words Rob Boffard

For the last few years, Skitz has had a fairly standard routine. Getting up at around 7.30 every morning, his priority has been his son: getting him dressed and getting him to nursery. Then he returns to house and brews a cup of tea, whereupon he walks down the hall to a room that functioned as an office, spare room and toyroom.

Booting up his Mac Powerbook, he checks some emails, takes a sip of tea, and starts making beats. His setup at home is fairly minimal: his computer, a keyboard and an external soundcard. He’ll bang out ideas (and work on the ones that stick, he says) until mid-afternoon when his son comes home. Every so often he’ll go up to a big studio in London or Reading and spend a night working on a tune. And that’s about it.

And then suddenly, a few months ago, the routine changed and things got really busy. All those beats that Skitz had been spending his mornings on since 2005 or so began to coalesce. The result is Sticksman, Skitz’s second album and followup to his much-celebrated debut Countryman. It doesn’t sound like it was put together in a selection of early mornings with a cup of tea; it sounds like something King Tubby and Coxsone Dodd would have spent long, long nights working on in Studio One. It is unreasonably good.

“I make a beat really quickly, and I know pretty much immediately whether it’s working or not,” says Skitz of his morning routine. He’s been super-busy lately, scuttling up and down the country for shows, and is currently on a crackly phone line as he drives down to London. “I’d say for every beat that works, there are fifty that get put on the wayside…there’s an archive of little ideas, but none I want to give to people. People always ask me to give them one of my throwaway beats but that’s not really how I work. I will work through a beat, take it all the way and spend a lot of time on it and get right.”

“People say, knock out a remix for me, but I spend a lot of time on it. I spend a lot of time mixing, a lot of time on each individual sounds, creating space for each individual sample. I don’t make a beat in two hours and give you a remix. People don’t understand the amount of time and effort that goes into one tune.”

Countryman was such an iconic album in UK hip hop that when Skitz went quiet in 2007 – after he’d left his radio show on BBC 1xtra, of which more anon – his absence was felt.

Nary a peep has been heard from him on record until this year. So it’s a good thing that not only is Sticksman an excellent album, but that it reads like a wish list for UK rap heads. Sure, Rodney P is there, but so is Deadly Hunter, Harry Shotta, Orifice Vulgatron, Mr Ti2bs and even Masta Ace, Wordsworth and Kardinal Offishal to round things up. Skitz’s beats are the backdrop, but Sticksman would have lived and died by its guests, and it shows just how much time he put into producing the tracks – as opposed to just knocking out beats.

Talking to Skitz, it seems that Sticksman is as much about closing the book on the past few years as it is about putting out fresh music. For one thing, he’s completing his Gods trilogy: in the wake of Fingerprints and Twilight comes Requieum Of The Gods, a four-beat monster that stacks Shotta, Orifice, Ti2bs and Dynamite MC onto one huge track. It’s a fitting way to go out.

Skitz says that he really wanted to wrap up that sequence of tunes; he’s in a different place, and needs to take new directions. “The actual lineup changed quite a few times,” he says, commenting cryptically on the track. “Originally, I mastered the tune with MCD on it before Dynamite was on it. And then MCD didn’t want to be on it anymore – he had his reasons – so I took him off and put Dynamite on it.”

And then there’s ‘Struggla’, the firestarting lead single which puts Rodney P and Skitz back together (with a choice hook from Kardi and a Skibadee verse to even things out).

“Me and Rodney are always in each other’s pockets, and we have a good working relationship,” says Skitz, when asked how the dynamic between he and his MC partner has changed over the years. “We’re good friends – I wouldn’t say the closest of friends, but we’re good friends. We know each other pretty well, we’ve both seen each other’s dark sides, seen each other’s moody sides. I’m pretty easy to get on with, and he’s a cool geezer and open to different things. And plus we’ve done so many shows together, so we’re quite close.”

That they have, going up and down the country and travelling internationally to do shows. And for years, they locked down BBC’s 1xtra station, their show Original Fever forming the backbone of an exciting young radio outfit. Skitz created the first tune ever played on the station (which Rodney rapped on). So celebrated was their show and so inseparable were they as hosts that they became one name in the lingua franca of UK rap: Rodneypandskitz.

In 2007, 1xtra canned Original Fever when the station decided to take a different direction. They haven’t worked on radio together since. Skitz says that although he and Rodney were offered several positions at other stations, they felt it was hard to create something new after spending years building Original Fever. He’s appreciative of the BBC, saying that they gave he and P the freedom to play what they wanted in front of a worldwide audience. And although it seems a distant possibility, he hasn’t ruled out a return to the airwaves.

“There aren’t many shows I listen to,” he muses. “There aren’t many that play the hip hop that I love…I’m bored of people not being independent. The creative flair in DJing just isn’t there anymore. They don’t take chances, don’t take risks.”

“That’s the one thing Original Fever was always about was: we just played the music we loved. We didn’t care if it was brand new, if it was old, if people didn’t like it – we played what we liked. That’s what people loved about Original Fever.”

He’s reluctant to mention by name the DJs that have been rotated in and out of 1xtra’s hip hop lineup over the past few years, including Mistajam, the otherwise excellent Sarah Love and Charlie Sloth. “I can’t comment on all the other DJs. Some I like, some I don’t like, some I can’t stand. I don’t listen to many of them, to be honest. More people on Internet radio I’d listen to now, to be honest. If you’re playing it with passion and that passion comes across…”

In many ways, Skitz has nothing left to prove. After smashing down barriers in both recorded music and broadcast spheres, and maintaining a decade-plus career in one of the most fickle markets on earth, there’s almost nothing left for him to do. Sticksman could have been, by all rights, a lazy effort, an album that rode off his reputation and demanded nothing more from him than a few standard beats. The fact that it didn’t and he didn’t, shows just how important this country man really is.

Now just imagine if he worked nights, too.

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