"I'd go to Church High With a Knife in my Pocket" - Blue Daisy Has Got a Weird Kind of Salvation

All photos by Jake Krushell

“The hip-hop scene in the UK is quite straight,” says Kwesi Darko with a shrug. We’re drinking cider in The Unicorn on Camden Road. Tucked away behind the pub is New Rose Studios, where the 27-year-old Camden local, better known to production aficionados and beat fiends as Blue Daisy, spends most of his time locked away in a studio working on his forthcoming second album The Mask & The Aura.

“When A$AP came out with his first mixtape rapping over Clams Casino beats you started hearing all these American rappers rapping on this weird shit,” he explains. “I was thinking: Fucking hell, man. They’re pushing boundaries. I give credit to Clams for reaching into that side of hip-hop. I thought to myself: ‘I make fucked up beats and I’ve got fucked up shit in my head that I need to put down!’ This is a new chapter in the Blue Daisy journey, but I’ve always tried to do the unexpected.”

Darko knows a lot about new chapters. His 2011 debut record The Sunday Gift was championed by Pitchfork, named Electronic Album Of The Year by Mojo and backed by long-time supporter Mary Anne Hobbs, who had given him his first break. Fans started talking about him in the same breath as Flying Lotus and Burial, yet he could barely believe he was here at all. Back when he was in secondary school, one of his friends predicted he’d be dead by 18.

“I grew up as a hoodrat,” he explains. “Music was never really a part of my upbringing. I wasn’t interested in it. All I cared about was going around fighting and getting girls. Doing all the stupid shit you do growing up as a teenager in London. If you grow up in an underprivileged environment you get into all sorts of stuff. There was a mad turning point when I was 18 when I basically pulled a knife on my brother. I had been attacked on numerous occasions so it got to a point where I was just crazy paranoid. I started smoking skunk and that fucked me up even more. It took me into even more of a darker hole. I had this anger pent up inside of me. That’s why the music I make now is so dark. Music, in a sense, saved me from going even deeper into that road life.”

Having grown up without giving music much of a second thought, it took over his life around 2004 when he heard Dizzee Rascal’s Boy In Da Corner and Kanye West’s The College Dropout. “What Dizzee was talking about on that album I could relate to completely,” he says. “And at that time Kanye West was just a normal guy! I related to him because he was an outcast and even when I was with a crew I saw myself like that. I’ve always thought you’ve got to fight your battles yourself.”

Darko is the middle-child of five, raised here by his mother while his father stayed in Ghana to work. His mum had been a Jehovah’s Witness before she was kicked out when she became pregnant while still unmarried. However, his Dad remains strongly Christian and it was only when his father came over to London that Darko and his brother were introduced to the church.

“The Sunday Gift was about that moment in my life when I was going through such a dark stage,” he says. “By the end of the album, there’s a glimmer of hope. I’d found a way out. That was partly about finding church and that spiritual aspect which saved me. When I started going to church I would still blaze and go in high. I remember going to church with a knife in my pocket. That’s the mentality I was in. As time went on I found some zen and started staying in making music.”

The Sunday Gift was released on Black Acre after label boss Ian Merchant, who’d been following Darko’s work as Re:Kwes on MySpace, heard Mary Anne Hobbs play one of his tunes on Radio One. Darko had sent her the music via a Soundcloud dropbox embedded on her MySpace page.

After The Sunday Gift dropped, Darko found himself with a classic case of second album blues. “I felt like I’d made the album I always wanted to make,” he says. “I feel like I’ve done what I needed to do in the beats scene, and if I’m totally honest I’m kind of bored of it. For me, it’s the same old same old.”

He found “his niche” when he set up Dahlia Black, a collective he fronts and compares to Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade or Tyler’s Odd Future – but “darker and more fucked up”. They announced themselves with last year’s “Fuck A Rap Song”. “When that dropped a bunch of people who had never heard of me were talking like I was new, which was weird for me because I know I’ve been doing it for a few years now,” he says. “The stuff that’s coming out now, like Psychotic Love, shows the approach I’m taking for the next album. It’s more of a punk/rock/rap type of thing. I’ve always had rap inside me but I’ve been looking for a way to approach it.”

Current EP Psychotic Love features moody, sturm und drang new tunes like the title track and “Cries of the Beast”. It will be followed soon by another EP, slated to feature Roll Deep’s Roachee on title track “Pit of the East”. The full-length album that follows will be called The Mask & The Aura.

“It’s a concept album,” says Darko, “Where ‘The Mask’ is me going in with a masculine approach, like “Fuck A Rap Song” and “Cries Of The Beast”, and then ‘The Aura’ is more chilled, with female vocals over my production. I’ve been reading up on C.G. Jung and his idea of the anima. It’s about the female side of the inner spirit that we all have, but we choose to put on masks and act masculine. ‘The Aura’ for me is my real aura as a person. You can act big and be a hardman, but underneath you can have a heart of gold. That’s where ‘The Mask’ and ‘The Aura’ connects.”

As well as The Mask & The Aura, there’s also a featured spot on the next Tricky record on the horizon. For someone as influenced by the Bristol trip-hop scene as Darko, the moment felt a little bit like being passed the baton. The collaboration came about due to a gig in Lille. “I got an offer to support him and although he didn’t know who I was he welcomed me with open arms,” Darko says. “Before the show he asked me to play him some of my stuff so I played “Fuck A Rap Song” and he just lost it. Within 20 minutes he’d phoned up his manager to tell him he wants me to be on his next album, so then I went in and did a verse for him”

For Darko, it’s just another chapter in the Blue Daisy story. After we finish our pints we head out into Camden so he can be photographed in the roads where he’s grown up. As much as Blue Daisy reflects the influence of “fucked up” American beats, Bristol trip-hop or south London grime, there’s something about it that’s unique to Camden. “When I was growing up it was all indie round here. It was when indie was ripe. I was walking round in bowler hats and waistcoats and shit at some point,” he laughs. “I’ve been through so many stages in my life because of Camden. I give a lot of props to Camden, it definitely has a mad influence on what I do. I play music to people and they say, ‘Oh, you’re influenced by this person’. I’ve never heard of them but then I listen and I see why they said that. It’s just because I’ve been around people who have all sorts of different mentalities. That’s my life, man. That’s how Blue Daisy gets down.”

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @KevinEGPerry