"When I started putting my stuff on YouTube in 2011, that was a eureka moment. It never occurred to me to do that, as in just poetry on YouTube. I don't think at any point in my career, I've been viral, I've never gone viral, but I’ve always found a way of reaching the people that need to see it, the people that are in a position to accelerate my career, or the people that will champion my message in the most meaningful way. In 2011/2012 I did my first little short, which is called my city, which is a poem about London, in the wake of the riots on the dawn of the Queen's Jubilee and the London Olympics, as well as the present an alternative perspective that accelerates things somewhat. Then obviously the following year 2013, I did my first headline show, which was in the Royal Albert Hall. It showed a lot of people that I could transition from YouTube, and then later that year, I got signed, I released my first EP the following year in 2014, I graduated in 2013 as well, I suppose graduating was a big thing for me psychologically.
What happens with most content creators from my field is that they might make a rap and put it on YouTube and go to the familiar channels and hope that they get a lot of traffic on those channels. But my situation, I just made a poem, which no one was used to hearing delivered in a way that was doing it. Furthermore, no one was used to that kind of content in poetry form. So the few people that heard it, in my immediate social group, my Facebook friends, instead of going and passing it to, SB TV or link-up TV or Grind daily at the time. They would give it to their parents, or they'll play it to their teacher, or they'll talk to their lecturer about it. We didn't have a big mass movement of all of the 13 year olds in the country buying my single, but what we did have is an intergenerational cross-sectional conversation. For people that are not used to sharing the same art. How many times you sit down with your parents and say, look at this cool song. It comes from that cool song world. And you're able to have a conversation across age barriers and across professions. So what started to happen by 2012 is I'm getting commissions from companies to write about sustainable development. That opened up a new line of thinking for me, I realised that there can be a commercial avenue to this thing that doesn't compromise my ethics. That doesn't interrupt my uni work because it kind of aligns everything I'm reading about. At the time I was doing a paper on the political economy of capitalism."