The reality of county lines

Headie One is a rapper on the up, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. The 26-year-old drill artist – real name Irving Adjei – has performed with Stormzy, and been lauded for his unflinching reflections on inner-city life. He’s well placed to comment. Adjei, whose mother died when he was three, grew up on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham. His childhood was happy and carefree: there was a strong community on the estate; and until he went to secondary school, he rarely left it. But in his teens, he joined a gang – and became involved in county-lines trafficking. The money was a factor, but it was also a way of getting away, and “staying safe”. Was it exciting? “It’s boring. You do get a sense of these places – like Scotland being cold – but there’s horrible stuff you’ve got to deal with and consequences that pull you in a downward spiral that becomes harder to escape from. You might have thought it was cool when you were an immature youth, but you quickly discover that you don’t want to have to spend your life looking over your shoulder...” In 2014, he was caught in Aberdeen with £30,000 worth of drugs, and sent to jail. It wasn’t his first or last offence, but he wants to move on from that life. In his songs, he raps about the realities of being in a gang (“You think we like being around them crack pipes and them needles, staring at this dirty money?”), and of life in prison. Jail, he says, is boring

– “and all the things people do not to be bored are boring too. The drugs and violence on the street are there on the inside.” As for the notion that drill causes crime, he says that’s rubbish. Drill, he says is “reality, raw and uncut. It’s straight to the point with no sugar-coating. People are saying how they feel. That’s why a lot of people are afraid of it, but this stuff happens and it shouldn’t be hidden away.”