REMI/ROUGH

Which particular project has presented the greatest challenge to you in your career and why?

That’s easy. The biggest challenge of my artistic career came about when I heard they where doing a street art exhibition at the Tate Modern. I tracked down the curator online and sent him a message saying it’s amazing what you’re doing – brilliant, massive street art show at the Tate Modern… but where’s the British artist? You have an Italian, two Brazilians, a Spaniard, a Frenchman and an American, but no Brit?

As a British artist I felt we were being poorly represented. He got in touch with me a couple days later asking how I was at public speaking (“Yeah I’m great (never done it in my life)"). He said great, because there were some people from the scene and a few academics who were going to be giving talks and doing slide show presentations. Would I be interested in coming down and doing a presentation with a stencil artist named Blek Le Rat? I was thinking 50 people – great, no worries, I can do that.

So I started putting a film together, I wrote my speech, prepared notes to go with a slideshow and practised it over and over. The day comes, I walk into the Star Auditorium (never been there before in my life – it’s massive) and I start to think to myself, how many people are coming to this? I sat down on stage and just watched a flood of people pour in, filling up row after row. There was a moment when Blek and I looked at each other like, what the hell did we just get ourselves into? There were 350 people in there. So that was definitely the most challenging experience of my career, preparing for that event and holding people’s attention for thirty minutes.

When did the musical side of your persona emerge? Do you to take it as seriously as your visual side?

I grew up in a very musical household. My dad was into his jazz 78s, my mum was a huge music fan. There were always hundreds of records in our house, so music has always been a big passion of mine from day dot.  I started messing around with rapping and writing lyrics in the late ’90s.

I hooked up with Juice 126, who’s a graffiti artist and close friend of mine. He’s in my crew Agents of Change, and he’d been doing music a few years prior. We were talking about collaborating on a music project and ran into Joe – the music guy from Reptiles, who was making some amazing beats at the time. We knew we wanted to make hip-hop, but in a way like no one else was. At that point the leftfield scene was miniscule. I remember the first time I heard Mike Ladd’s album, I was like WOW! So there are other lunatics out there. We started work in the late ’90s and put out an album in ’98 as Reptiles, and then from that record got signed to Jazz Fudge and started touring. I didn’t really get into making music until the early naughties, probably 2002, because I didn’t really have the capabilities. I saved up for months to buy an MPC, and when I finally got the £850, I ran to Turnkey in the West End, brought it home, and taught myself how to use it. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that I was comfortably starting to make music.

Page 3 visuals, left to right: HYPERION. Matt emulsion and spray paint on canvas. 2009//REMI Photo by Diarmid Scott.//MAN OF FAITH VS MAN OF SCIENCE. Matt emulsion and spray paint on canvas. 2008