Nicky Lockett boards a train at Manchester Piccadilly and travels 160 miles to London: a teenage boy in black pyjamas, black shades and a samurai sword across his lap. Where is he going with that weapon? He’s off to compete in the DMC Rap Championships, of course. He gets on stage and hands the DJ his record, with an instrumental B-Side he’s planning on rapping over. But the DJ plays the wrong side, the side with the lyrics — in fact, he plays three wrong tracks in a row. The crowd starts to boo, so Nicky picks up the microphone, points his sword at the DJ, and tells him that if he plays the wrong track one more time, he’s going to cut off his hands. He is promptly disqualified for violent behaviour. “Londoners,” he says of the incident nearly 40 years later. “Absolute twats.”
Nicky is 55 now, his samurai days behind him. He opts for the calm life these days. When I meet him in his Ardwick studio, he’s drinking vodka-Vimto from a Wetherspoons mug. Back in his heyday, he was better known as MC Tunes — a fast-talking rapper who achieved mainstream success through collaborations with 808 State, and cult status with his band The Dust Junkys. Crucially, he was part of a small scene of rappers and DJs who grew up across two neighbouring estates in South Manchester, that would go on to pioneer a brand new form of Northern hip-hop, and some of the best rap ever to come out of the UK.
I first became aware of this scene when I came across the Ruthless Rap Assassins — a rap trio from Hulme credited with planting the seeds for grime, with their debut Killer album described by The Face as both the first and the greatest rap record Britain ever produced, “in light of the fact that almost everyone else has been chasing Brooklyn’s coat tails, affecting phoney New York accents, and trying to pretend they were born on the other side of the ocean”. While East Coast hip-hop evidently had a strong influence on the group, there’s something uniquely Mancunian about their sound: the broad accents slipping into occasional American inflections; lyrics about the Windrush generation and their experiences of racism in the North; a rough, DIY sound born of minimal equipment and training; and a broad range of influences resulting in a style of lyricism that fluctuates between the humorous and the highly considered. They even came up with a name for their pioneering genre — The North Hulme Sound — a title so provincial as to be almost comical. How many high-calibre rappers could there possibly be from North Hulme? My search for affiliates of the genre quickly yielded a number of possible names to pursue: Jonny J, Davey C, Prince Kool, Gerald Simpson and MC Tunes, aka Nicky Lockett.
“Yeah I know Kermit, Carson, Anderson,” says Nicky, listing off the names of the Rap Assassins. “I grew up with them all.” My pursuit of the North Hulme Sound takes me slightly further south than you might expect, when I discover that throughout most of the 1980s, Nicky and Rap Assassin brothers Carson and Anderson Hinds lived directly opposite one another, the former on an estate in Rusholme, the latter on an estate in Moss Side. The three of them even went to school together — Nicky fondly remembers having a fight with Carson at the age of 13: “That’s how long we go back.”
Running directly between the two estates was a row of old terraced houses on Claremont Road. Gerald Simpson lived there at the time — a 16-year-old who was soon to achieve international acclaim as electronic musician and record producer A Guy Called Gerald, and with his group 808 State. Nicky tells me how he and the Hinds brothers often gravitated towards Gerald and his family home after school. “Because he was the only guy with turntables and a drum machine,” Nicky explains.
Gerald, on the other hand, remembers Nicky as a talented younger kid growing up nearby — the pair were around 16 and 13, respectively, when they first met. He tells me that one day he was walking past Nicky’s house when, through the walls, he heard the sound of someone practicing drums and was impressed. “I was like ‘What’s going on here?’ ” says Gerald. “I was one of these people that kept myself to myself, but I got in contact with him.” By 1986, the pair had become good friends and were regularly making music together in Attic Studios (otherwise known as Gerald’s mum’s attic), with Gerald cutting and scratching records, and Nicky rapping over the top. In that attic they made their own makeshift hip-hop soundsystem and stored their equipment — PA systems, turntables and microphones — alongside their ever-growing collection of American import hip-hop records. The attic proved a popular meeting spot for all the budding wannabe rappers and DJs of Moss Side and Rusholme, including the Hinds brothers.
I know, you’re probably asking yourself: if Gerald, Nicky, Anderson, and Carson all grew up and met within a 500-yard radius of each other on the cusp of Moss Side and Rusholme, why did the Ruthless Rap Assassins call themselves the North Hulme Sound? When I ask Nicky about this, he becomes borderline irate. He tells me that the culprit is Kermit Leveridge, the third member of the Ruthless Rap Assassins, and the trio’s main creative force. Kermit came up with the name, Nicky claims, and the rest of them simply went along with it. “But I fucking disagree with it!” says Nicky. “Because Gerald’s from Rusholme. Anderson, Carson: Rusholme. Prince Kool: Rusholme. So, fucking Hulme sound? No! Rusholme Sound! One artist from Hulme does not a Hulme Sound make.”
But when I call up all three of the Rap Assassins and put these allegations to Kermit, he tells me, “Tunes is a fucking liar”. (Lest this article breed animosity between the two, I will clarify that this statement, though shouted rather loudly, was made in good humour.) Kermit’s real name is Paul Leveridge, but that doesn’t suit him, and he doesn’t use it, so neither will I. Why is Nicky a liar? Well, for a start, Kermit isn’t even from Hulme. “I’m from Moss Side originally, but my family moved to Whalley Range when my dad got a really good job,” he explains. It was, in fact, Carson and Anderson who grew up in Hulme until the age of 10, at which point they moved to the estate. Carson explains that, even though they began developing musically in Rusholme, Hulme was still a crucial part of their childhood, and their lives.
More importantly, perhaps, the two brothers met Kermit around 1986, while he and Anderson were both living one above the other in the now famous Hulme Crescents: A housing development which Rap Assassins producer Greg Wilson describes to me as a sort of “urban Butlins”. The story of their meeting is oddly similar to Nicky and Gerald’s — Kermit was moving into his flat in the Crescents and heard the sound of Anderson’s music coming from the flat below. The pair of them shared a love of hip-hop, primarily the East Coast stuff, and a particular favourite was KRS-One, who had a track called “South Bronx”, the chorus of which, somewhat unoriginally, consisted of him chanting, “South Bronx, the South South Bronx”. At the time, Anderson and Kermit were both living in North Hulme, “and there were signs all around us,” Anderson says. “You’d have North Hulme playground, North Hulme College, North Hulme this. So we made a joke about it” The group began chanting “North Hulme, the North North Hulme,” at gigs, and it spiraled from there.
But while the Rap Assassins may have begun using the title as a joke, music journalists down in London took it seriously. “Cor blimey, what’s up North?” wrote music magazine Hip Hop Connections in 1991. “We went all the way to Manchester to investigate the North Hulme sound”.
How do the Rap Assassins define the North Hulme sound? “Rough, rugged, raw,” answers Anderson immediately. The three of them explain how they were just kids when they recorded their first album, and their equipment was extremely minimal, forcing them to get creative with the way they made beats, resulting in a unique but primitive sound. “We borrowed an 808 [drum machine] off Gerald at some point,” Anderson says, “but we didn’t really know how to program it.”
Kermit also cites the city itself as a huge influence on the sound: the meeting of minds in the Rusholme/Moss Side estates and at Hulme Crescents, and the Northern accents setting them apart from the London scene. “Everybody else looks towards London, but Manchester’s on its own vibe,” Kermit says. He also suggests that the city’s incessantly wet weather had an impact, forcing people to hang out in each other’s houses, talking and creating together. “That’s what happens in Manchester!” he shouts enthusiastically. “People stay in!” Nicky, on the other hand, simply says that Mancunians are more talented than Londoners (this came shortly after he’d called all Londoners “absolute twats”). “There was a proper rivalry,” he says. “London has got the infrastructure, always has had, but we’ve got the talent. That’s just the way it is.”
But while the Ruthless Rap Assassins’ debut record, the Killer album, was met with unprecedented critical acclaim (Hip Hop Connection called it “the best rap album the UK had ever produced”; and I’ve already quoted what The Face had to say), it was commercially unsuccessful. Producer Greg Wilson explains that the least successful a song can possibly be while still charting is to enter the charts at number 75 and drop out after only a week. “There’s a few artists that have done that,” he tells me. “Rap Assassins did it twice.”
Kings of Rap trading card for the Ruthless Rap Assassins. Photo: Greg Wilson via Manchester Digital Music Archive.
Why the lack of commercial success? Everyone I ask — Greg, Gerald, Nicky, the three Rap Assassins — answers with the same two reasons: the overshadowing of Manchester’s hip-hop scene by the indie and rave scenes, and institutionalised racism, though it would be wrong to separate the two. “[Hip-hop] wasn’t viewed — and it should have been, very much so — as part of the whole Manchester thing,” Greg says. This viewpoint is reinforced by the fact that Kermit only achieved mainstream success after the Rap Assassins parted ways, when he joined Mancunian indie heroes Shaun Ryder and Bez in forming Black Grape — a band objectively worse than his former rap group.
“They were pushing Manchester as an indie city,” says Carson, “but there’s a lot more to us than that.” Kermit agrees: “We were a hip-hop city. We had a certain tilt in our walk.”
Gerald adds that the black musicians of Manchester never had the same “leg up” as the indie scene received from Tony Wilson. He lists a number of exceptionally talented black Mancunian musicians who never got the credit they deserved, primarily black women: Rowetta from the Happy Mondays, and Diane Charlemagne from 52nd Street, who he describes as the city’s own Billie Holiday. “For some reason, Manchester always seemed to fail when it came to black British people. It was a pattern. They’d get one chart record, and they’d disappear.” Why? “Because they were black,” He answers. “I can’t really find another way around it. Cause they had talent, and they had energy, but something was holding them back from success.”
Interestingly, Gerald counts Nicky among these systematically overlooked musicians, despite him being the one white rapper in this tale. This is because Nicky insisted on bringing other, black musicians from the estate up with him, Gerald argues, and the record producers didn’t like that. Nicky agrees that racism was a major part of the scene’s failure, but he can think of another reason, too. They were all basically children at the time, and there was no one around them who took control, who turned their talent into a proper, marketable scene. He argues that this is the one failing of Manchester in comparison with London: that we haven’t “got our shit together”. “Cause [in London] they would have built a whole industry around us. There would have been a club, there would have been a studio,” he says. “That’s how you start a scene, a culture.”
He explains that by a certain point in your career, you either signed a record deal and went to the capital, or you were done — a point again enforced by the fact that Gerald Simpson, who headed down to London as soon as he could, achieved by far the most commercial success of the group. By the late 90s, the Manchester clubs and venues that were supporting the hip-hop scene — The Strawberry Club, Legends, Adam and Eves, and Sneaky Fox — were being shut down one by one, and the entire Manchester music scene was being squeezed into the city centre. “It was, like, where do we go now?” says Nicky. “We might as well do fucking house music.”
Despite feeling that Manchester never supported its rappers in the way that they deserved, Nicky’s still grateful to have been a part of the hip-hop scene here, rather than the mediocre one in London. “I just think, Mancunians, we’ve got it,” he says. “London has got people willing to put money into things, but we’ve just got it.”
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