Central Cee is in the mood for love

Taken from the autumn 2024 issue of Dazed. Get your copy here.

When leaving for school as a kid, Central Cee would stuff sweets into his satchel. The sweets would disperse into clamouring hands and, in exchange, the jar they came in would fill with coins. One day,  in Year 8, he made £90. Back at home, a boy from his old primary school would come over with a mic and an interface. For a fee, the boy would record Cee’s earliest raps. “I’d pay him £7 an hour,” he remembers. “Every day I would leave school and go link my man, pay him in coins and record. That was the beginning stages of man’s ting.”

Cee is back in London today to put the finishing touches to his debut album in the studio. We are sitting in the building’s lobby, and the rapper has just risen from sleep. And though he’s been here for two weeks, sleeping in the studio, feeling faint pangs of pressure about the moment ahead, the time has not been as productive as he had hoped, this current stage of his career pulling him across countries and time zones and rarely offering him a moment to settle. “It takes me a minute to adjust to a new setting,” he says. “I might be getting used to a place and then [suddenly] it’s time to leave.” He plays me a few songs from the album off his phone – the single “gen z luv”, and an unreleased one that nods to the summery swing of UK garage. His voice glides over the bouncing instrumental, a sound born in London during the 1990s, before Cee was even born, and retooled for the city he inherited.

For as long as he can remember, Cee’s pursuit of music has moved in step with a long, deep hustle for a brighter future: before Oakley Neil Caesar-Su became Central Cee, before rap and fame, before money and acclaim and notoriety. Before he emerged as one of the defining British artists of his era, and songs like “Doja” and “Obsessed With You” swamped Instagram and TikTok feeds. Before the freestyles with Drake and the features with J Cole and Ice Spice and Lil Baby. Before his single with Dave, “Sprinter”, reigned at No 1 for 10 weeks on the UK singles charts, also mounting the summit in Australia, Ireland, Sweden and more. Before the Brit nominations, the Mobo wins and the rumoured eight-figure joint venture deal with Columbia Records and Sony, he was a young boy from west London, hungry for more than he had.

In his earliest lyrics it was there, hints of a burning ambition, a desire that drove who he would become. “Maybe I was too aware at a young age,” he says, “and too fascinated with the deprivation of money.  I felt like I needed it so bad. I wanted it so bad, and  I went and got it.” The story of the album starts at home, in the flat he lived in with his Irish mum and younger brothers. His father, part Guyanese and Chinese, had split from his mother when Cee was around seven, and the family was facing real hardship: Cee felt a duty to make things right, to support and step up for his loved ones. He wrote raps and poetry at the age of eight, an outlet for his emotions.

When his mum was out of the flat, he rummaged through the home, finding things of value, then sat his brothers on the doorstep and used their infant charm to sell belongings to passersby. Later, he would write songs like diary accounts of hustling and selling in the city, memories of addicts and hand-to-hands and long nights in trap houses. Street traumas and close encounters and friends jailed and buried. “For my livelihood, push white in my hood / but I don’t recommend it,” he barred on “One Up”.

“Before, I was almost pissing in the wind. Now I had proper aim, I could see the target. It seemed like it was gonna happen” – Central Cee

Young people like Cee were raised in these climates, working-class kids seeing the tease of wealth and riches on the other side of the fence, the allure of what could one day be. One time, outside his house and “doing stuff he shouldn’t be doing”, he saw David Beckham on the other side of the street. “This is mad,” he remembers thinking, feeling in that moment that they were “on the same road”, despite their wildly differing circumstances. Other days he would spend hours riding the 94 bus, getting on at Shepherd’s Bush outside his mum’s flat and staring out the window, the bus groaning down the long A402 road to Queensway and Marble Arch, where the centre of the city opens its jaws and traffic melts into the chaos of central London. At the end of the line, in Piccadilly Circus, he would wait and ride the bus back west and make the trip again. “I could always see how big London was,” he says. “I always treated London [how you should treat it]. There’s transport, you can really get about – [I’m] an opportunist, I guess. Seeing them things defo opens your eyes, if you’ve got the right mindset.” And though he had a focus and a vision, his home life was unsteady.

Aged 14, he left his mum’s flat and roved across London, staying in nearby Notting Hill for a while, then in the east with his dad. “The council moved me and my pops,” he says, “but I couldn’t hack it.” He moved to Brighton with his cousin before coming back to London, roaming around east again with his dad, and ending up in Ilford – an adolescence spent in the many scattered neighbourhoods of the city. “It was always just kind of in and out,” he recalls. When he came back west, he observes, he “was starting to clock that some of these man ain’t ever left. People [get] trapped. What that can do, putting us here and someone right there, is cause a mad divide. It makes some of the mandem not move a muscle. You feel so uncomfortable walking on that road because it’s so different.” It’s a path that led him to his debut album, pencilled in for release this year, and a newfound maturity in his approach to his art. “With the mixtapes, I was living in [the same] house I grew up in,” he says of his earliest output. “Now we’ve elevated, we’re actually musicians. There were times it was hard to say man’s a musician. I was just a guy that [went into the] studio [sometimes]. Now, I’m an artist.” 

Cee still remembers the first time he set foot in a studio. He was 14, and a friend from school took him to a place by Wandsworth Bridge. He heard his voice clear in the microphone, and something became concrete. “That day I knew I wanted to be an artist,” he says. “I knew what I was trying to do. I knew it was a job.” He set out his intentions for success early, looking sideways at peers such as Chip and Bow Wow and Channel U/AKA stalwart Fugative, who had all broken out as teenagers. “I got higher ambition, I was trapped as a kid,” he rapped on a 2015 Link Up TV freestyle. There were other releases, a few bars on Rinse FM, and tracks that have since been scrubbed from official channels. In his teenage years he transitioned between styles, moving from freestyles to Auto-tune and trap-infused melodies. “When I was 14 I would say, ‘If I’m not where I want to be when I’m 16, then I need to allow it.’ Then I would get to 16 and I’d be somewhere – definitely not where I wanted to be, but further than I was [before].” 

He had a few jobs in his teenage years, some in retail, investing his earnings into his career, paying for studio time and developing his image. At 17, he threw his own headline show at Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, renting the venue himself for around £500, packing it out and making around £2,500 in profit. Six months later, after he’d turned 18, he did it again. “It was just the same as the first time,” he says, “I hadn’t grown.” Discouraged, he began a long slide out of music, the dream he’d held since childhood slowly fading. “I took my foot off the gas,” he admits. “My whole life I’d been in this mad delusional state trying to blow, and I wasn’t seeing the world for what it was.”

In this period, drill was dominating the landscape of UK rap. And Cee, instead of neglecting this shift or looking to push back against it, leaned in. Tracks like “Day in the Life” and “Loading” soon followed – both melodic evolutions of the subgenre. “I started to become less delusional in them times. Before, I was almost pissing in the wind. Now I had proper aim, I could see the target. It seemed like it was gonna happen. I knew what to do now. Whereas before it was more just a hope ting, a faith ting.” His Wild West mixtape was released in March 2021 and landed at No 2 on the UK album charts; a follow-up, 23, went one better the following year. In the years that have passed, his life has changed, the ambitions he held as a young boy now realised. The weight of what his life has become is still sinking in. Very consciously, he stepped out of one life and into a new one. “Maybe it’s just being busy, but I don’t really think about celebrating or how far I’ve come,” he reflects of his breakneck schedule. Whenever he visits a friend who lives way out of ends, a nagging sense of survivor’s guilt comes over him. And even though he has moved away himself, he never feels it in his new home, maybe because his boys are often with him. But out there, far from everything and everyone he first knew, thoughts about where he grew will flower in his mind. 

Out ahead, the release of his debut looms large on the horizon. (“Maybe I’m small, small feeling the pressure of the album,” he says, “but I’m happy with the music.”) The release will mark the closing of a chapter, and yet despite Cee’s narrative shift, there is a part of him, he insists, that will remain rooted in a version of the city that most of us know. We don’t outrun where we have come from, what we have lived through and the early moments that have moulded us, he says, as the studio door closes behind us. We learn to live with them. His music is a reflection of this process, a testimony to the boys who emerged out of chaos, attempting to make good on the realities they were dealt. 

Grooming NICOLA SVENSEN, set design TOM SCHNEIDER at NEW SCHOOL, photographic assistants OLIVER MATICH, ARTHUR FINCH, MARTHA MCGONAGLE, styling assistants PIPPI NOLA, DARLENE PARK, DOLLY MILKES, tailoring CARSON DARLING-BLAIR, set design assistants EDDIE AMOS, ROSE REEKIE, SAM JOHN NATHAN, production assistants ANA SILVA, JANINE COELHO GOMES, NOAH CHONG, special thanks KENNINGTON STUDIOS

The summer 2024 issue of Dazed is out internationally on September 12.