On the mixing desk sits a book on Frank Gehry's architecture, while the far corner is dominated by a gargantuan bean bag, apparently fashioned from the skin of a dead muppet. Outside the sliding glass doors, Tinie has a child-sized Lamborghini, which he's planning to use in an upcoming video.
Sinead Harnett was here the other day. The studio has been Tinie's second home since He recorded his million-selling debut Disc-Overy here. And it's where he's been obsessing over his third album, Youth, for more than two years. The record has suffered a number of delays as the star revised and refined the tracklist.
Part of the problem was that, after five years of success, he'd lost touch with his roots. Move back into your mum's house. Take all your stuff and live your life from there. It would just be too annoying.
So what I did instead was make sure I met up with all my friends and did the things I did before this all happened. You can hear it in the music. There's a playfulness and warmth that was missing from Tinie's second album Demonstration, which found the rapper struggling to come to terms with fame.
He symbolically scratched his eyes out on the cover, fearing he'd become too much of a "personality". Look at the likes of Stormzy and Dave - there's a plethora of British rappers. It's an accepted genre now. It means something to British culture on a mainstream level. Part of this story. View Event Info. He's a quick learner. The eldest of four children, Tempah was always destined to become a formidable lyricist, excelling in school and charting a course to Oxford or Cambridge University before a life in rap took over.
Tempah even took his name from a classic piece of writing. Yet buying this studio was part of an even grander plan. Why just have your own space, he thought, when you can be your own record label, too?
Surely, the smart thing is to cut out the person in charge — who can often see artists as disposable products fulfilling a current market need — to control your own destiny?
This small, two-floor building then is the engine room of his business, Disturbing London, where he signs and develops his own artists, works on his clothing label and even designs the album covers. Parlophone essentially has a distribution and PR deal. Almost every other aspect of his career is self controlled by him and his team, which has grown to 30 people. The first thing Patrick Chukwuemeka Okogwu Jr decided had to go was the name.
School was where his music career started really, and his first audiences were his mates. Come playtime, he would trot out to the playground and perform in front of them. Unlike the other would-be pop stars performing at lunch, his sessions were meticulously well planned — he would rap to lyrics printed out from his computer and, when he was done, carefully place them back in a ringbound folder that he nicked from his mum. While he was building up a collection of songs he did well academically, too.
Yet rather than take his reward, he took another gutsy decision, and decided to delay enrolling to work on his music. In the summer holidays a few people would take an interest and I would go from collective to collective. So I put my song Wifey on there and it went to the top of their chart for ten weeks. Firstly, Wifey was far ahead of its time, ditching the kind of brutal song lyrics delivered by American rappers of the time and replacing it with the kind of sweet, very British, slice-of-life observations that would propel Arctic Monkeys to superstardom.
Secondly, the reason he was able to afford to make a music video at all was because he financed the thing through part-time work selling double glazing. He stood out further still by staying behind for hours after every show, signing autographs and having photos taken with his fans.
Then one night I went to Odeon and some big guy runs out to talk to me and it was him. He had his own house and car and so I was super impressed. He became my manager, bought me a phone and helped me set up my own label, now called Disturbing London. Undeterred, he decided he could make a living from management, and so found out all he could about the profession from books and the internet. When he eventually signed Tinie, he invested his student loan in his career — he was studying a degree in sports science at the University of Greenwich at the time — and made more money by buying old cars, doing them up and selling them on at a profit.
And what Tinie may not have realised back then is that Dumi was using a bit of creative license of his own. Rather than just turn up, Tinie and Dumi made their own luck one final time: the rapper had been keeping a blog called Milk and Two Sugars — you can guess why — as well as his YouTube account.
The field was packed when he performed but, crucially, emptied out almost immediately after his set ended. After word spread, six different labels had serious discussions about signing him up but he turned them all down — finally signing a deal with EMI on October 7th, Why did he choose them?
Because they were the ones prepared to travel down to his studio.
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