Skream Talks Vaginoplasty

Gavin Haynes has 100 free minutes but no friends. So each week we're going to make him call a popstar. This week: Skream.

Noisey: Hello Ollie. What’s Annie Mac really like?

Skream: She’s one of the loveliest people I know. She’s a very good friend of mine.

Yeah, but deep down, what’s she really like?

No she is. She’s a good time girl. She keeps her finger on the pulse musically, and yeah… she’s lovely.

Yeah but if you pare all of that back and really get deep deep down into the very engine room of Annie Mac…Right down to the roots of her psyche, past personality, Id, Ego, Superego… to a raw molten core of pure consciousness, a liquid essence of humanity, beyond gender, beyond memory, at the core of Annie Mac what is she like?

GREAT!!!!

I guess if you go that deep, she’s probably just like everyone else… one indivisible band of consciousness. The observer who observes itself observing.

She is. She is very much like everyone else. I haven’t got a bad word to say about her. She’s nothing but lovely and I’ve never seen her be a cunt to anyone.

Have you seen any other Radio 1 DJs be a cunt to someone?

No comment.

Your new new single seems like a very fruity, upbeat kind of dubstep, characterised by funky squelchy disco dubstep bass and falsetto disco dubstep vocals. Can you confirm that this is indeed the way forward for dubstep?

No.

No?

Uh, It’s not a dubstep single. It’s 120bpm. It’s a disco record.

Ah. I see. Well if Nile Rogers, Giorgio Moroder and Thomas Bangalter all turned up at your front door and pleaded with you to return to making dubstep immediately, would you do it?

No. That chapter’s kinda over for me now. I gave it a good innings. I been doing it from when I was 13 to 26, so it’s time to move on.

Do you get called ‘Judas’ now when you go to dubstep nights? Or are you still called ‘Ollie’? And which is worse?

Still called Ollie. Still got a lot of close friends still doing it, still going strong. So they still reference me as Ollie, luckily.

Did you kill dubstep?

No I didn’t! It’s still very much alive and well.

Your new track features a man called Sam Frank. Are you sure you didn’t just get mixed up with serial 2013 collaborator Sam Smith?

No. He’s Sam Frank. He’s an absolute genius. He’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever worked with. He’s been in the business for a very long time.

How do you, personally, tell the difference between the two? Is there like a rhyme you use or something? “Sam is frank and never has pith/Frankly my Sam isn’t Sam Smith’?
No no. Sam Frank is the tallest man I know. That’s how I tell them apart.

You once worked at Big Apple Records in Croydon. Do you generally wash apples before you eat them, or do you think that’s just pansying around like a big old fanny?

That’s just pansying around like a big old fanny.

What about bagged salad? What sort of treatment do you give that?

I do wash it. As soon as I get it out. Yeah.

But it’s bagged in a sanitary factory. Pre-washed for you. But still you give it a second wash? That’s pansying around like a big old fanny. And a waste of water.

It’s not a waste of water. I don’t trust them fuckers at Tesco.

Just Tesco? Is this part of your personal crusade against them?

It’s not just my personal crusade no. I’d even wash them from Waitrose.

Do you shop at Waitrose?

I’ve been known to. Not all the time. Just for a small shop.

What does the dubstep community say about people who shop at Waitrose?

I haven’t got a clue, mate. I haven’t played dubstep for a year. They do amazing smoked haddock fishcakes, that’s all I know.

I imagine the collectivist nature of the John Lewis partnership appeals to dubstep sensibilities. You don’t buy any of those ten quid jars of deer testicles or whatever they sell though do you?

Nah. Just the fishcakes. And maybe some elderflower cordial.

That’s very H.E. Bates for a man from Croydon. Do you try and hark back to a vanished vision of rural England in your everyday life?

I do, yeah.

Where do you stand on croutons in salad? Poncey signifiers of stale bread-based upward mobility, or just an interesting textural break emphasising and underlining individual salad aspects with no inherent class mores?

Croutons can do one.

You are from Croydon. If your wife came to you one day and said: “Honey, I need a facelift,” what would you say?

I think… “Go out and get one”, I guess. Just not the Croydon one. That term did not come from Croydon though, did it? I’ve never heard it used in Croydon. That’s definitely some comedian.

Would you sign the cheque for a tit job?

It depends how much I’d earned the previous year.

So it would simply be a financial question? What about vaginoplasty? If your wife came to you and said: “Honey, my inner labia are frankly vile and ‘down there’ I look like a garden gnome that got caught in a ski lift. Something must be done or I’m renouncing sex”?

Surely I’d be stupid to say no, right?

Would you? But isn’t this just officially sanctioned Female Genital Mutilation? What would Deborah Orr say?

Nah. Uh, listen, there’s always…

There’s always room for improvement, is that what you’re about to say?

Uh… yeah. I would pay for it, yeah.

You are best known to gormless Joe Average in the street for remixing La Roux’s "In For The Kill". Do you ever wonder whether you have it in yourself to kill someone?

Fucking hell! That’s a really tricky one to answer in a train station.

I feel like maybe you have it in you to kill someone. Do you take that as a compliment, or not?

I suppose everyone has to some degree.

I guess it’s part of human nature. I was watching this anthropology documentary the other day, and it reminded me that the basic human response for thousands of years if you met someone from outside your tribe, was simply to kill them without compunction.

Yeah but that’s like saying if I bump into someone on my street from the next street I’m likely to kill them…

Well the thing is –

[Descends into broader discussion of anthropology, nature-nurture, primitive mores, infanticide, etc. Frankly it’s too broad for the purposes of this interview, but if you really want to understand you could always watch this]

Follow Gavin on Twitter @HurtGavinHaynes

Illustration by Sam Taylor @SptSam

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