Local underground culture champions NE Rising are launching a new club night at World Headquarters on 29th February. Inside will look to be a hybrid of their phenomenally popular open mic nights hosted at The Cluny and their all-day garage parties which have been homed at The Telegraph and more recently Empourium.
“Inside will be a blend of a club event & a live show at times, jumping back and forth between our resident DJs shelling everything from Hip Hop, Garage, Grime & DnB to our local MCs previewing their new music and showing off their freestyling capabilities!”
To announce the new night NE Rising teamed up with their regular collaborators Shutter Productions to film a cypher with the majority of their resident MCs. Eyeconic, P Mann, Too Common, Left-Blank, Sweets, Sonny and take part in the cypher, with Ape MC joining them for the club night line-up.
Eyeconic continues to cement himself as one of the top multi-genre artists in the North East. The Middlesbrough based barsmith is currently on a run of singles blending Nirvana-fuelled grunge with pathos-packed rap but as he says at the end of the video: “rap, grime, trap, I can juggle fine.”
Elsewhere it’s exciting to see Sweets and Sonny being part of things together given the hype around some of their back-to-back work and we’ll hopefully see more of it at World Headquarters on February 29th.
Although Left-Blank stakes a strong claim, It’s P Mann who steals the show this time around. AJ Tracey’s ‘Ladbroke Grove’ is an obvious influence on a load of young MCs including some of these Inside residents. The resurgence of garage can be traced directly to the 2019 smash-hit. It’s no surprise that the ‘bet you thought I was going to say..’ scheme Merky Ace pioneered and AJ again re-popularised has found its way to the North East but P Mann’s take on it here is the most refreshing since the originators.
“North East man what ya gonna dee? Bet you thought I was gonna say do, but North East boy don’t spit like you” had me screwfacing for the longest.
The resident DJs for Inside are: Pirata, JTD, Hallé Kirby, ReWorx, Norvid and Cottam.
Words: Lee Hawthorn
RIDE MUSIC 