Stormin: grime pioneer who reinvigorated the rave scene

Sadly, the death of Stormin MC wasn’t a surprise: he’d been fighting skin cancer for some years, and his last Instagram post was made from his bed in a hospice. The tragedy has hit colleagues, fellow musicians and fans hard – Wiley, Skepta, Giggs and Novelist are among the MCs to have paid tribute to him – and particularly because Stormin was on the cusp of the greatest success of his life.

He had already been at the heart of a transformational moment in UK underground music, when – as a teenager with east London’s Nasty Crew – he was a key participant in the birth of grime. Recently he had been leading another big wave in grassroots music: as part of the drum’n’bass collective SaSaSaS, he’d become a figurehead for the reinvigoration of the rave scene, playing regularly to large audiences – most notably at the Rampage festival in Belgium last year, the YouTube video of which shows an extraordinary collision of artistic discipline and audience energy.

The scale and organisation of SaSaSaS’s performances are, in a sense, light years from the barely-cohering chaos you can hear in Nasty Crew’s early pirate radio sets and DVD clips. At the turn of the millennium, the teenage Stormin and colleagues such as D Double E, Kano, Jammer and Sharky Major came together out of necessity: they were excluded from the drum’n’bass and garage scenes, which were dominated by a closed shop of rave-era veterans, and had to create their own infrastructure out of nothing. Crews like Nasty had fluid lineups, beset by adolescent rivalries, gossip and threats, and for all the extraordinary talent it was hard to see how anything lasting could come out of this explosion of noise and language.

But grime did last. While the most visible sides of it appeared to be boom-and-bust – police and councils shutting down raves, the major labels hoovering up major talents then tangling them in development hell or shackling them to naff electro-house beats – there were plenty of scene stalwarts who kept going. And Stormin was an exemplar of this, ducking and diving, slipping between the cracks of hype, but always working and writing; staying locked into the scene whether under his own name or lately as his masked alter ego Teddy Bruckshot. Not that he was a grime purist: his mixtapes and sets from the beginning are full of hip-hop and reggae influences (and on one notable 2005 freestyle, a flip of Queen’s We Are the Champions into a gangster boast), and he never lost his love of the jungle and drum’n’bass he’d been immersed in as a kid.

As the years went by, the faultlines that had been so vital to the birth of grime began to close. MC Shabba D had been in drum’n’bass from the rave explosion – the ones Stormin and friends had been unable to join as teens – but he was also a friend of Stormin’s uncle, and recognising his skills, brought him into the d’n’b scene. SaSaSaS, the collective that emerged from their impromptu jams, represented a cross-generational joining of the dots through the UK underground: old-school rave DJ Phantasy and his young protege Macky Gee cut up a cascade of tracks with military precision, and the hip-hop and grime lyricism of Harry Shotta and Stormin respectively played off the ragga-heavy MCing of Shabba D and Skibadee, inspiring young rave crowds. And in fact, it’s not so far from those early Nasty Crew days: what seemed like unsustainable, lawless chaos was in fact the sound of young minds feeling their way, working hard to find, or make, their place in a powerful British musical tradition.

The last picture on Stormin’s official Facebook page contrasts hugely with his final Instagram. It’s him, weeks before he went in to hospital for the last time, on a beach in Dominica, about to appear on a local TV station: enjoying his success, but, now a grown man with family, still putting in the hours to expand his profile. To the very end, Stormin was the epitome of the underground music trouper: consistently harnessing energy and turning it to constructive ends.