Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime

A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, PITCHFORK, NPR, METRO AND HERALD SCOTLAND BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2018

‘The definitive grime biography’ NME

’A landmark genre history’ Pitchfork

Beginning at the start of the new millennium in the council estates of inner London, Inner City Pressure tells the full story of grime, Britain’s most exciting musical revolution since punk. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, grime’s teenage pioneers sent out a signal from the pirate radio aerials and crumbling estates of London’s poorest boroughs that would, 15 years later, resonate as the universal sound of youthful rebellion, as big in the suburbs as in the inner city.

By 2018, the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta have long since become household names. But have the conditions that produced this music now gone forever? What happens to those living on the margins when those margins become ever-smaller spaces? And what happens to a rebellious, outsider sound when it is fully accepted by the pop cultural mainstream? Inner City Pressure tells the astonishing story of a generation dancing, fighting and rioting against the forces gentrifying the capital.

• WELL-ESTABLISHED EXPERT VOICE: Dan Hancox is the UK’s pre-eminent music journalist on grime, having interviewed all the key MCs numerous times and covered the phenomenon for a decade in magazines such as Vice, The Fader, XXL and Dazed and Confused. His Guardian Long Read on Wiley was widely shared online in early 2017.

• THE FIRST DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF GRIME: There isn’t another definitive narrative nonfiction book on grime in the market – there have only been illustrated books, celebrity biographies or niche academic titles. This is an all-encompassing history in the tradition of Simon Reynolds’s RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN (TCM 30k), Jon Savage’s ENGLAND’S DREAMING (TCM 25k) and John Harris’s THE LAST PARTY (TCM 20k).

• TV/FILM RIGHTS SOLD: We have sold TV/film rights to Pulse Films, who are responsible for some of the very best music documentaries and films of recent years, including Beyonce’s Lemonade video, the Nick Cave film 20,000 Days on Earth and the LCD Soundsystem concert film Shut Up and Play the Hits.

• GRIME4CORBYN: Dan ran the Grime4Corbyn campaign that went viral during the 2017 General Election. The intersections of grime and politics are explored to great effect in this book.