It will take Digga D about 20 minutes, give or take, to warm up to me. “Don’t take it personally,” says his publicist, remarking that he is, in general, a man of few words - though being clever and nasty and evocative with them is how he made a name, how his bread is buttered. When we first speak he’s in Trinidad, where the weather is so unrelentingly hot that, even in the shade of a sapodilla, the energy expended by a long conversation can make you feel light-headed. And so he is curt. (“It makes me money,” he says of his motivations.) He is evasive. (“When it started making me money,” of when he realised he was good.) He is brushing his shoulder-length twists from his face and moving from the porch to a room inside, then shifting to another, equally airless room, searching for a comfort that is likely to elude him. He is answering my questions vaguely, or with a handful of words, and then punctuating his responses with, “You get me?” Often, I do not.
Throughout our first conversation, it appears as if he’d rather be dozing on a hammock beneath the Caribbean sun, which seems the obvious choice over speaking to a stranger with a notepad who is asking you to take stock of your life. Nostalgia doesn’t come easily for those shackled to their worst mistakes. And so it is unsurprising when the software that transcribes our conversation tells me afterwards that I’ve somehow done 60% of the talking, despite being the appointed reporter in the situation. For a moment at the beginning of our interview, it feels as if we’ve traded roles. Digga is asking the questions. He wants to know what I’m planning to write. He wants to know if I mean to talk about the music he’s been making, or if I mean to clear the air (which has for years been thick with tabloid panic). If a side-eye could speak, it would be Digga D saying, “Which one is it?” His lawyer of five years tells me he is distrustful of journalists. His publicist tells me 90% of the interviews he does are with uniformed men who want to recall him to prison. Men who believe his music should be targeted with terrorism legislation. Men who will be reading this profile for reasons besides entertainment.
At 22 years old, Digga D, born Rhys Herbert, is already one of the brightest stars in the UK music scene. He’s released three mixtapes in as many years, and his latest offering, , debuted at number one on the album charts last year. He’s won plaques for several singles on the Top 40, and accrues millions of views on the music videos he posts to YouTube - that is, the ones that haven’t been scrubbed from the site by Project Alpha, an ‘intelligence-gathering initiative’ funded by the Home Office. He’s signed to a record label
