Pa Salieu, fast-rising British rap star, interviewed
A new rapper arrives with a dramatic backstory and talent to burn
Four years ago, Coventry competed against 11 other municipalities to become UK City of Culture 2021. It was following in the footsteps of Derry-Londonderry in 2013 and Hull in 2017, both hugely successful and transformative for their communities. The legacy for Hull was £220m worth of investment and 800 new jobs.
Ninety-five per cent of Hull residents said they took part in at least one event during the yearlong initiative, administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
It is Coventry’s misfortune, then, to have their festival during a pandemic. “There’s a real determination to deliver this programme as we promised,” creative director Chenine Bhathena told Radio 4’s Front Row in February. “Coventry’s always been a symbol of regeneration and change. We rose from the ashes of the Second World War, so we’re summoning that same spirit this year.” The festival is now scheduled to kick off in May.
Happily, Coventry’s cultural capital was already
in the ascendant thanks to the hype surrounding Pa Salieu, the British-Gambian rapper tipped to become the city’s most significant musical export since The Specials five decades earlier. It’s been a meteoric rise. In a matter of months, Salieu went from uploading freestyles to YouTube to his first single “Frontline” becoming the mostplayed track of 2020 on 1Xtra. Another song, “Betty”, was Radio 1’s Single of The Week three weeks running. Last November, The Guardian greeted the release of his mixtape Send Them to Coventry by anointing him “Britain’s hottest new rapper”, teeing up his place at the top of the BBC’s career-making annual Sound Of… 2021 poll the following month.
Salieu has a contract with Warner Records, major-label home to Dua Lipa, Liam Gallagher and Jason Derulo, and is signed up with Adele’s management. In January, he appeared on American television on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Prior to that, he fronted an advertising campaign for Burberry. It all suggests a huge new pop star but Pa Salieu is more interesting than that. Send Them to Coventry has originality in abundance, bouncing from abrasive rap (“Block Boy”) to yacht rock (“More Paper”) to afro-infused soul (“Energy”), all delivered in Salieu’s rich, West African dialect, an accent he rightly calls his “instrument”. He’s got songs that sound like huge hits (“Betty”) and songs that sound absolutely terrifying (“My Family”). His videos are terrific.
Pa Salieu Gaye was born in Slough, then spent 10 years in The Gambia, living with grandparents and elder relatives. Afterwards he was raised in Hillfields, a Coventry suburb in the top five per cent of the most deprived areas in the country, a rolling horror show of local news headlines involving machetes, cannabis factories and kids gunned down outside schools. His friend Fidel Glasgow — grandson of The Specials’ singer Neville Staple — was stabbed and killed in 2018. Salieu himself was shot in the back of the head in a drive-by shooting the following year. That followed separate incidents involving being stabbed and arrested.
‘My name is Pa, I’m from Hillside,’ he raps on “Block Boy”. ‘Bust gun, dodge slugs, got touched, skipped death.’ And, on “Informa”: ‘“What’s your name?” “King Salieu.” “Where you from?” “C-OV, hashtag City Of Violence.”’
If all this, alongside the dangerous-dogs-and-baseball-bats posturing of his videos and record sleeves, suggests an intimidating character who lets his lyrics do the talking, the in-person Pa Salieu is a different proposition. Cheerful, thoughtful and cocooned in enormous sportswear, he somehow seems even younger than his 23 years. “I’m awkward!” he grins. “When I was on the [Radio 1] Breakfast Show for the Sound of… 2021, I was so awkward. I said, ‘I’m feeling so awkward!’”
He says he’s felt out of place his whole life. “I got kicked out of my first primary school because of my accent,” he says. “’Cos I had a fight and that. It wasn’t my fault. It was racist slurs. And then I was the ‘British boy’ in Gambia. I was treated different. I come from Slough, you know what I’m saying? And that’s me: that’s my brand. I’ll always be different. I was born in Gambia: different. I came back here: different. The dark guy with the accent, whatever. And now my flows… it has to be different. Everything has to be different. The way I see stuff has to be different. It’s beautiful to be different!”
In part, he says, the eclecticism of his music is down to an idiosyncratic writing style. “My songs start with writing [lyrics] or I just freestyle. Or, you know, I will mumble, ‘nah, nah, nahnanah…’ I love that! Mumbling comes straight out of the spirit. It’s the energy. It comes right from the mumble.”
One of his tracks, “Dem a Lie”, was used in an episode of the HBO show Ballers, slotting in alongside a soundtrack of Drake, Lil Wayne and Big Pun, further evidence of the continuing enthusiasm for UK rap/drill/grime in America, the home of rap.
“It’s so easy to be inspired in England,” Salieu reasons. “Genuine stories are coming out, these madnesses are actually happening. I’m inspired by hardship, by the losses I’ve had, by so many different cultures. So, I wouldn’t blame them for being interested.
“I didn’t see crackheads in Gambia, I saw that here. As soon as I came here. You’ve got a lot of people brainwashing kids, especially vulnerable kids. Seeing people getting stabbed up… I was very, very, very young. All this was normal.”
For the record, he says getting shot in the head was bad — though not as bad as getting stabbed. “It was going to happen some time,” he shrugs. “People get stabbed and shot for no reason every day. We’re living through it, you know? There’s worse stuff that’s happened.”
He credits the Hillfields youth club Positive Youth Foundation and its creative arts programme Changing Trax, as well as his mum (“very strict”), with keeping him on the straight and narrow, mostly. Also: motivation.
“It’s greatness I’m aiming for,” he says. “Me and my manager are trying to do a festival, a homecoming, every year in Gambia. It’s sick. We’re going to open up the sands, you get me? We’re going to open Africa, open the Sahara. This is not a joke. Me, I’m big on the unity. And uniting Africa. Music is one of the biggest factors in unity. I’ve got so much ideas, you know?”
Warner Records snapped Salieu up unusually quickly, as the label’s A&R manager Paddy O’Neill explains. “We offered him a deal the day after we saw him,” he says. “I went to the president of the label and said, ‘I’ve just met this kid and he’s unbelievable.’ To sign an artist with no profile whatsoever is pretty much unheard of — certainly within major-label music — they [usually] come into conversations at a very different time. But he had some amazing music, and this energy.”
He points out Salieu has achieved everything that he has to date without the usual promotional platforms afforded a new artist. “Go on Twitter and every comment is, ‘I’m so gutted that I can’t see him live.’ Travelling, playing festivals, meeting fans, connecting with people — that’s the joy of being a musician. But it hasn’t held him back.”
Indeed, it’s perhaps instructive that Salieu doesn’t see launching a career in a global pandemic as entirely bad. “If it wasn’t for corona, it would have been too fast for me. I’d have been in at the deep end and it would have been straight to the sharks,” he says. “Back then, I found it hard just to perform. I was so nervous. Now, after this corona, I want to do live music. A full production! Fela Kuti! Straight energy!”
With perfect timing, Coventry City of Culture 2021 has found its man.
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