more. After the London riots they locked up a generation. A lot of kids are getting out in their early twenties and we have a knife-crime epidemic. What did we think was going to happen when we locked up all these juveniles?”

The solution? Politically, he’s agnostic. “I’m not a Corbynista. I like what he’s doing but can’t understand why Labour can’t mount an effective challenge on what is possibly one of the worst Conservative governments in the history of this country.” But Basic Volume is also a personal elegy. The album’s title is a nod to the UK company founded by Tavares’ late father, a materials scientist, who died last year.

He and his two brothers were raised in Brixton (one is now an MIT research scientist, the other is the film-maker Kibwe Tavares). “Living with somebody who is frustrated and has such high standards was tough. It was: ‘Read this technical book and think about the struggles of black people’,” Tavares says. He attended Wilson’s School, a grammar school in Sutton where “there were about four black people in my year”. Having moved around the grime scene in Croydon since his teens, he studied engineering, then art and design at Salford University and rolled with rap crew Murkage in the city before forging his own path.

In his mid-thirties and now living in Paddington, he declines to give his exact age because “I want young kids who are 18 or 19 to feel the things I achieve are possible for them.”

Basic Volume, therefore, is a muscular rallying cry for disaffected diasporas but it’s only step one in GAIKA’s creative output for the year. In August he’ll debut SYSTEM, an audio-visual collaboration with Boiler Room and Somerset House Studios, a sculpture which fills the middle portion of the Lancaster Room at Somerset House. Moving images from the Notting Hill Carnival’s archive, live feeds from the space and data visualisations suggesting AI tracking and surveillance scatter across the side elevations of the structure on built-in screens.

“We see in Grenfell what happens when selfishness, self-interest and greed come before humanity. And it will happen over and over again until we just stop this,” he says. “It feels like it’s OK to abuse immigrants, to burn them up in a fire — no one cares. It doesn’t matter because they’re black. That’s how it feels. Then you’ve got Carnival, which in the face of that says: ‘You can’t kill me, I’m going to dance in the street’. That becomes part of the country, and part of what it means to be British. Carnival and sound system culture is about space, and holding space. It’s about literally drawing a line in the sand and saying: ‘This is who we are and we’re here to stay. You can’t turn us off’.”

Basic Volume (Warp Records) is out on July 27. System is at Somerset House Studios, WC2 (buy tickets here), from Aug 2, boilerroom.tv