Stormzy is no stranger to exercise, but this is something new. As the sun streams into his cream kitchen on this unseasonably warm autumn day, the task occupying his biceps couldn’t be more domestic or British: mixing the batter for a Victoria sponge.
“It’s f**king boiling in here,” declares the rapper, real name Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr or, as most in his orbit call him, Mike. He puts down the cake mix, decisively drawing the blinds on the bright garden of his spacious London house.
It’s a modern, detached home — minimalist with a touch of bachelor clutter. A games room — complete with a large card table — peeps out from the corridor. Around a hundred gold-clad bottles of Armand de Brignac (which retail for around £200 each) line the top of a cabinet. And most strikingly, stacked up on the floor beside the TV is a large, framed cover of Time magazine, declaring my host, whose image fills the front page, as a “Next Generation Leader”.
Like all leaders, Stormzy — 6ft 4in, tall, lean — has his trademark uniform. “I’m known for black,” he says, laughing, adding in equally trademark Black London slang, “Black clothes, hood up, blacked up, whips are black, little snood.” And today he is true to his reputation, wearing black vest, shorts, socks and Crocs. The only colour in his entire get-up is a reassuring gold-toothed glint, which flashes every time he smiles. Despite the arduous batter-mixing, there’s still not a bead of sweat on his skin, so smooth and brown he once rapped, “They call me cocoa butter Mike.”
“When I’m touring, I do these really extreme diets and training plans. I’m sure it’s not entirely healthy,” Stormzy reflects, in his trademark deep-bass south London voice, liberally sprinkled with expletives. “I have very, some would say, unfair expectations of myself.” Off-tour, as he is now however, he allows himself some respite. “For the past few weeks, I’ve been eating whatever I want.”
Stormzy’s private chef, Vic, whose principal role seems to be providing nutritional moderation in between these extremes, keeps a watchful eye on our baking efforts. “Even Vic will say, ‘Bruv, you ain’t gotta do it that f**king extreme,’ he jokes. “But the way I look at it, when I’m on stage, performing, it’s an extension of my art,” he adds. “Giving someone an incredible show means a lot.”
There is no denying Stormzy has given the world incredible shows. Since first going viral with his 2015 video “Shut Up”, he has become the most successful rapper in British history; the only one to have ever seen three albums go to No1.
His live shows have become cultural moments too. In 2018, under a torrent of stage-rain at the Brits, he called the government “criminals”, and demanded of the then prime minister, “Yo, Theresa May, where’s the money for Grenfell?” When he became the first British rapper to headline Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, the press declared, “A generation has found its voice.”
Much as Stormzy’s outspoken lyrics earned him the status of trusted national treasure in some parts — among those not on the receiving end — it’s what he did next that really revealed the intention to build a lasting legacy. His company #Merky has expanded to establishing a publishing imprint, sponsoring a generation of Black students to study at Cambridge University, and even taking on Britain’s biggest sport, with an attempt to create the kind of diversity behind the scenes in football that reflects the contribution of black British players on the pitch.
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“Even outside of his ‘work’, Stormz wholeheartedly lives his truth,” says Tobe Onwuka, close friend, manager and co-founder of #Merky, who has been with the rapper from the beginning. “Stormz’s experiences and tribulations aren’t too dissimilar to many young men who come from where we’re from. For many, myself included, it’s remedial to witness his journey, like collective growth.”
Our cake is only just in the oven, and already I’m humbled by the ways in which Stormzy names his vulnerabilities, much as he does in his music. One critic described his most recent album, This Is What I Mean, released in 2022, as “haunted by heartbreak”. Nowhere is this truer than on its track “Bad Blood” — a song that reduced me to tears when I heard it. “We ride or die, you and I, had pride and it ruined us,” he raps. Despite its universal themes of enduring love and regret, it seems fairly obvious that Stormzy is referring to his then ex-girlfriend, television personality and recent Vogue cover star Maya Jama, with whom he experienced a very public split in 2019.
At the time of writing, speculation that the couple have reunited has been intensifying for several months. “We were so public the first time round,” he responds when I probe him about it. “Somewhere down the line my spirit started resisting ” he trails off. “So I’m not gonna speak on it,” he adds, bashfully. A few weeks earlier, I remind him, they were spotted holidaying together on Hydra. In the days after we speak they will be snapped coming out of Humo in Mayfair. He’s cropped up on her Instagram. “We were just living la vida loca,” Stormzy jokes coyly of the holiday snaps. “Lapse of judgement for an hour!”
The lack of privacy plagued both the relationship and the break-up. But it hasn’t stopped Stormzy living his life: training at a local gym and attending a church close to where he grew up. Bemused locals in his suburban part of south London are used to seeing him in the area, walking his Rottweilers — “my sons”, he calls them — or buying his groceries. “I would go to Tesco right now, like this!” he insists, when I question this alleged normality. “I feel there are some people you never see. Like, you didn’t go Tesco and see Adele. But with man, you will go round London and find so many people with a thousand different stories of how they encountered me. That’s because I’m determined to feel free! I’m going to the f**king shop ”
No one could argue his life is normal, however. His team often accompany him out and about, his stylist, Mel — star of the recent track “Mel Made Me Do It” — buys his clothes. To stay grounded, he relies on his deep Christian faith, and as we talk he frequently emphasises its role in his life. “My greatest desire is to be a great man of God,” he says. “My desires are maybe different to other people in my position.”
“In this day and age, you get a lot of inspirational and motivational messages, like affirmations. This very modern thing of looking in the mirror and saying, ‘I am strong.’ ” He shrugs. “That’s just bullshit to me. There’s this guy I follow, who says instead of having affirmations, you should ‘have an undeniable stack of evidence, that proves who you say you are’.” Stormzy relays this admiringly. “That’s me.”
“My thoughts and my brain can get overloaded,” he continues. “I have a constant cycle: I go from thinking on what I have to do, and my purpose, and #Merky being a next generation leader, all these things, and then I’ll feel responsible, and super heavy about it,” he says. All of a sudden he leaps off the kitchen island, where he is still perching, and bounds across the room, where the Time cover gazes out at us. He turns it around, image to the wall. “Sometimes it’s just too much,” he sighs.
Stormzy is lying on the sofa now, hands behind his head as he reclines, his long legs up on the backrest. He turned 30 this year, and is preoccupied with what it means to grow; what it means to be a man.
Much of this is intertwined with his attitude towards his father, a taxi driver, who was absent most of his childhood. Born in Croydon and growing up in South Norwood, with a single mother, this only exacerbated the pressure Stormzy felt growing up. “I am the man in my family,” he says. “I’ve got my mum and my sisters, I am provider and protector. It’s just a lot of things that I wish I had.” His was an upbringing of contrasts: excelling at school, then dropping out. Known for his talent at rapping, yet still pursuing an apprenticeship at an oil refinery in Southampton, while he built himself as an artist. “That’s why I mad hate social media,” he exclaims. “Because it’s made everyone think that I just got there. A young artist will look at me and think, ‘Oh, he’s just got it figured out.’ ”
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Stormzy seems determined to disrupt those romanticised ideas about his journey, having almost no filter when it comes to sharing his struggles. Since speaking so publicly about his lack of contact with his dad, he has now been in touch with him, an experience that’s made him reflective, melancholy even. “I have always felt like his absence in my life has had zero effect, that it was a very indifferent thing,” he recalls. “But the bit that’s irking is where I feel like I need to man up. And not in the toxic way that people tell young boys to ‘man up’, because I feel like, let the youths cry. Let the youts feel, innit.” He pauses in thought. “For me, it’s where I need what I think a dad would do. What a good dad would do for his son.”
Since we are on a somewhat ironic mission to manifest Stormzy’s national treasure status through the medium of cake, we begin icing it, turning it into an actual Victoria sandwich with jam and buttercream. He can’t resist an act of subversion, tagging it with the words “Big Mike” in red icing. Then — deciding that I should have half to take home — he cuts it brutally, jaggedly, in two. We each have a slice, while continuing to mull over the point of it all: life, meaning, purpose.
It’s an endless conversation for Stormzy, noted overthinker. “I’m just a very serious person,” he tells me. “But on the flipside of that, the opposite ends of the spectrum are insane. I’m also just a boy I’ve got a Ludo group, I’ve got my boys coming over to play poker later. Me and my friends cuss each other like we are in Year 7.”
“But I think bare things are mad serious,” he adds, with urgency. “Like art, and music.” Then, as if reminding himself of exactly what needs to be done, Stormzy declares: “Bro, you’re an artist! You are painting the times.”
The December 2023 issue of British Vogue is on newsstands from Tuesday 21 November