Bless Beats
22-year-old Bless Beats is one of the country’s most visionary young producers with the hit making touch in the studio.
2010 sees him return anew with a single picking a hook from an indie pop princess, a verse from a Daisy Age hip hop great and one from the King of Grime. ‘I made a musical Subway sandwich’ says Bless ‘I just went in and picked whatever I wanted and put it together’.
Fans of grime will have charted this half-English, half Jamaican Bow E3 residents’ rise. His first break through production in 2006 was 16 Bar Rally which lead to his tracks being in demand on the hardest mixtapes of the year like Roll Deeps’ ‘Rules & Regulations’ Jammers ‘Are You Dumb’, Wiley’s ‘Tunnel Visions’ and Chipmunks ‘League of My Own’.
What Bless did next changed the face of UK music and established him nationally. He sampled DSK’s dance classic ‘What Would We Do?’ to create the electro house grime crossover hit ‘Wearing My Rolex’ with Wiley. The song was the most played track on Radio 1 for 4 weeks in May 2008 before peaking at No.2. Fellow grime titan Skepta’s response track ‘Rolex Sweep’ also produced by Bless spawned a dance craze that swept the nation (including Coldplay frontman Chris Martin).
Now Bless’s relentless creativity has put together a new smash hit flavour, inspired by a chance meeting. ‘I was outside YO!YO!’s having a cigarette and this unassuming boy came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself as Bless Beats, said his little sister was a big fan and he’d like to work with me.
So I went down to the studio in Bow and we ended up having a little jam’ says Remi. ‘She was showing me rock n roll beat patterns and we built it from there with her playing guitar’ continues Bless. ‘It gets you moving’ chips in De La Soul’s Plug One AKA Kelvin Mercer who contributes a verse ‘Bless handles the arrangement correctly.’
‘When it comes to production you can always rely on Bless to move the goal posts’ continues Grime titan Wiley. ‘My iTunes is full up of people you maybe wouldn’t have thought I listen to, like Bjork. I’ve been making really experimental music. I like DJ Zincs crack house, minimal and tech. I am a producer so I like to see how other people use sounds’.
Bless Beats roots might be in the grime of Bow E3 but he has the hunger to experiment and venture out to tinker with the urban pop formula like an East End Gorillaz. ‘I tried to put something together that appeals across genres. I can produce for a couple of kids in Bow or for De La Soul.’