On Friday 19 May 2023, Potter Payper’s debut album, Real Back in Style, went in at No 2 in the official UK charts. By releasing a slew of classic mixtapes over the last decade, the 32-year-old had built a reputation as one of the most skilled writers in UK rap. On paper, the album was a career high, achieved against the odds.
First, it has no guest features. Rappers often use collaborations to maximise their streaming audiences, but not this time, no need. The album’s binding style, introduced by the singles Blame Brexit, Multifaceted, Corner Boy and White Ash, upheld its creator’s formula of undiluted hip-hop, avoiding any urge to chase a softened sound for primetime radio play.
“I’m never looking for the next hit. It’s always just my expression, and I don’t like to waste it,” says Potter Payper, real name Jamel Bousbaa. We meet at a recording studio in Camden Town, north London, where he arrives with a younger sibling who has just received their GCSE results. He tells me proudly about how well they’ve done as we take our seats in the kitchen.
Most remarkable was Real Back in Style’s timing, days into a two-month spell for Bousbaa at Pentonville prison. It was his 15th time inside since his early teens, and a return he thought he’d never make, given his meteoric rise as a commercial artist since he was last released in 2020.
I am told by his PR before we meet that he doesn’t want to share why he was arrested – it’s the only topic of conversation off the table. I gather that after years of being an open book in his lyrics, he’s preparing to batten down the hatches, avoiding media judgment until things have calmed down. Nonetheless, he hints at wrong-place-wrong-time circumstances.
“I’d been back in the country eight or nine hours. I’d been on holiday in Morocco for a month doing Ramadan. I went to get some food, I was with my mate in a car, and for whatever reason the police wanted to stop the car, and they sent me to jail. But they had to let me go because it really wasn’t anything to do with me,” he says.
As fans digested the latest chapter of his storytelling – a home blend of sensitive autobiographical woe and raspy braggadocio laid over crisp, cinematic production – Bousbaa sat in a cell studying Stoic philosophy to ward off negative thoughts. Others on his wing checked on the album’s progress. Prison officers came by to congratulate him on its chart position.
“It was like a kick in the nuts, that’s the only way to describe it. I was on such a smooth path,” he sighs, lighting up on a heated toaster. “I got through it. I was on the phone every day to the team, making sure they did what needed to be done.” Meet‑and-greet pop-ups with fans took place across the capital, but without their star. An operation months in the making was thwarted.
“Coming out and being here now … it’s underwhelming, in reality. I understand that I’ve been making mistakes all my life, and it’s been costing me all my life. Without getting too emotional about it, I missed a massive moment,” he says. “Forget the success of it. Forget how it was received. My debut album release … I wanted to be a part of that, to feel it.”
Born in 1991 to an Irish mother and Algerian father, Bousbaa was raised by his grandmother, Nanny Lucy, on the notorious Gascoigne estate in Barking, straddling east London and Essex. Much of his lyricism, old and new, amounts to a brutally candid portrait of these years: “When I was little I weren’t scared of the Boogeyman / I was scared of scumbag police in a bully van,” he begins on When I Was Little. “Hitting robberies on Ilford Lane where the hookers hang / Tryna get those kicks Nanny said that I couldn’t have.”
“It was London estate living, but with added brokeness,” he says. “I grew up around a lot of drugs, a lot of violence. I became desensitised to a lot of stuff very early and was geared towards having the capacity to fulfil a role as a drug dealer who could be violent to survive and thrive in that kind of environment. That’s what was necessary. Now, looking back, I ask myself: if I have a son, would I want him growing up like that? The answer is: hell no. But I grew up in a different time. My parents were immigrants, each escaping their respective traumas.”
Having fair skin meant being a minority in a migrant community, yet Bousbaa carried an Islamic name in a part of the country rampant with white nationalism and racism. He was entangled in a web of identity crises from birth. “It was always: ‘You’re not Black, you’re not white,’” he says, noting that, even now, he self-identifies as African, but not everyone sees him that way. “I struggled with who I was and where I was from.”
Family breakdown overwhelmed him. “Cold nights sleeping on the ground floor / I don’t hate my father, I just wish he was around more,” he raps on one of his earliest and most celebrated songs, Purple Rain, later adding: “’99 they said my mummy went on holiday / I found out that my mummy was in Holloway.”
But between playing out with friends and his grandmother’s love, life could also be sweet, and language became an escape. In primary school, Bousbaa came across the word “ponder” and asked his teacher what it meant. “They said: ‘It means to think about something.’ I replied: ‘Why not just say: ‘To think about something’, then?’ And they told me that there are different words that mean the same thing. My mind was blown.” He went home and found a thesaurus. His aunt was studying to be a lawyer, and he would steal her university books to learn new words to use around adults. “I used to like being a smart arse. It was an easy way to get a compliment,” he grins.
As a teenager, he was pushed by the forces of poverty and a turbulent home life and pulled by territorial, quick-money pressures towards criminality. He was sent to Feltham young offender institution in west London, a sprawling labyrinth of barred, windy walkways that link wings named after bird breeds – “Just a kid on Eagle, had to miss my people,” he raps – and cells from which you can see the aeroplanes taking off from Heathrow. Over the years, the prison has become a rite of passage for makers of UK rap and drill music.
“Often the people who end up here have left schools that weren’t catering for music. Life could have been different if they’d had that experience,” says Phil Jones, who has taught music at Feltham for 23 years. He remembers Jamel passing through the education department’s doors – one of hundreds he’s seen who would take to rapping. “People might not make a career out of playing an instrument, but it allows them to gain confidence, learn something and get more culturally minded. Music is a lifeline and a competition … a deep therapy that takes them into a zone. The guys who are writing more thinking man’s stuff, they feel they’ve got a duty to do so.”
When Bousbaa arrived, people would gather during “sosh”, or association time, to take turns spitting their lyrics in cyphers. Because he was from east London, the nucleus of grime music’s inception during its golden years in the mid-2000s, he delivered his words faster than everyone else. His peers were more taken with the slow, pronounced flows of what is now labelled “road” or “real” rap – the British equivalent of gangsta rap. Back then it was a hardened, subterranean sound in its infancy, pioneered by regional groups from across the capital such as Northstar, PDC and Mashtown, and later popularised by Giggs, who would become a mentor to Potter in the mid-2010s.
“A mate said to me: ‘Bro, you should slow it down a bit, you can say more and be taken more seriously.’ And all I wanted at that age was to be taken seriously,” Bousbaa says. In between penning long letters to Nanny Lucy – he has a tattoo of her signature on the side of his face – he listened to American rappers such as Styles P and Cam’ron. Over subsequent trips to prison he met teachers who helped him dissect the poetry of Tupac and rhyme schemes of Eminem.
“This teacher said to me: ‘Eminem doesn’t rhyme words, he rhymes syllables.’ Then he showed me on a piece of paper how to do it: ‘That-is-real, mass-app-eal, hands-to-kill.’ I still use that same formula of writing today,” he says. “That’s like my magic, my secret ingredient, but I don’t hoard it.” Being caught in the revolving door of the criminal justice system for the best part of two decades would become a “gift and a curse”, he admits. “I had nothing but time to sit there, write, rap and perfect that, rather than get a job or live real life.”
Potter Payper’s artist name was an accident: his long-held nickname, a reference to everyone’s favourite boy wizard with rimmed glasses, was mistakenly placed next to the word “Payper” in the labelling of a song. He decided to keep it. His friend had the keys to a youth club and encouraged him to start recording there. Bousbaa was offered the chance to do freestyle videos for underground music hubs, catapulting his name into hood fame among music aficionados.
In 2013, he released his debut mixtape, Training Day. Inspired by the DIY attitude of the late California rapper-entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle and the co-founder of Nike, Phil “Shoe Dog” Knight, he pressed up 1,500 CDs and drove around London selling them from the boot of his car. “At that time I thought I was going to the edge of the Earth, but it was probably just Knightsbridge,” he laughs.
The mixtape’s title referenced the 2001 film in which Denzel Washington’s corrupt detective takes Ethan Hawke’s young recruit under his wing. “In the film, my man [the recruit] is naive,” Bousbaa says. “He wants to be the hero. But then he sees that everything he believed wasn’t what it was. It’s ruthless, people are out here for themselves, it’s dangerous. It’ll be the person you’re supposed to trust the most, your partner, who in the end could be your downfall. That was me in the beginning of that street journey. I was just out here on the roads, a little kid, and as it went on I got more and more entrenched in a life that was never really for me. I’m a better musician and asset to the music industry than I ever was a drug dealer.”
The Training Day trilogy would form the backbone of Potter Payper’s subsequent rise. It was shortly after the release of Training Day 2 in December 2016 that he was sentenced to four years in prison for his participation in county lines drugs trafficking (serving two of them). He was a victim of his own lyrics after his brags about drug dealing were used against him in court. This phenomenon was, back then, relatively rare, but has since become normalised as police seem to mine online content for evidence of criminal guilt and gang membership.
In 2020, Training Day 3 came out on the same day that Nanny Lucy died. “It was a massive moment, like a right and a left hook, bam bam,” Bousbaa says, acting out the punches. As he reckoned with loss and new familial responsibilities, his mixtape soared to No 3 in the UK charts. “It completely changed my life, my perspective on how people perceive me, and how people treated me within this industry,” he says.
The following year, he was signed by 0207 Def Jam, the new UK division of Def Jam Recordings. “It was the right move … I needed stability. I just wanted to be legit,” he says. His first mixtape released with their backing, Thanks for Waiting, went to No 8 in the UK charts. Its soulful lead single Gangsteritus, featuring hook specialist Tiggs Da Author, became Bousbaa’s first UK Top 40 hit. It is now his most recognisable and streamed song, its inclusion at the tragic climax of Netflix television show Top Boy season four last year made his voice synonymous with London’s exported street culture around the world.
To help steward Bousbaa as he worked towards his debut album, Kwame “KZ” Kwei-Armah Jr, a multi-award-winning producer who has worked with the likes of Stormzy and Amaarae, and on films such as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was hired as exec and additional producer.
“Words never escape him,” KZ says, of Potter. “He’s one of the best poets I’ve worked with.” KZ brought live musical elements into the studio – horns, strings, electric guitars, drums – to elevate Potter’s words. He was impressed by how Potter was committed to involving his own circle of producers and turned down some big names to finish on his own terms. “We would have meetings about what he wanted, what he wasn’t prepared to compromise on … a lot of people don’t have those minerals. It’s a story of growth and triumph.”
Real Back in Style is British rap at its most raw and refined, simultaneously. Its songs are full of cathartic purging, forensic self-criticism and musings on adapting to life as an unexpected star. “I got mental scars from this shit but we’re living off it,” he cries. “Tenth floor in the stairs, we used to hide from the rain, fell in love with the life just to hide from the shame.” He ponders society’s ills – “Rapping about drillings and they’re killing civilians / Somebody take a look at the children, and heal them” – and his storytelling is gripping and literary: “I waited in the block until I see lights hit the corner / I cut out the back and disappeared into the trauma.”
Like many artists, he has become wary of letting higher powers into his creative process and becoming indebted to financial advances that take years to recoup. “I want to just build my own empire rather than building someone else’s … I don’t ever want to lose myself, and money is one of the quickest ways,” he says. He misses his old, tried-and-tested way of making music and releasing it into the world independently, without the glitz.
This year, Bousbaa has laid verses on other charting artists’ projects: he was one of only a few features on Digga D’s latest album, Back to Square One, and the only guest verse on Manchester rapper Tunde’s Top 10 mixtape First Lap, whose video was shot a week after Bousbaa went to Pentonville and features a phone call from him at the start.
Having launched his own imprint, 36 the Label, and signed veteran south Londoner Fee Gonzalez, Bousbaa says he wants to try his hand at talent-spotting as an A&R. Throughout our interview, in the room next door, Blade Brown has been working on a verse for a song also featuring Skrapz – both top-tier UK rappers – that will contribute towards Bousbaa’s next project. This time, he explains, it will be full of features, demonstrating the breadth and variety of his artistic network. Going forward, he is passionate about helping the UK rap scene edge closer to breaking America.
He intends to never go to prison again. “The difference now is that I don’t fit in there any more as a person. Which is a bittersweet moment, because it means you’ve grown, you’ve bettered yourself, and that’s commendable,” he concludes. “But that’s like going back to your ends and realising that you don’t belong there no more.”
Real Back in Style is out now.
