Kano

Before Kano had a debut, he had a folder of demos and no clear idea what an album was supposed to look like, so he played them for Wiley, the MC everyone in the scene already deferred to as its architect. "You're going to make an album," Wiley told him, waving off the anxiety in one line: "Just put them six tunes on a CD, add a few more, and that's your album, bro." Kano took the advice almost literally — Home Sweet Home followed within the year — and later called the debt structural, not sentimental: "You can all trace us back to Wiley in a way."

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2002

EskimoWiley

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2008

Anywhere We GoKano

listen for"Eskimo" is Wiley's own blueprint for the sound Kano credits him with inventing: a bare, needling synth line locked to a stiff, faltering 140bpm clatter, built to leave space for bars rather than melody. Six years later, guesting on Kano's own 140 Grime Street, Wiley steps into that same cold, spacious pocket on "Anywhere We Go" — the mentor who once sketched an album's running order for a nervous artist now trading verses inside one, the rhythm barely changed.

Years before either of them had a record deal, a teenage Kano was making pause-tape freestyles in his brother's bedroom when D Double E rolled up hours late in a Golf GTI, the coolest presence in the neighbourhood by Kano's account. "He was to me what Jay-Z is like to kids in Brooklyn," Kano said of him. He later called their whole N.A.S.T.Y. Crew lineup "the Wu-Tang Clan of grime" — a dozen distinct voices sharing one mic, D Double E's among the loudest. Fifteen years on, Kano brought him back for "Class of Deja," reassembling the pirate-radio lineup one more time.

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2010

Street Fighter RiddimD Double E

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2019

Class of DejaKano

listen for"Street Fighter Riddim" rides on D Double E's own signature: percussive ad-libs snapped into the gaps between bars, so distinctive in UK grime they function as a second rhythm track. On "Class of Deja," the same vocal tics resurface inside Kano's own verse structure rather than around it — D Double E's voice still unmistakable over a beat two decades younger than the one that first hooked a teenage Kano in his brother's bedroom.

Kano's first-ever recording almost stayed a bedroom demo. He played the rough cut of "Boys Love Girls" to a friend who happened to be a teenage Dizzee Rascal, already sharpening the same pirate-radio craft; Dizzee told him to take it into a proper studio, and the reworked version became Kano's debut single. A year later, watching Dizzee's own debut Boy in da Corner win the Mercury Prize, Kano understood the format itself was viable for someone from their scene: "When Dizzee released Boy in da Corner, he showed us all that it was possible."

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2002

I Luv UDizzee Rascal

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2004

Boys Love GirlsKano

listen forDizzee's 2002 single "I Luv U" set the template Kano's own first single followed two years on: rapid double-time verses over stark, sub-heavy, 140bpm production built for pirate radio, not daytime rotation. A 2005 profile of Kano put the resemblance plainly, describing "Boys Love Girls" as "not quite 'I Luv U', but a teenagers anthem nonetheless" — same generation, same tempo, the rougher edges smoothed by the studio session Dizzee himself had pushed for.