“It marked a new time”: Reflecting on the rich visual legacy of Risky Roadz

In the oughts, DVD series Risky Roadz opened a window into the personal worlds of young grime rappers, showcasing their talent through landmark freestyles and ultimately formulating a visual language for UK rap that remains in place today. Twenty years on from its 2004 debut, Ghetts, Roony ‘Risky’ Keefe, Ruff Sqwad and Aniefiok Ekpoudom map its influence on rap culture

2005. On a grey afternoon in Plaistow, east London, backdropped by a terraced house façade, Ghetts (then known as Ghetto) stares down the lens of a handheld camcorder and raps. “What’s happenin/ Are you really good cuz/ What’s cracklin” he asks over a string-forward, clap-heavy riddim, in one of grime’s most memorable opening salvos.

“At that time I felt like I was the one. The guy, the person. I felt like no one was doing what I was doing in the way I was constructing my music,” Ghetts recalls. Taken from Risky Roadz 2: Ruccus on Road, one of UK rap’s most formative DVDs, that freestyle, performed alongside his former N.A.S.T.Y. Crew collaborator Big Seac, was a visceral expression of talent and one of early grime’s most defining moments. 

“I took [grime music] out of a one-line era into something with more substance with 64-bar freestyles – that freestyle especially. And the one that’s out isn’t even the full one – it’s straight spitting for 12 minutes,” he continues. “So for me, and for a lot of other people, it marked a new time.”

On the other side of the camera, Roony ‘Risky’ Keefe, the DVD series’ creator, knew that he was bearing witness to something momentous. “When we filmed Ghetts’ freestyle, that was my real moment of thinking: ‘Yeah, this is special,’” Roony says. “It’s probably one of the most iconic freestyles in grime. I stepped away like, wow.”

It’s just one of the genre’s several landmark freestyles that Roony captured in 360p and immortalised in the Risky Roadz DVDs – the 2004 original, which celebrates its 20th birthday this year, its second volume, 2006’s The Movement Documentary, and others. In the latter, a joint cypher on east London’s Roman Road brought together many of the scene’s forerunners as Skepta, Wiley, Frisco, Wretch 32 and Ghetts went bar-to-bar, while the late, great Stormin’s acapella Trim diss in Volume 1 will forever be remembered as one of the genre’s best (and funniest) takedowns: “I saw your nan/ In Geneva I saw your nan/ She was whined up by about six man.”

Despite bubbling vigorously on London’s streets, grime remained a largely underground affair in the early and mid-2000s. In an era before YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, before online sharing, artist-to-fan, became commonplace, the genre largely flew under the radar of the UK’s media, rarely capturing the pages of the most widely-circulated music magazines that remained reverent to guitar-led sounds. 

The same largely applied to the national papers, save for moments that reinforced narratives that demonised inner-city, Black, working-class youth. In 2006, the then Conservative Party leader David Cameron accused Radio 1 of playing music on Saturday night that “encourages people to carry guns and knives”, which saw Lethal Bizzle pen an op-ed in the Guardian titled ‘David Cameron is a Donut’. “I’m the voice for the streets; you should be working with us instead of laying the blame on us,” he wrote.

Roony and his Handycam camcorder, then, was many aspiring artists’ first exposure to the worlds of interviews and press. “We learned as they learned,” he says. “It was like the first bit of media training, for all of us – it prepared artists.” 

The series also helped to visualise a sound that had mainly existed on pirate radio airwaves, passed around mix CDs and in dimly-lit raves. “Risky is a visionary,” says Ghetts. “He understood early that TV doesn’t support these guys, so he was like: ‘Let’s make our own TV.’ And that’s genius, it’s amazing.”

That urge to visualise was what gave Roony the idea in the first place. “I had started DJing, old school garage kind of stuff, and I’d got a Saturday job in [legendary east London record shop] Rhythm Division,” he remembers. “One day Frisco came in, and I remember hearing his voice and going to my manager Sparky: ‘Is that Frisco?’ He said ‘Yeah’, and it made me think that if I wanted to know what [rappers] looked like, then everyone does.”

In a sliding doors moment, he picked up the phone and called his grandmother to ask if he could borrow some money to buy a camera. “She sent it, and Risky Roadz was born,” he continues. To this day, the series forms one of the most important historical artefacts and documents from grime’s halcyon days. Every single one of grime’s scene leading artists and crews featured at some point – on top of the previously mentioned, the likes of Kano, JME, Bashy, D Double E, Lethal Bizzle and Giggs all appeared, as well as crews including Roll Deep, Ruff Sqwad, Boy Better Know, The Movement, Slew Dem, Newham Generals, Meridian Crew and many, many more. It wasn’t all about the music – interviews form a key part of the DVDs, which provided fans with insights into the personalities of their favourite artists beyond the bravado of their bars, many of whom were still teenagers.

As with Ghetts in Plaistow, videos were almost always shot in the artists’ local areas – in their homes or studios, at the pirate radio stations they would appear on, or most commonly, out on the streets. Looking back, there’s a DIY rawness that still stands out; the very first shot of Risky Roadz Vol. 2 features a man changing a punctured tyre on his car while God’s Gift asks: “What’s that all about fam?” 

In capturing the sounds of its streets and the musicians on them, Risky Roadz forms a vivid portrait of London life just after the turn of the millennium. Random street encounters with strangers are caught on tape, as are pre-viral fame rappers moving through the city, taking the Tube and walking along London’s streets as they usually would. “They’re beautiful time capsules of London, in a specific time and space. And I think the music scene at the time wasn’t as self-aware, so you can have these really intimate and raw moments captured on DVD,” says writer Aniefiok “Neef” Ekpoudom, author of new book Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, which traces the history of UK rap and MC culture with the social history of Black communities in Britain. “Risky Roadz was this direct look into the lives of these musicians.”

The ordinariness of the situations documented is what makes them so powerful. “It was probably a normal day, we were just doing what we were passionate about,” says Prince Rapid of Ruff Sqwad, reflecting on their shoots with Roony. “Being with your guys, riding up and just doing what you do, which was MCing.”

But perhaps the most memorable moments, and the most enduring, are the freestyles. “Every few weeks, it seems like there’s a different clip from Risky Roadz that goes viral,” says Neef. “There’s the famous clip from The Movement DVD with Skepta and Wiley, and you see that being shared over and over. There are remixes of it with alternative productions. Exposing grime to the world, and exposing the versatility of the musicians, is a big, big legacy of Risky Roadz.”

Both its impact and reach helped to formulate a visual language for UK rap that remains legible today. As grime grew in popularity, and YouTube embedded itself as a centrepiece for music sharing, online platforms like GRM Daily (formerly Grime Daily), SBTV and Mixtape Madness picked up where the early DVDs left off. Watch any drill video from the last few years, with a rapper surrounded by their friends, spitting into a camera, and you’ll see the legacy of Risky Roadz.

“Risky Roadz and [Jammer-run MC clash DVD series] Lord of the Mics set a blueprint for genres that would come up. A lot of the biggest UK drill artists got big from freestyles – think of Digga D on Next Up? by Mixtape Madness. Those freestyles are essentially the same format,” says Neef. “It’s one of the distinctions that you can have between British rap and US or French rap – how vital those kerbside freestyles are to the scene, but also how they can change a young person’s life in an instant. There are so many examples of one freestyle changing the whole momentum of someone’s career, like Dave’s Warm Up Session on SBTV was a big catalyst for his career. Those [online platforms and DVDs] are very much interconnected.”

“That aesthetic lives on. I think it’s become part of British music culture,” agrees Roony. “Obviously in council estate surroundings, that aesthetic lends [to the music] perfectly because it can be glossy, but also very lo-fi and you can get away with it. It’s a way of making the best of what you have to achieve the success you need – that’s what it was all about.”

Just over a month ago, on the final Saturday night of June, Prince Rapid takes to the stage of NOWHERE – an intimate stage in Glastonbury Festival’s late-night, demented circus-reminiscent Shangri-La. Alongside him are fellow Ruff Sqwad members Slix and Dirty Danger. They’re playing the Risky Roadz 20th birthday party celebration, sharing a bill with Oblig & Frisco, Kurupt FM, Jelani Blackman, and backed by DJ Target on the decks. The mood is celebratory, as the group spit over a slew of old Ruff Sqwad classics, including Together, Xtra and Functions on the Low. Also onstage is Roony, camera in hand – of course – capturing the moment as they work the crowd. 

It’s a full circle moment; a chance to celebrate Risky Roadz’s legacy. “There’s so much history between us – [Roony] designed one of our first mixtape covers, he designed one of my vinyl artworks and he’s been one of the people in the background of the scene for so many years,” says Rapid. “So it made so much sense to come together after so many years.”

Since altering the course of UK music culture all those these ago, Roony has continued to produce Risky Roadz-related content. His Grime Gran series and Channel 4 TV show put the spotlight on his grandmother who bought him that first camera 20 years ago. Later, the 2021 documentary, Risky Roadz: 0121, took viewers into Birmingham’s bubbling rap underground. Glastonbury Festival is a stocktake of how far he, and many of the musicians he has documented, have come.

“It makes me very proud to be here after 20 years,” says Roony. “Still opening new doors, pushing new boundaries and taking grime and Risky Roadz into new places. I think all of us have seen it grow from a time when nobody wanted to know [about grime]. Now we’re taking it into these big establishments. Who knows where we go next?”