Rapper Bugzy Malone involved in serious motorbike accident

The Manchester rapper Bugzy Malone, AKA Aaron Davis, is reported to have been seriously injured after his motorbike hit a car on the streets of Bury. CCTV footage showed the 29-year-old’s motorised trike colliding with an Audi.

The footage shows Davis apparently being flung through the air before landing on the road. Further video shot by a pedestrian and posted to social media shows Davis lying on the road bleeding from the face, then being tended to by paramedics and taken to hospital.

His condition and that of the Audi driver are currently unknown. A representative for the rapper offered no comment on his status. The Guardian has contacted the Greater Manchester road-traffic collision unit for further information.

Peers including KSI, Krept of Krept and Konan, and Lethal Bizzle have sent good wishes to the rapper on social media, while some fans have asked why he was out riding his bike during the coronavirus lockdown.

Born in Crumpsall, Greater Manchester, Davis had a turbulent childhood, born into a family that he described as “career criminals”. He went to prison aged 16. On his release aged 17, he became a boxer, and then a rapper, inspired by the influential Risky Roadz DVD series.

Rapping, Davis told the Guardian in 2017, helped him acknowledge “bad anxiety … stuff that I’d never even verbalised before,” he said. “You suffer from trauma from the things that you’ve been through because you come from a poverty-stricken background. There are a lot of us like that.”

Related: Grime MC Bugzy Malone: 'When you're from outside London, you'd better be special'

Releasing his debut mixtape, SwaggaMan, in 2010, Davis’s success helped draw attention to Manchester’s then underground grime scene. His appearance in BBC Radio 1Xtra’s freestyle slot, Fire in the Booth, became one of the most popular videos in the series.

Davis has gone on to have four UK Top 10 albums, including three mixtape releases. The Guardian said of his debut studio album, 2018’s B Inspired: “Considering how far he has come, his assertion that you can ‘live on the street and make it a castle’ on sweeping garage ballad Ordinary People is genuinely inspirational, as is its tale of finding a northern identity where ‘there was Stone Roses and Oasis, but when they were big we were still babies’.”

In July 2019, his single Kilos, a collaboration with fellow Manchester rapper Aitch, became his first Top 20 hit.