Caxton Press is one of Snuff's musical projects. This video features Sanford Walk Housing Coop itself! So hit play and read on...
The San: How did you first become interested in Hip-Hop?
SNUFF: Most things happen by chance. I grew up in Belfast, experiencing the troubles - that's a whole story in itself - when I was about thirteen I came across the Belfast City Breakers. They were all in town throwing down b-boy moves, with their lino and their beat box. I just thought it was cool as fuck so I started hanging about with them.
One thing I liked about them was that they were a mix of Catholic and Protestant - we were coming from a place that had a serious sectarian divide. My primary school’s playground backed on to the ‘Peace’ wall, I was having petrol bombs thrown over and stuff. It’s rough and ‘tit for tat’ but I always instinctively knew everything that was going on was bullshit. There’s a serious issue with the occupation and the history of bigotry towards the republican community, but still bullshit what us as kids were fighting over when not knowing why, it’s a cycle that’s hard to break. So I was happy that I managed to meet some like-minded people who had some real creative flair.
I left home and school when I was fourteen, I lived on the Falls Road, my family home got petrol bombed, older sisters had moved on, my granda was in hospital and my mum was doing her own thing. So I just disappeared and went and did my own thing too. The Belfast City Breakers were running a youth centre so they kind of took me in. I was raised by b-boys (laughs). One of them, Sconey, had decks. He let me practice with his records, his collection was as education for me. I got funk in my soul but I couldn’t get busy on the floor like the elders, so I channelled my energies into DJing and took it from there.
The San: When did it become your professional life?
SNUFF: Persistence. If you walk a path in life, you're gonna get somewhere if you stick to it. I was already djing at clubs in Belfast in the 90’s. When I arrived in London I started street-teaming for a few events that I’d connected with. Street promotion is easy, you can write “bollocks” on a poster and go out all week with a travel pass and put “bollocks” up all over the city if you wanted to, “most advertising companies already do”. I've got my spray glue, I can print shit out - it's not hard. You just need to have a ‘can do’ attitude. So I went out and did it.
I started an event called ‘Speaker's Corner’ in Brixton. In the lead up to that, I spent a few years djing on the squat party circuit playing reggae and hip-hop and bringing a whole lot of MCs through, it helped me set a foundation but I’d got tired of being surrounded by everything that comes with that scene, the junkies and shit. I wanted to bring what we had to a legitimised platform and help the artists get more recognition. In Belfast we used to have the slogan, “Give Peace a Dance”, everyone was on ecstasy, everyone's mum, granny, child, everybody was just high, myself included, I nearly lost my mind. By the time I came to London, I was aspiring to regain a sense of sobriety. I prefer to be around conscious minds, creative people, talented people, and that's what I’ve managed to surround myself with now.
The San: So you started more professionally in the period Speaker's Corner emerged?
SNUFF: I can't say it was really very professional. I was just doing my thing. I'm not a businessman and I can't get with that way of thinking. I didn’t start the event to make a profit. I started Speaker's Corner out of rage. What tends to get supported in the entertainment world is vacuous and suits the status quo apathy of polite society’s blind indulgence. I was responding to that.
I’d built a strong family through Hip-Hop. I’d been active at a grassroots level, I had my show on pirate radio ‘ItchFM’, and I’d been DJing for a Hip-Hop open mic session in town ‘Deal Real Records’, but still, none of us as artists seemed to be getting a deserving platform, so I found a venue ‘Jamm’ in Brixton and held a free entry, free speech policy. Speaker's Corner seemed like an apt name for it, my brother ‘Manage’ helped me put on the first one, we both felt a real need for it. We had over fifteen groups at the launch and we continued like that every month. It lasted about four or five years. It became notorious. People from all round the country would come down to it. There was no money going in and no money going out, there was a real good energy to it. And it was good for me as well, as a DJ. That platform, and doing something from a genuine motive had a knock-on benefit for me, reputation-wise.
The San: And was that at the beginning of 2000?
SNUFF: That was 2003. In 2000 I was still street teaming and djing for a few popular events, one I used to host with Estelle. At the same time, I was working in a bar in Brixton. I started to get really pissed off not long after 9/11 with the apolitical apathy in the people who were there. They were just putting their credit cards behind the counter, throwing their money about, posing. I grew up in an occupation and I know how the British army and British Empire conduct themselves. ‘Shock and awe’ was the big news story as they murdered 100’s upon 100’s of 1000’s in Iraq live on TV, the gravity of this just didn’t seem to dawn in peoples consciousness. When we were doing Speakers Corner we'd have VJs, visuals and talks as well as the live acts and open mic. I set out to raise awareness and inspire a sense of empathic responsibility in people.
I had to stop Speaker's Corner at the end of 2008. We were running and supporting so many campaigns that we were getting a lot of interest from the police, especially due to our campaigns investigating and highlighting deaths in police custody in Lambeth. As well as this, two of my brothers at Speaker's Corner owned a graffiti supplies store which was under surveillance, and my brother Dark who was djing with us, had his Graffiti crew infiltrated and observed for five years. It was fucking ridiculous - they were using anti-terrorism laws and money to investigate them. They spent over a million on the case and gave 9 of them 2 years each. While this was going on the Police were pressuring the venue we were using to introduce a membership scheme to our event, in order for them to have access to our regular crowd’s details. So I shut it down and went underground again.
We found a place in an arch on Coldharbour Lane and launched with a new name. It was private so we could smoke in there, which was perfect timing because the smoking ban had just hit. One of the MCs who rolled with us had in a lyric, “What we need is a people's army,” so we formed a collective and took the name People's Army. We set out some principles and left the organisation loose. We support all artists as long as they're responsible with their art. Just it being out there has a positive influence. We do some youth work and so on, but we mainly focus on generating a conscious approach to music and inspiring that in others, especially lyrical content.
We ran this event for about a year, Lowkey, Logic and myself were the host. We got more directly focussed on political objectives when we formed the Equality Movement with Jody McIntyre. We created a public forum and held a few discussions including talks entitled: “What is Imperialism?” “How Can We Resist?”, we had a lot of reputable speakers join our panels. After UK Reggae star Smiley Culture was murdered by the police in his home, and with the police then later being cleared of all charges - we held a massive talk at Lambeth Town Hall entitled “Who Polices the Police?” with Benjamin Zephaniah and Merlin Emmanuel on the panel, which we managed to broadcast on Channel 4 as well as bring the entire crowd down to Brixton Police station to each fill out a complaint form.
In 2011 I re-launched Speakers Corner back at Jamm. Now it’s a paid entry event and the venue cover our budget for the artists. We’ve been running some very big events there. The Hootananny in Brixton have me programming line ups twice a month too, goes to show doing the right thing with the right intent pays off in the long run. Now I’m DJing worldwide and making a living off it, working with everyone from Congo Natty to Maverick Sabre to Immortal Technique. Musically right now I’m focused on DJing with a Hip-Hop group called Caxton Press, supporting a video production team called Globalfaction, and continue to support emerging artists.
The San: Do you remember the first time you heard about Sanford?
SNUFF: I had some friends from Belfast living here, some of them turned into smack-heads and got thrown out. There was one girl who used to live on Sanford who had a baby girl. She was a very close friend of mine, at the time she was going out with this guy from Nettleton co-op who turned out to be a cokehead irresponsible arsehole. I came down and helped her raise the kid for the first year before she moved back to Ireland. I was introduced to the street through her, 12 years ago.
The San: Why have you decided to live here?
SNUFF: I really just landed here. I was lucky. It saved my life at the time. I was at the point where I was working and sleeping and working and sleeping and only covering the rent in a never ending cycle of wage-debt-slavery. I ended up having to squat and I wasn’t well equipped for that at the time. Sanford gave me stability and released a lot of pressure I was feeling at the time, freed me up to pursue my own path.
Now, given the opportunity to move to a private place again, I'd turn it down. I'd rather stay here or get land and build my own self-sustainable home, something that's not reliant on the national grid and the whole private landlord thing. How these people get away with charging rent for doing fuck all is one of the biggest scams out there and 99.99% of the population aren't even questioning it. I’m proud of the autonomous self sustainable status of the co-op and much of the work taking place now transforming the car park into an allotment, I wish I could be of more help, I hope to learn a few things about farming this summer. I’m always happy to play a big part in making the FolkUs Festival what it is, that’s something I’m good at.
Sanford as a housing solution is especially beneficial for the more disadvantaged and at risk youth in our community to gain experience in self-organising. This to my understanding from speaking to some of the co-ops founding members was its original intent and purpose. Though to some extent nepotism, and a general disregard for these responsibilities have taken us off this dutiful path. This is one of the reasons I’ve volunteered as an equal opportunities representative.
Still, I’ve been inspired by living in Sanford, and by other self sustainable communities here and abroad to pursue the idea of finding an island to form a Hip-Hop community on by the year 2020, it’s my 20/20 vision. I already have a good team working on it. Watch this space. Thinking big.
The San: Do you also have experience developing your projects outside Europe?
SNUFF: You know End Of The Weak?
The San: Yeah.
SNUFF: Parallel to the time I was setting up Speaker's Corner, End Of The Weak was a weekly open mic night in New York. It launched in 2000 and continues to be the worlds longest running weekly open mic event. We connected through doing the End Of The Weak MC Challenge. I got involved with them because I wanted to showcase British/UK talent internationally. They already had bases in France, Germany, Brazil and Uganda. I got involved with them in 2003 to run the UK chapter of the End Of The Weak MC Challenge. We've won three world titles since then. I’ve since been involved in the organisation of End Of The Weak in Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Czech, Switzerland, Ireland, and all the rest in both local and international affairs. All chapters do a lot of artist exchanges. I tend to get seen as a founder of the movement.
The San: How do you see the engagement of people from the developing countries?
SNUFF: People who suffer more hardship tend to be more appreciative of opportunities. One example, when we were in Berlin during a youth exchange program I’d organised, people from the UK and some of the other European cities were sitting up really late, drinking and talking every night and in the mornings were complaining, “Why have we got to be in the studio at 9am? What the fuck, man!?” like they're being pushed into something at school. But the two kids from Uganda were straight down there. They were on nearly every track, coz studio don’t come easy back home for them. People over here have a lot more access to this type of thing. In the end, It’s a humbling experience for everyone involved, always inspiring.
The San: This summer, you had a major issue with one of your eardrums?
SNUFF: Oh yeah - I had blood trickling out my ear after a gig I did with Snoop Dogg. The doctor told me I was gonna be permanently deaf in that ear. The whole drum exploded inside and ripped apart. They said, “It's not gonna heal. There's no way the tissue can connect back together and heal.” But, four or five months later, my hearing started balancing out. I don't know if it's completely perfect because my voice is louder in my head than it is outside.
The San: How do you perceive it?
SNUFF: I hear a base tone inside my skull. I can hear what I'm saying but I don't know how loud you can hear it (laughs). Which is weird because if I put music on I can hear it clearly - it uses different frequencies. I think it's healed to the point where I have stereo. I haven't been to the doctors since. Some things are psycho-somatic. I think positive, “Of course it's gonna heal!”
The San: You're confident!
SNUFF: Yeah man. I've been mortal for 35 years. I’m not sure if this is my first manifestation. Even if our legacy is welded in to a lead history book, it’ll still eventually turn to dust. The soul remains eternal. Life’s a test of character and sacrifice; we need to show responsibility and discipline in our actions to radiate on a heightened frequency. In this I’m confident.
https://www.twitter.com/djsnuffone
https://www.caxtonpresshiphop.com
https://www.youtube.com/globalfaction
Snuff is going to be at The Amersham Arms from 8pm on Saturday June 9th, with Caxton Press live and a DJ set! Check it out: https://www.facebook.com/events/201046480013298/
The San is Sanford Walk Housing Coop's very own magazine, published intermittently on infinite subjects, from politics to gardening; from hip-hop to boiler maintenance.
