You might have just missed Kid Acne & Req One's whistlestop 10 date tour of England & Scotland.
Fortunately I didn't and made it along to the 'alternative' Supersonic Festival at Brum's excellent Custard Factory. Finding a moment and some peace and quiet between the giant tree man and the dragon (CF regulars know what I mean) I grabbed some words with the man to discuss the music and art in his life...
Ok then, explain who you are and what you do
I’m Kid Acne, I’ve got a new album coming out called ‘Council Pop’, I paint, I draw fantasy art, I MC and Req One’s my producer and we’re on tour promoting the album.
It’s your 2nd album, both are on the Invisible Spies label which is something to do with you as well?
Yeah, we run the label, me, Supreme Vagabond Craftsmen, whose new album is actually coming out on Twisted Nerve, and our group, Toah Dynamic. Basically the members of Toah Dynamic run the label. It started off as Invisible Spies being the heading for all the different things we were doing - films, bands, graffiti and that, kind of like the name for our crew but not just graf or hip-hop people. We used it as the name for the label when we started it properly in 2000. Before that we put out a few 7”s.
You find yourself on tour, ending tomorrow night. How have you found it? Is this your first proper organized tour?
Yep, chauffeur driven, staying in stately homes, it’s been good. We stayed in some place in Yorkshire for a couple of days. The game keeper took us out to see the badgers and deer so we were hanging out with some wild life for a bit which was nice.
Have they been straight up hip-hop shows because tonight in Birmingham is a bit more of an alternative thing.
Req’s got his new Warp album out and I’ve got a track on that, it was actually one of the first recordings we did about 4 years ago, so I’ve got bundled in with his live set basically. There’s another MC, Remark who used to be in a group called Deliverance a few years ago and Chase, our beatboxer, so there’s the four of us. It goes Req’s set into my set. The audience has been a mix of hip-hop and electronica people I guess.
so that's what's inside the TTC album sleeve...
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I noticed the set for tonight is scheduled for 2 and a half hours..
My live set’s like a standard 40 minutes, so there’s a lot of Djing and other bits. Req has his peddle set which runs for an hour and incorporates Chase on the beats too.
What’s been the best show on this tour then?
Leicester last night.
The home coming show?
Pretty much, I’m from Leicestershire anyway. It was in this really old Phoenix Nights type venue, Peter Kaye has actually played there a couple of times, there’s pictures of Jeremy Beadle on the wall and things, shaking hands with the owners, well his good hand. It was a wicked set up.
Where do your influences come from because there’s a big difference between your solo material and the Toah Dynamic stuff?
The thing for me, I got into painting when I was about 12. I was into rave music at the time and then I got into hip-hop, but my brother and all his mates weren’t really into hip-hop. The people I was hanging out with weren’t into painting either. We did a lot of different bands instead, different projects and Toah Dynamic was one that came out of all that. It’s a good outlet to make music, not as a band but as a collective. The last album I played drums on quite a lot of it and I’ve been there as the sort of ‘arranger’, sample finder and things like that. I enjoy that, I mean hip-hop’s great but I cant be bothered to, erm, keep it real for anyone or whatever. You have to just accept the way that you do things and basically this is the way that we do it.
How do you approach doing your solo material then? How’s it differ from working as part of the collective?
The collective is a good way to work, you can bounce ideas off people, same with Supreme Vagabond Craftsmen, his solo material is very different to Toah Dynamic, there’s another guy called Earl Shilton who has done a death metal album that we put out. All these things are combined in the group project but on your own you have your own personality, your own say, a bit like Wu Tang in a way but obviously its not all hip-hop. As far as my music goes, it’s like my artwork I get influences from outside the genre but present it in the style of hip-hop.
On the art side most recently, people will have seen a heap of record covers and things you’ve done, TTC on Big Dada. Your style is really ‘comical’. Where does that influence come from? It’s quite different, quite unique in that you’ll see a cover and know it’s by you.
That was part of my plan, when I was growing up I was fortunate that I hooked up with Solo One, I met a load of Birmingham writers and then I met Part 2 before he was doing New Flesh and everything. I met a lot of international writers as well. When I was about 15, 16 I realised that I had to have my own style cos if you copy someone, chances are you will meet them one day. Before I started painting I was into drawing cartoons, comics and characters so to me it made sense to incorporate characters I was already doing. They are more appealing to people than B-Boy characters or whatever. They invite you look at the piece basically, to check out the letters. The driving force for me is to have a narrative through each piece of my work. There’s a lot of ‘cool’ or hip-hop graphic design which doesn’t say anything. For me I always like to have a narrative in the image, the same with my lyrics. Rapping for me is an alternative to animation, you’re presenting imagery to people. If its recorded well enough and you’re convincing in your voice then you can give people images to visualise. That’s the way I see it.
Your latest single, 'Radio Music', seems to be just hook after hook, it's quite rambling going off on tangents but there's choice lines in there.
Because me & Req are both graphic artists there seems to be a tendency to be meandering with the music we do as well, it’s just like jamming. On the first album all of the tracks were like 5 and a half minutes long, there's probably as much instrumental as vocal in a song but I like that. Radio Music is just banging imagery in rhyming couplets and that’s it, that’s the song. It all depends on the break really. Radio Music and the flip Hooligan 78 are just like freestyle sets.
On Yer Bike with Kid Acne & Req One
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Are the beats by Req and you just get them off him and do the raps or is there more to it than that?
When we first started doing stuff together we'd make a song in day. On the second album I started going down to Brighton and he'd have beats ready for me that he thought were suitable. I picked the beats that I liked or had an idea for. So really the first album was writing beats for the rhymes and this album is more lyrics for the beats and that’s why I talk about a lot more stuff on this album because it's been influenced by the style of the music.
Tell me about Zebra Face.
There's a Zebra Face book out of a bunch of stories . We started Zebra Face when I used to make fanzines. It started as a one page story in my zine ‘Velcro Grass’ in '95. Then we did a whole Zebra Face zine and it went from there. We had something in Trace Magazine and The Face picked up on it and stuff, by this time we’d been working on the book. It’s been out 18 months, two years now. There's like 10, 12 stories in there, all unpublished before. Supreme Vagabond Craftsmen writes it and I do the drawings. The next step is to animate it and we've got a few people interested in supplying voices - Juice Aleem, Infinite Livez, hopefully Roots Manuva as well. That’s the plan anyway.
And how are you planning to put that out?
Don't know really, it might be part of the next album, like on a DVD or something although I think the third album for me is going to be more of a concept album with the artwork and everything. I’m really into fantasy art, mythology and all this and I want to take it back to that sort of level.
Kid Acne and friends give a cheery hello
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So you do fantasy art as well?
Yeah, it's my angle at the minute. I’m really into that Conan The Barbarian type thing, so I’m researching that at the minute
Women in chain mail bikinis and men with big swords?
Basically yeah, so Zebra Face may be part of that or be an independent project all together. We've got to look at making the theme tune and stuff so it'll be next year before anything happens with that. The book took years to make so to animate it...
So you're just selling the book word of mouth?
It started like that and then we put it out through the record distributor because we're used to dealing with albums. We do everything the opposite way basically, but now you can get it in Europe, America, from websites. It’s very much grassroots but you can get it.
The Kid Acne website doesn’t exist at the moment…
I will be working on that. There is a plan. It’ll be more my artwork, mainly illustrations. It’s all there but just needs to be webbified or whatever.
Where’d the name Kid Acne come from?
Being a teenager basically. I like the symmetry of the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ and lower case and all the rest of it. When I started making hip-hop I came up with Kid Acne.
So Kid Acne's the music angle?
Yeah although I paint as Kid Acne now. Kid Acne’s like my professional name. It kinda determines the style in a way. I think, certainly with hip-hop you have to be pretty juvenile anyway cos it’s just like showing off, talking about girls and all the rest of it.
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Part 2
Kid Acne
