brought his new album, home to South London, and we opened the shop doors for him. There are album launches, and then there are nights where the room already knows every word of the project before it has even come out.
At the end of July, we teamed up with to launch Crafty 893’s new album ‘142 Grime Street’ in a cornershop on Rye Lane, Peckham. Ten tracks played front to back, a few hours before the project went live at midnight. No stage, no barrier, no green room. Just a shop, a sound system, and a room full of people who have watched this artist come up.
If you’ve followed OLS for a while, you’ll know why that setting matters to us. We’ve always believed the space shapes the moment. Put an artist in a venue and you get a show. Put them in the kind of shop they grew up running into each day, and you get something closer to the truth. Crafty said it himself to the room that night: “Man’s done so much on this f*g high road… so much in the South.”
Crafty lives in Manchester now, so bringing the album back to South London was never just a logistical decision. This is the part of the city where a lot of him was formed. The walks, the buses, the people, the years before anyone was paying attention. When he talks about where his music comes from, these are the streets in the background of it.
You could feel that in the room. It wasn’t an industry crowd politely nodding along. It was friends, family, people who have been on the journey since his earliest tracks, and fans who have watched the last couple years happen in real time. Half the room seemed to know each other.
The energy inside the shop was mad from the first track. Crowded, sweaty, phones out and someone shouting for a reload before the second bar had landed. Exactly the kind of chaos an off-licence was never designed for and somehow handles perfectly.
“Write An 8-bar, Shorty”
The best story of the evening came attached to Let It Go (Remix), the heavyweight link-up featuring JME, Logan_olm and BBK’s Shorty. Crafty explained that Shorty walked into the studio “like the Godfather” and asked what was playing. Crafty played him Let It Go, looked back at him and said: “Write an 8-bar, Shorty.” That was it. That’s the whole origin story of one of the album’s defining moments.
Then he brought them out. Logan and Shorty stepped behind the counter for the remix, and the shop went crazy. Paul Stephan came through for Wasteman Interlude. Hearing those verses performed a few feet from the crisps aisle, by the people who actually wrote them, on the night the album dropped, create moments like these which are what it’s all about for us.
Because one album playthrough clearly wasn’t enough, Crafty invited MCs from across London and the wider UK down for an exclusive cypher, with Chamber 45 on the decks. Scorcher, Jafro, Kruz Leone, Duppy, N3, Drifter, Blessed, Cunning MC and Renz all stepped up. Different generations, different corners of the scene, all packed into the same small space taking turns. It turned the back half of the night into something closer to a community linkup than a launch party, which, if we’re honest, is always the night we’re chasing to make happen.
Our album launches exist for the bit that usually gets lost. Not the press shots or the release-day posts, but the stories behind the songs, the people in the room who helped shape them, and the reason an artist made the record in the first place. A shop floor is the right place for that. It’s accessible, it’s familiar, and nobody has to feel like they’ve walked into somewhere they don’t belong.
Everyone’s local cornershop looks roughly the same, which is exactly the point. When you put an artist back in that setting, in the area that made them, the distance between them and the people listening basically disappears.
That’s what happened on Rye Lane. An artist came home, played his album to the people who were there before it existed, and told them how it got made.
Crafty 893 – ‘142 Grime Street’ Album Launch Party is out now on our Youtube:
More sessions soon.
OLS TEAM
Photography: JP With The Cannon