Music
A life of grime: hanging out with Tim & Barry
The celebrated duo guide us through a career at the cutting edge of London's grime scene.
Underneath Somerset House an unlikely rave is taking place. Whilst upstairs the well-heeled browse photography as part of a week-long takeover by Photo London, the basement, a musty dungeon of flinty walls and narrow tunnels, has been given over to Tim & Barry.
D Double E and Logan Sama
© Theo Cottle
The duo, who’ve become key lynchpins of the grime scene, have been given the chance to document over a decade at the forefront of grime photography. Being Tim & Barry, they’ve decided that showing photos isn’t enough. Instead they’ve rolled into Somerset House with a massive soundsystem, a set of DJs playing extra-terrestrial bass bangers, a beyond-gassed PA from Newham Generals, a stack of free booze, a horde of fans, and a sense of cartoon chaos - and it’s all being streamed live online. “There’s water dripping through onto the kit, we’ve got to fucking cover everything with plastic,” Barry shouts as he passes, half laughing, half frantic. The music booms on. Same as it ever was.
Two friends who met studying photography at university, Tim & Barry first started snapping in 2000. “We didn’t have a plan,” Tim says. “We knew we wanted to do photography, but we didn’t really have any ambitions.
“We knew what we didn’t want to be more than what we did. We worked with a couple of photographers who were pretty ropey, and we didn’t want to go down that route; really shit fashion photography, with these photographers being quite sterile, being all about them as a personality.”
Instead, they carved out an uncanny reputation for being in the right place at the right time – from their early experiments streaming MCs on YouTube, to their ceaseless championing of the braggadocio and humour of the grime scene, to their recently completed debut full length film documenting the Chicago footwork scene. Through a haphazard combination of passion, bloody-mindedness, luck and persistence - and a complete disregard for every branding strategy you care to mention - they have found themselves involved in some of the most crucial cultural innovations of the last decade.
D Double E
© Theo Cottle
“Around 2002 Dizzee Rascal didn’t have a record out,” Barry explains. “But we’d hear school kids singing his songs waiting for the bus. We knew he was going to be massive, so we went to a major magazine with photos of him and they didn’t want to know. A year later he won the Mercury and they were on the phone asking us to get Dizzee – but he’d already gone to America. That was the turning point for us. We knew we never wanted to work to commission again – we only wanted to work on stuff we were into.”
This policy meant the duo ended up becoming a fixture on the grime scene, hanging out with the producers and MCs as friends and offering a completely different take on it to the dominant narrative of grime kids as thugs and criminals. They’d go to key MC and producer Jammer’s house “for 6 hours at a time, just hanging out and taking the occasional photo”.
I lived in a flooded basement for a while because it cost nothing
“We didn’t have any money for years,” Barry says. “I lived in a flooded basement for a while because it cost nothing. Then for a while we both lived in a mate’s shoe store. They didn’t have any security alarm, so we were the night watchmen. We had this futon to sleep on. We had to roll it up each morning to let the customers in. But it was free."
They’ve come a long way since, famously winning a MOBO in 2014 with their video for Skepta’s That Not Me – for many, the turning point in grime’s renewed assault on the mainstream. In typical Tim & Barry fashion, the duo only found out they’d won after a series of tweets reporting that Skepta had declared the video cost £80 to make.
“We actually swapped it for a dubplate and a freestyle,” Tim says. “He still hasn’t recorded the freestyle…”
This can-do approach, coupled with a lack of concern for funds, has become Tim & Barry’s calling card. Like most grime artists, some of their most innovative work has been inspired by necessity. When, in the mid-noughties they found themselves pegged as leading a digital revolution, they were pretty nonplussed.
“We changed to digital because film was fucking expensive,” Barry points out. “It’s classic,” laughs Tim. “We’ve been called pioneers of digital technology, but I hadn’t even owned a computer ‘til 2006. We used to upload the photos on a mate's laptop. We were just learning as we went along.”
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Anyone who’s been to Tim & Barry’s Dalston studio will have seen this haphazard approach to technology in action - somehow they have managed to shoot and stream countless episodes of their iconic Just Jam show, which has featured everyone from Shangaan Electro pioneer Nozinja, to electronica hero Four Tet, to Hyperdub boss Kode 9, to some kid you’ve never heard of before or since, and all from a set-up of wheezing computers and wi-fi running at a glitchy flicker. But this DIY kit has been worked around and into the Just Jam aesthetic. The stream may drop or stutter, but every time it does, you’re taken back to pirate radio energy, that moment of searching for the magic that lies between static and the mainstream. It’s the effortless rawness that makes Tim & Barry’s work breathe.
“If we’d waited to get all the equipment we needed to do it,” Tim ruminates, “nothing would ever happen. So we’ve always just used whatever we can blag and gone from there.”
On the mic
© Theo Cottle
And standing in the low, dark corridors of Somerset House, slap bang in the heart of one of the world’s oldest cities, watching the crowd wile out to DJs cutting grime with Jersey, footwork, house, and other genres so fresh they defy names, you can’t help but think that, blagging or not, they’ve come out on top.
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