In November 2017, a London collective called 1011 – pronounced “ten-eleven”, after the W10 and W11 postcodes – released their Next Up? freestyle video on YouTube. They bragged and threatened over haunting beats, their verses emblematic of UK drill’s raw appeal to a global generation listening and gossiping online. At the time, I worked as an education mentor at an inner-London academy while volunteering at two community centres. Suddenly, all the boys I worked with were talking about the skippity-skip flow of the group’s 17-year-old frontman, Digga D.
Nearly six years later, I meet Digga in Wembley. He has since become a youth cultural phenomenon, topping the UK album chart and scoring three Top 10 singles. “I’m tired of hearing about it,” he says when I mention Next Up?, which was removed by YouTube in 2018 on request from the Metropolitan police after it had been watched more than 11m times: the force claimed it was inciting violence. This summer, an edited version of the song surpassed 100m streams on Spotify. “I wanna tell you: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it.’ But, keeping it real, I don’t really think about it. I appreciate it. I’m grateful. But now what?”
I first interviewed Digga, born Rhys Herbert, in 2019. His immaculately timed MCing and reputation for trouble had thrust him into stardom and controversy, and he had just finished a 15-month prison sentence after admitting to conspiracy to commit violent disorder, after members of 1011 – characterised by the Met as a criminal gang – were arrested with machetes while allegedly travelling to attack a rival group. They soon rebranded to CGM – Cherish God More – but became synonymous with the moral panic about drill, blamed for the upward spike in serious youth violence across the UK that started in 2015.
In 2018, Digga was placed under a criminal behaviour order (CBO), a modern version of the anti-social behaviour order (Asbo). The highly unusual terms of the order restricted not only where he could go and who he could meet, but what he could mention in his lyrics, and even required him to submit those lyrics to the police within 24 hours of releasing them in song. Free speech advocates including Index on Censorship criticised the Met over this impingement on his creativity. He was, as he remains today, banned from performing the lurid but theatrical Next Up?, but in 2019, his catchy single No Diet and debut mixtape Double Tap Diaries proved it was possible to write his way around the rules.
The second time we met, in 2021, he was moodier, tired of media scrutiny; he had been stabbed in the eye during another stint in prison, after being recalled for a minor breach of his CBO. But if the depths were deeper, the heights were higher. He was the subject of Bafta award-winning BBC Three documentary Defending Digga D, and released his mixtape Made in the Pyrex, which reached No 3 and featured a slew of era-defining commercial drill singles including Woi. A year later, travelling abroad for the first time since being handed a criminal licence aged 15, he recorded his third mixtape Noughty By Nature in studios across the US, Europe and the Middle East. On its release in April 2022, it went to No 1.
Later this summer, Digga will drop his fourth project, Back to Square One (the first full-length release on his own label Black Money Records). One song is called Fuck Drill while others focus on storytelling or cleave to the pained, Auto-Tuned trapwave subgenre – for Digga, this stylistic breadth is a sign of artistic maturity. His lyrics have broadened into new preoccupations: fame, riches, complicated relationships and mouths to feed. “It’s more money, more problems,” he chuckles. “People are getting older, the fans are changing, people like different types of music now. I don’t feel like drill is for me any more. I’m still learning about Auto-Tune, how to project my voice, how to make people feel different feelings. I’m still learning that I can talk normally on a song, and I don’t always have to sing. The intro is just me talking – it sounds like poetry.”
That opening track, Fighting for My Soul, has an unprecedented depth of humility about prior mistakes, faith in higher powers and commitment to growth. In one line, he mentions being “someone’s idol, so I’m mindful when I talk”.
“When you see people dressing up like you, or speaking like you, or when you’ve got little cousins who wanna be like you … I see what people are saying now,” he says. “I’ve got to always think before I speak. Before, I didn’t understand the power of social media; now, I do something, and then I’m like: ‘Oh shit, my little cousin might see this!’”
No matter how much he tries to leave his past life behind him, however, the conditions of his CBO won’t expire until 2025. During one interview in Defending Digga D, he concedes that the lyric-writing restrictions helped him to be more creative. “But the police didn’t do the CBO for that reason,” he tells me. “That was me finding the best out of a bad situation. Now it’s literally just a headache.”
I ask him for examples. “So, I’m in my own car, going about my business, trying to get into my area. They’re telling me I can’t go this way, I have to go all the way around. It adds 20 minutes to my journey.” He sits up and becomes animated for the first time. “They’ve got me banned from areas and people I don’t even know, I promise. Going to shows: I’m approved to be at the shows with people, but I’m not allowed to travel with them, so instead of us all going on one bus, we have to get three buses. I have to pay for the buses – if one bus is £1,000, I’m losing £3,000. One time, I was in an Uber, but I didn’t know where. Then I realised I was in the wrong area. So I had to message my probation officer. And if it was down to the police, they would have put me straight back in jail.”
Cecilia Goodwin, his lawyer, is present via a video call. She says: “Everything in his life has changed, apart from the CBO. He is not the same person – yet he is still the subject of this order that hasn’t moved with him, that hasn’t adapted to his life, or his success. So is it necessary?”
I ask Digga whether this has affected his mental health. He gestures to indicate that he doesn’t want to talk about it; Goodwin asks if we can steer clear of this topic. I note that it should be normal to talk about your wellbeing in an interview. “Not when the police take it and use it against you. My life is different to other people,” Digga replies.
The criminalisation of Digga’s artistry is part of a wider context. Back in 2018, the Met were trying to stem drill music’s spread – and, by their reckoning, stem the rise of street violence – by removing videos such as Next Up?.
Now, as UK rap and drill have become a world-beating export, seen as a route out of social exclusion and poverty for a generation of young men and women, the clampdown has trickled deeper into the British criminal justice system. Music lyrics and videos are no longer simply censored, but mined for supposed criminal evidence and used in trials. Over the past two years, I have been called upon as an expert witness in criminal cases to respond to attempts by prosecution teams, usually aided by police officers self-identifying as experts in music or gangs, to use lyrics to secure a conviction.
A wildly disproportionate number involve Black teenage men and boys, often tried in groups of defendants with limited substantive or forensic evidence. While middle-class television executives and music industry marketers do well off selling arms-length stories about urban crime, those living amid the reality are being criminalised for doing the same – and having their freedom of expression curtailed.
Even outside the extraordinary circumstances of Digga’s CBO, there is now less and less opportunity for working-class Londoners to make their way in any kind of music. Raised by a Jamaican mother and Barbadian father, growing up within earshot of Notting Hill carnival every August, Digga, like the rest of 1011, learned to rap at the Harrow Club, a youth club that has served local young people since the late 19th century. Yet, over the past decade, more than 100 of these services have closed across the capital, while arts education in schools has been diminished.
I recently delivered a music programme for the National Literacy Trust at Oakhill Secure Training Centre in Milton Keynes, the only prison in the country that looks after children as young as 12. Chairs were bolted to the floor. In one exercise, I played the video for Digga’s recent single, Energy, a pop-drill anthem that advocates protecting yourself from negative influence and betrayal while clearly under the psychic weight of institutionalised violence.
I asked the boys to write a paragraph about how they protect their own energy. Their answers were printed at a celebration event, where staff listened to the music they’d recorded: it included letters to mums, nostalgia about home, and cheeky musings on romantic desire, as well as commentaries about street life and manifesting positive change. I show one boy’s succinct but hopeful answer to Digga, and he holds the paper close to his face.
“That’s mad. You reckon they would let me in a place like Oakhill?” he asks. “I’d be like: ‘Yo, you lot are in Oakhill. But go to [men’s prison] Belmarsh. On the exercise yard you can go round and count up the years [of each person’s sentence]: 30, 30, 35, 32, 33. That’s like 200, 300 years in the yard.’ Wow! I’d tell them how I got stabbed in Wandsworth. I’d tell them how [prison] life is super dead. They don’t hear enough of that.’
“When I was younger, I wouldn’t always listen … If I’m the type of teenager that likes trouble, I don’t wanna hear about anyone who is trying to step away from it. Unless they’re in my face, like: ‘Brudda, wake up, this is not a joke!’ So instead of telling them: don’t do this, don’t do that, I’d say: ‘OK, cool, if you are going to do this, then you need to know what comes with the consequences. Or try to avoid certain situations. If someone draws you out, and you wanna go and fight, think about it first. Every action has a reaction.’”
On Ending, the final track of Back to Square One, after the mixtape has taken the listener on a rap journey that veers in all directions – including his trademark G-Unit-style instrumentals, references to his rivals (a cohort that includes some big names) and his sexual exploits – Digga falls back into cathartic mode.
“It’s me talking to an assembly of parents, explaining how I grew up – listening to this, watching that. This is the reason I’m like this, but OK, I’ve grown up now, and I’ve seen the influences of other people. But I want to let you know that while I’m doing all of that, I’m still learning – so if I make mistakes, don’t judge me or blame everything on me.” Whether the Met and much of the media can allow for that growth remains to be seen.
• Back to Square One is released on 4 August on Black Money Records
• This article was updated on Friday 30 June with a correction: Digga D must submit his lyrics to the Met within 24 hours of a song’s release, not prior to release.
