![]() He took one look at me backstage and went: ‘Cor, you’ve got some demons, ent ya?’ Even down to him coming onstage with me at Glastonbury last year, he’s always had my back.” Is there any chance of a potential supergroup between the three? “Oh, yeah, definitely. “Pete was similar he loved Wobbles on Cobbles and invited me to support one of his gigs. “We went to the pub, got leathered, tried to make a tune, and just did that a few times until we were pals,” he says of Jamie T. This is a way for me to connect.”īaker has himself connected with other rowdy, socially conscious troubadours, and having recently supported Pete Doherty at the Royal Albert Hall, he’ll be appearing at Jamie T’s Finsbury Park all-dayer in June. But rock and blues came directly from us and our struggles too. “A lot of black people are scared to back something that they don’t see as strictly ‘black’, like grime or drill. Windrush Baby explores the heartache of cultural displacement: his mum crops up to complain that black Britons have “let go of the very strong values that we used to have”, but the song welcomes his burgeoning black audience, coming around to a genre-hopping sound. You never know one day, whoever runs the country might actually listen to us.” But he doesn’t suggest that he and his people are always unified. It’s always shit, it’s always hard, but we still hold on to the idea of working together for a better place to survive. “I felt I could encapsulate the world of working-class people. Inside, Baker learned the guitar, and having fallen for the wistful acoustics of British band Daughter, he coined his own genre, G-Folk, as a way to tell stories in his infectious cockney cadence. If you’re not doing that in jail, then what the fuck are you doing?” “Prison gave me time to assess what I actually wanted for myself. “Where we’re from, you only know about keeping it moving, trying to provide for your family,” he says. In his mid-twenties, though, Baker was jailed for two years for robbery. “But if we’re all gonna die, I don’t want to spend the time being sad about it.” “When people are low and it feels like world war three is on the balance, it’s hard to believe in yourself,” he says of its paradoxically cheery end-of-days vibe. Few other British albums this year are as vibrant, and true to life’s contradictions. Then there are joyous songs like Doolally, where Baker flirts and boozes around a party sounding like the Streets on Fit But You Know It. Gentrification is one of the glum topics on the singer-songwriter’s debut album World’s End FM, alongside a host of others: colonialism, surveillance, depression. That old guard is being priced out, and if you say hello to someone in the street, they look at you like you’re weird. “But now when I look out my window, it’s just not the same. “Old boys taking me boxing, or to the scrap yard to flip tyres for 40 quid: that stuff gave me a sense of belonging,” he says. H ak Baker is harking back to the east London of his childhood, before the oat milk lattes and experiential advertising creatives moved in.
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