“Justice for Grenfell, Justice for Gaza.” Behkam heard those chants around Ladbroke Grove, the West London neighbourhood where he grew up, close to where the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people in 2017. They started him writing his first play, which he named after Manchester Drive, a street in the same part of North Kensington, and this song is its title track.
The piece starts close to home. Behkam calls himself “a Lad Broke”, a play on Ladbroke Grove, in a neighbourhood where one neighbour lives large and the next is flat broke. Then he turns to Gaza. He raps about feeling silenced every time he speaks up, and about a child who asks whether something falling from the sky is food and is told it’s a bomb. He also takes on a West that opens its homes to Ukrainian refugees while brown and black migrants are left to drown. He signs off “reporting live from Manchester Drive”.
In the play, Behkam raps and plays piano as Ardz, a medical student whose parents run a corner shop. Ardz becomes a star after a video of him rapping goes viral. When he posts about politics, his management takes over his social media, and he has to choose between his career and his voice, all while falling for Shirin, a photojournalist working in the West Bank. Behkam based the story on Layli o Majnun, the 12th-century Persian love story by the poet Nezami Ganjavi. The play ran in May at the Peckham Fringe, the festival run by Theatre Peckham, at Canada Water Theatre, directed by Amari Harris, with Rima Georges and Wesley Bozonga alongside him. Behkam trained on the Lyric Hammersmith’s Springboard programme and at Theatre Peckham Rep, and made his stage debut as Bacchus in The Bacchae at the Lyric.
This version of “Manchester Drive” was filmed at the Steeze Factory, the West London studio of Sheffield producer Toddla T, who has produced for Skepta, Wiley, Roots Manuva and Ms. Dynamite. The studio is a single room he rents in a complex, and he records vocalists out in it with him, away from any booth, with the air con running and the kettle on, beside an upright piano he bought on Gumtree for £50. The Steeze Factory name also covers the sessions, cyphers and parties where he puts established MCs on the mic with newcomers.
Toddla first met Behkam through a friend, and only later realised that Behkam’s parents run the red corner shop on the Notting Hill Carnival route where Toddla had been getting his iced coffee. Like Ardz in the play, Behkam grew up as the son of corner-shop owners.
Catch Behkam’s Steeze Factory session HERE, then see Toddla T react to it with Jordan Stephens, who makes up the Brighton rap duo Rizzle Kicks and regularly joins Toddla for the Steeze Factory’s reaction videos, HERE