Nursing a hot chocolate in a coffee shop in his home town of Brighton, Riley Davies exudes ebullient excitement, the same ebullience you hear when he raps as ArrDee. Almost uniquely among the current crop of British rappers, the 19-year-old invariably sounds like someone who is having the time of his life, as if he’s grinning from ear to ear whenever he gets on the mic. He says he’s always been like that, ever since he was a kid, when his relatives nicknamed him Smiley Riley, and what he calls “the whole cheeky chappie thing” helped at least a bit in what sounds like a turbulent adolescence. At one point, he says, the police were at the door of his mum’s house so often that “the landlord started moving a bit funny” and they were forced to relocate to a different town. “But then, as I got older,” he says, “I think I realised that life gets a bit easier if you’re not a prick to everyone.”
Even if it wasn’t in his nature, you couldn’t blame him for having a spring in his step. When we meet, his single Flowers (Say My Name) has just entered the charts at No 5. It’s his fourth Top 10 hit in 12 months – two solo, two as a guest rapper, including his meme-inducing appearance on the remix to Tion Wayne and Russ Millions’ Body, the first drill track to reach No 1. The other week, he says, he posted his Fifa Ultimate Team on his Instagram story, “and Ian Wright DMed me! I had him in centre-mid and obviously he’s not a centre-mid, but he’s like: ‘For you, I’ll play midfield.’ I lost my mind, and then Rio Ferdinand DMed me! He’s like: ‘Why haven’t I made the cut, I can’t be a defender?’ Rio Ferdinand! I was calling everyone, bruv. This is mental!”
This time last year, he was working the night shift in an Amazon warehouse. “Ten pm to 10am. I barely saw sunlight,” he nods. “I’d get home, sleep all day, obviously, wake up and have to go back there. On the days off I had, I was bunking the train to London to go to the studio.”
In fairness, he already had a small online following – “about 8,000 people” – thanks to the videos he’d been posting online since he was an Eminem and Lil Wayne-obsessed 12-year-old, rapping in the local park after school. In the early days, he thinks, “people were sharing them mainly to take the piss”.
He’d also met his manager, who had helped hatch what he calls “a two-year plan” with him: the first step was to release a new freestyle, called Cheeky Bars, with a video shot on the bandstand on Brighton seafront for £100. The problem, if you can call it that, was that the plan kept going completely awry. “Cheeky Bars went mad, had to change the plan,” he smiles (it has had 5.8m views on YouTube, and 6.5m plays on Spotify). He released another freestyle, 6am in Brighton, “and that went mad, had to change the plan again”.
And then the plan had to be ripped up entirely, thanks to the remix of Body, a collaboration that didn’t begin in the most auspicious circumstances. Having decided to celebrate signing a record deal in the wake of his freestyles’ success by hiring an aparthotel in London and throwing a party for his friends, Davies nipped outside for a cigarette and couldn’t remember the door code to get back in. “So I’m trying to type the code, and these two G-Wagons pulled up, loads of massive boys jumped out and they’ve all got balaclavas on. I’m five foot nothing, from Brighton, at one in the morning, I’ve just got a record deal so I’ve got this little Gucci bag I’d bought. I’m like: oh my God, it’s going to go mad. And one of these boys, who’s like six foot six, starts giggling and goes: ‘You’re ArrDee, right?’ He takes the bally off and it’s fucking Tion Wayne, staying in the same aparthotel as me.
“When Cheeky Bars came out, he’d liked my post, which was mental. So I went to his room and he’s showing me the original of Body and saying: ‘I see you’re popping, I want to do something with you, I like your style.’ A lot of people advised him against putting me on that song: he’d had Aitch on [previous hit] Keisha & Becky, who had a bit more music out and buzz behind him. I was two freestyles deep and he didn’t know whether I could do a viral verse or anything. But he took that risk.”
Thanks to a rather blue punchline about condoms, ArrDee’s guest verse did indeed go viral, helping propel the single to platinum status and fast-tracking Davies to fame: his first mixtape, out in January, is hotly anticipated. It all took off so quickly, he says, some people thought he was “an industry plant”, until “the Brighton lot started saying: ‘No, he’s been rapping for five years.’ In my head, rap-wise, there’s no such thing as an industry plant, because if London doesn’t fuck with you [appreciate you], it doesn’t matter how much money labels pump into artists, it still don’t work.”
You can see why he has taken off: Davies is an extremely dextrous and talented rapper. His singles have a perfect musical balance – heavy on hooks, they function as pop music without ever sounding cheesy or craven – and his Daily Duppy freestyle showed he could do more socially conscious material and kitchen sink drama.
Moreover, he cuts a unique figure: UK rap isn’t exactly groaning with diminutive rappers with a belief in the power of crystals and witchcraft. “My mum practises witchcraft, not in the sense of magic spells but charging crystals, what crystals mean, which is why I have this,” he says, showing me a black ring on his finger. “Black sapphires, my birthstone, are protective and grounding. Some people might think it’s bullshit, but it works for me the same way as being a Christian or a Muslim or whatever – that’s what they believe and it works for them. I talk quite heavily about manifesting and believing in the universe doing things for you if you believe. My mum showed me that. When she was 15 she left the country, came back, got her GCSEs, went to college, became as high as she could in special needs teaching, then she got a black belt in kick-boxing, done two amateur fights, went back to university … all of that, as a single mum, raising two kids, my big brother with autism. It was monkey see, monkey do.”
Nor is it exactly usual to find a rapper repping Brighton, both the pleasures of life in “the ocean city” and its tougher side (“if you come down for the weekend from London, you’re not going to [famously deprived suburb] Whitehawk”).
“I definitely had more to prove coming from Brighton. When we did the freestyle, 6am in Brighton, a lot of people advised against calling it that. They were like: ‘Brighton has got a bit of a stigma.’ I was like: no, you know what, it’s bigger than me, so if I can shine a light on the town … because my whole personality, me being comfortable in my skin comes from Brighton, because there are crazy characters out here, but no one gets judged, so I wouldn’t be me without being born and raised here, and I want to be telling it like it is.”
No, he says, he has no urge to leave the city for London now success has come calling. “I think it’s what keeps me so sane when everything’s moved so fast. I get humbled here. I go to certain bars and they ID me, and if I don’t have my ID they won’t let me in, because they know I used to try and hang outside of there when I was 15, 16. They don’t give a fuck what I’m doing in my life at the moment.”
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