You may well be one of the 11 million people who have seen the video of a fresh-faced, ginger-haired 19-year-old, rapping along with his loop pedal, posted on the YouTube channel SBTV back in 2010. The five-and-a-half minute clip went viral, and the teenager featured — one Ed Sheeran — was a relative unknown at the time, but thanks to this video, Sheeran was catapulted towards the global megastardom of today.
The mastermind behind it all was Jamal Edwards, whose death from “a sudden illness” at the age of 31 was announced this morning. Edwards once said that he wanted to be the grime scene’s “Banksy”. In one sense, he failed in that ambition — despite spending much of his time behind the camera, he soon became personally well known, awarded an MBE in 2014 and rightly regarded as one of London’s great contemporary entrepreneurs — but in another, huge way, he succeeded: like Banksy, Edwards’ impact on UK culture was truly seismic.
It all began one Christmas in the Noughties, when the teenage Edwards was given a video camera by his mum, the Loose Women presenter Brenda Edwards. An aspiring MC himself — his moniker Smokey Barz would later lend its initials to the YouTube channel — and inspired by the burgeoning grime scene that was rapidly becoming the sound of London’s streets, Edwards began filming freestyles from local musicians on his west London estate.
This in itself wasn’t a revolutionary act; duelling MCs captured on grainy handheld cameras was a staple of early grime. But it was what Edwards did with his footage that marked him out as a visionary. Whereas before those videos were put onto DVDs and doled out hand-to-hand, Edwards posted his stuff on YouTube, opening it all up to an audience far beyond the M25.
This was a peculiar time for grime. Despite Dizzee Rascal’s Mercury Prize win in 2003 for his debut album Boy In Da Corner — which announced this new, mutant genre to the masses — the wider industry remained criminally indifferent to this blistering new sound, unless they could mould the young, predominantly Black musicians into their own, chart-friendly image.
Steadfastly unbothered by those myopic music execs, Edwards’ channel was a bastion of grime in its pure, unadulterated form. It was democratic in the sense that anyone with an internet connection could log on to check out the best new talent and, by virtue of existing in the virtual realm, it managed to side-step the stifling and restrictive risk assessment forms (Form 696) that were being used by the Metropolitan Police to shut down in-person grime shows. But despite its for-the-people mantra, the channel was strict in terms of quality assurance. If you wanted your time in the spotlight, you had to be good.
SBTV was soon joined by other trailblazing YouTube channels — the likes of GRM Daily and Link Up TV — and by the end of the Noughties, any up-and-coming MC with aspirations of making it big could barely get by unless they were featured on at least one of them.
And SBTV was the home of some truly iconic moments; videos that would become landmarks of music history, not too dissimilar to Elvis and his gyrating hips on the Milton Berle Show in 1956, or The Sex Pistols and their sweary, anti-establishment sneering on the Bill Grundy show 20 years later. There was, of course, that Sheeran video, but there was also an iconic freestyle from Boy Better Know (the grime collective featuring Skepta, JME and others) in 2012, which marked SB.TV surpassing 100 million views on the channel, as well as the scores of hugely popular videos featuring the stars of tomorrow: Stormzy, Dave, Krept and Konan, AJ Tracey, Lady Leshurr, J Hus… the list goes on - and the tributes have been flooding in, with Tracey calling Edwards a “West London legend” and Lady Leshurr noting that “I’ll never be able to repay him for what he’s done for my career”.
Edwards’ unwavering support of the scene he loved was, as it turned out, him laying the foundations for a musical movement that would upturn UK culture in the 2010s. Grime and UK rap would go onto shape the charts, fashion, TV, film and more, and every one of its major successes — whether that was Stormzy headlining Glastonbury, or Headie One taking drill music to the Number 1 spot — can be traced back in some way to Edwards’ influence.
RIP Jamal Edwards, west london legend status ✊🏽👑💙
— 🥷🏽 (@ajtracey) February 20, 2022
Of course, his impact on music is just one facet of his legacy. In November 2021 the grass roots urban art project Acton Unframed paid tribute to Edwards in the form of a large-scale mosaic mural. The artwork is a testament to his work with young people in the area where he set-up four youth clubs, via the charity he founded in 2018, JE Delve. Much like SBTV, JE Delve started life with Edwards and his computer. As he said at the time, “there was a lot of hustling… even trying to get a conversation with the people that owned the buildings or the housing association. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn finding senior people to talk to and guessing their emails.” Undeterred, he went on to secure funding from Google and the Wellcome Trust. JE Delve builds on years of philanthropy that Edwards was involved in via the Prince’s Trust, Prince Charles’ youth charity which helps young people start their own businesses — and for which Edwards was an ambassador.
A month after the mosaic was unveiled, in December 2021 he told the online music platform Dummy that he wanted to “arm young people with all the tools and possible opportunities to get the furthest they can in life”. Looking back now, and even with his light having left us far too soon, you can only say Edwards achieved that dream with the most spectacular success.
