The east London MC was carrying a knife at 11 but is now about to release an era-defining album. The trouble is that it’s the Tories’ austerity era – something he’d rather see the back of
It took being beaten up on London’s Victoria line aged 13, in front of his mum and two sisters, for Jeshi to change tack. “I was sitting on the train, eating McDonald’s; I think we were going to the cinema. I look up and there’s all these guys in front of me. By the time I’d taken my headphones out, they’d punched me.” He chose not to retaliate. “Ego says: go and do something back. But I thought: ‘Who cares? I’m here, I’m alive, there’s no problem.’ I am a rarity in that situation.”
This moment, he says, was “this pivot”, away from a life of retaliatory violence and towards his current career as a strikingly singular rapper. Growing up in a deprived part of Walthamstow, east London, he started carrying a knife aged 11, something that “just feels so normal. You never really leave this two-mile radius where everyone is like you, and you find yourself in situations that are quite fucked up. But when you’re in them you’re like: this is just life. You’re born into situations where you have problems with people you don’t even really know, but you want to kill each other.”
