Joe James: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

With his deep baritone, blues-tinged grime beats and lyrics bursting with romance and pain, rapper Joe James has been a cult figure in the UK underground – but now, with his debut album, he’s ready to break through

“Being here is mad, man; the memories,” Joe James says, when we meet in Southend-on-Sea. It’s a warm, quiet morning in coastal Essex. An old boy cruises past on a mobility scooter, carrier bags dangling from the handlebars. Above us, a wild criss-cross of red, white and blue bunting flaps in the sticky wind. Joe was born in east London, but his first memories are of a council flat in Shoeburyness, on the eastern fringes of Southend. Now, the 27-year-old rapper’s clear-eyed, philosophical reflections of an adolescence spent at the edges of our cold island have made him a unique voice in the UK scene. 

Joe is a grime kid who writes about love and loss with the clarity of a bluesman, over mellow beats braided with backlit soul loops and pitched-up R&B samples. In this fast-food era of UK rap, where viral hits come and go, and longevity for those outside the cabal of legendary MCs is elusive, Joe feels like an important counterweight. He has no agent, no publicist: just steady, real growth, with raw music painted in shades of blue and pink; like a sunset or a bruise, depending on his perspective. Rapping in an earthy baritone, Joe’s descriptions of drug sales by derelict amusement parks, grow houses on Canvey Island, Basildon boys on the block and tit-for-tat violence in Pitsea reveal a parallel Southend to the outsider’s view of funfairs and fish and chips. 

Southend has a distinct relationship with underground music. In the early 2000s, pirate radio stations Charm FM and Y2K FM battled for supremacy. This feud, and the struggles of local MC Gambit, were captured in an episode of Tower Block Dreams, a 2004 BBC Three documentary series. The episode, titled Ghetto-on-Sea, was the inspiration for the hit BBC TV show People Just Do Nothing. It showed how culture is produced at the margins as well as in the metropolis, and highlighted the sisyphean struggle to make progress when you’re operating in those places.

It’s why Joe’s breakthrough feels so vital. He nods to this in his own music: audio samples from Tower Block Dreams are woven into his track Basvegas, an experimental cut that winds like a hazy, twilight drive down the A127. “I love Southend,” he declares, “but it’s very uniform. It’s a place where if you try and do anything slightly different, people question it. And I’ve always been very eclectic in my tastes.”

When a teenage Joe started writing bars, he’d watch young MCs from Southend like Agrow and SGB on the YouTube channel 140TV. There’s a distinctive, unselfconscious grit to their early freestyles – more sand and salt than concrete. “If you got on there, it was like you’d made it,” Joe remembers. But he also, always, was tuned into London. He blasted grime lords Dizzee Rascal and Trim in his headphones on train journeys back to the East End to stay with his nan. “I didn’t even care if the beat was shit,” he muses. “I just wanted to be sick and spit 300 bars.” For a young man like Joe, MCing was like a purging of the soul.

Joe’s been self-releasing music for the better part of a decade, originally on a SoundCloud page that’s still laced with unreleased gems, like the haunting Skanking With Satan. Much of his earlier work arrived online as sporadic loosies; sonically, he’s as much influenced by Howlin’ Wolf and Dizzy Gillespie as he is by Roachee and Griminal. There’s the gothic noir of 2018’s Afro Samurai and the pulsating grime of 2019’s Restoring Balance; on the latter, he raps, “Realer than most, grew by the coast/ Where the council dump all the youts from metropolis.” 

On 2021 mixtape Jöetry, Joe riffs on his playful, self-proclaimed genre tag, “R N Joe”, drawing from a childhood soundtracked by his mum’s UK garage compilations and his favourite melodic Ruff Sqwad instrumentals; blues, jazz and soul bleed into it all, too. There’s an energising kind of melancholy across these styles that speaks to him, and a live musicality that he’s experimenting with in his own work. “It’s all pain, innit,” he says. “Sometimes I describe my music as blues because of that.”

In the last two years, he’s released eight solo projects and a joint EP, the latter with trapsoul prince AirBorn Gav. Of these, 2023’s eight-track release Who Dares Wins felt like a key moment. Previously, Joe would trawl YouTube for beats to rap over, but on this EP he worked with producers Elevated and Jens Müller. He even teased it with an announcement, bucking his trend of dropping projects out of the blue. That same year, he was also the standout voice on mellow grime godfather KwolleM’s album Melo; this April, he collaborated with producers Oakland and Wilfred, whose own mellow grime edits regularly go viral, on the Love Riddims EP. 

Much of Joe’s music, like 2022’s Crawl EP, sits in this lane; grime-tinted but chilled, more like a summer breeze than a thunderstorm. “My mum loves garage, innit,” he explains, reflecting on the foundations of his sound. “I feel like she’s the reason I got into grime, through garage.” This ‘mellow’ interpretation of grime involves laying a classic grime acapella over a soulful, warm bed of sound. For old heads, it’s a callback to sticky dancefloors and reloads. For gen Z listeners, it’s a fresh take on a sound that’s now older than they are. Joe’s deep, smooth voice is the perfect foil for these tranquil productions, and through his friendship with KwolleM, he’s been there since its inception, shelling fresh verses: “If you’re talking mellow then you gotta say me/ ‘cos I was doing this when them man were dabbing,” he quips on Love Riddims’ Scandalous.

At a Joe James show you’ll find grime kids, Essex boys, fashion heads, people from the roads and young parents. It also doesn’t hurt that he is, well, very handsome. This June, 500 vinyl presses of Jöetry and its follow-up, Bruce, were snapped up from his website in 30 minutes. Last year, with no agent or promoter, Joe sold out back-to-back headline shows at London’s Lower Third and Village Underground. When we meet, Joe’s riding the wave of his debut festival slot at All Points East, where he performed to thousands. “It was beautiful,” he says, with a gap-toothed smile, “and quite overwhelming, actually, seeing all those people.” Festival-goers from Southend approached Joe, eager to meet one of their own. 

This winter, Joe will release his debut album, TENE (The Ends, Never Ends). It features Connie Constance and Hak Baker; brilliant observational storytellers who have reshaped English indie and folk music around their own experiences with a punkish edginess. The album represents an evolution in Joe’s creative process. “I’ve been going to the studio and working with my boys who are producers, who play instruments,” he explains. “We’ve been building everything from scratch.” 

This is a bold leap for Joe, who has no formal musical training. It’s an extension of the independence that has defined his journey in music so far. “I’m finding you can fine-tune a song more,” he continues. “Now it’s tailor-made. I can say, ‘I don’t like the sound of this kick. I don’t like this clap. I want these strings.’ I’ve got full control over everything now.”

Lyrically, Joe’s pushing himself into vulnerable new spaces. Bitter Street Symphony pairs Joe’s reflections on the futility of street violence with an orchestral arrangement. Papercuts, meanwhile, finds Joe weighing up the spiritual cost of chasing money: “A lot of people got hurt for this fucking chain/ And now I carry it with me, all their pain, I just carry it with me,” he raps over drums that thump like a heartbeat. There’s a lucidity of thought and distinctly British feeling to this autobiographical storytelling; you can see the lasting impressions of Dizzee Rascal’s bars about paranoia and bravado, the brutal honesty and sensuality of Amy Winehouse and Mike Skinner’s tales of love and loneliness. 

Walking down Southend High Street, the memories flood back: he’s 13 years old, and another boy says something that burns his youthful pride, spoiling for a fight; punches are thrown and Joe gets the better of him, twice, but the fight ends when he’s blindsided by a headbutt; Joe leaves with a split lip. He narrates this anecdote as if the adrenaline is still coursing through him. Violence is by no means a constant in his music, but its presence lingers like a cold mist. Across KwolleM’s 2020 c2c mixtape – an ode to the train service that connects Southend with London – Joe shapeshifts, as the playful romance of his bars is interspersed with violent bursts.

A sense of brotherhood runs through his lyrics. “When you all come from the same volatile environment, you know you won’t leave each other behind,” he says. “It’s like being in a regiment together in the army – you survive by looking after each other. You can’t do the lone wolf thing. I ain’t got many people, but the ones that I’m close to, I’ll die for them,” he says, without a shred of doubt in his voice.

Through his lyrics, we get to know Joe’s friends: their names, their personalities and their fates. “I just happen to be the person that raps in my circle of friends,” he explains. “I’m telling stories for all of us. It’s like we’re one entity. My people are telling stories vicariously through me, and for the people that aren’t here anymore, who have helped shape who I am today, I will always be speaking about them in my music because they’re always on my mind.” 

As we walk, Joe points out where there once stood a joke shop, known for selling young people real knives. Along Marine Parade, the New York, Monte Carlo and Las Vegas arcades, empty now, glow like neon palaces as the sun goes down. “If you’re not from here, it’s like, ‘Come to sunny Southend,’ but for the people who live here, it’s not like that,” he explains. “But even with madnesses going on this way,” Joe turns towards the streets behind us, “having the sea right here is very freeing.”

He found freedom through creativity, too. When he was four years old, Joe was diagnosed with ADHD. He loved making up stories and pairing up rhyming words. “The same feeling I get now when I write lyrics, I used to get it then,” he says, smiling. “It’s hard to describe the feeling in words. It’s like I’m painting a picture in my head. I can see its colours and textures, and I want everyone else to see it.” 

He remembers the joy of being asked to read his stories out loud in the classroom. He also remembers the lethargy and tics brought on by his ADHD medication, before his mum stopped him taking it. After being expelled, he moved on to a specialised secondary school in Birmingham – his last chance at completing an education – which meant long stretches of time away from home.