F-T is an artist/producer from the city of Milton Keynes, England. F-T broke out from the local grime scene to gain nationwide recognition with the crew IMP Batch who were also from the Milton Keynes area. Following on from the success of IMP batch F-T has continued to record and release released materiel on his own label ODD ENT as well as produce beats for some of the big names on the Grime/UK Rap scene. In 2011 F-T co-launched TMTV Freestyle fire an internet based TV channel dedicated to shining a light on up and coming talent. Break to the beat recently caught up with F-T to find out about his involvement in the UK Grime/Rap scene over the years as well as talk about his current projects.

How did you get in to the UK Grime scene and what inspired you to start rapping/writing lyrics?

My Dad wanted to stop me n my brother from watching too much TV when we were young so we could concentrate on education I guess, I can’t remember exactly but he effectively said we couldn’t watch TV during the week and we literally went upstairs and discovered a ghetto blaster tucked away in the storage cupboard of the spare room. We found Milton Keynes pirate station ‘super jam’ and heard MC OJ and MC DANNY P going back to back with ‘Mr Fixit’ on the turntables. We hasn’t heard anything like it, all we knew of musically before this was US hip hop like 2pac, that was my first taste of UK Garage. I then started sourcing out all UK garage music I could from tape packs to recording tapes and the music evolved from garage to grime and I was a listener throughout the transition. Then in secondary school me n some mates decided to form a little group called ‘The Justice System; and we soon started winning a lot of talent competitions and had the ethic from the start to put our money together to produce semi pro recordings something other people of our age were not doing. Nobody would give me beats to rhyme over so I decided I needed to make beats myself and that too started and I was eventually noticed by the popular Milton Keynes grime crew at the time (imp batch/impressionist crew) and I ended up part of that movement. It was then at the age of 16 that I made an instrumental called Gype which blew up spending 12 weeks at number 1 in the same UKG chart I grew up listening to and aspiring to be part of one day. From there as a collective we went on BBC 1xtra various times, had countless record releases that topped the UK G charts and I got to produce for the likes of Kano, Tinchy Strider, Roll Deep, Crazy Titch, Jemma Fox, Jammer (the whole grime scene). Continue reading →