Inspiring
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
DJ Target ROLL DEEP
DJ Target is a founding member of Roll Deep and a DJ on BBC Radio 1Xtra. Roll Deep have been consistent supporters of Love Music Hate Racism, using music as a means to reach young people. Four years ago they teamed up with Vauxhall to make a short film as part of the Vauxhall Collective.
“Roll Deep are a group, a band, a collective, however you want to call it. Basically we’re a group of friends who grew up together and were into the same type of music.
We’re from Bow, Limehouse and Poplar in East London in the Tower Hamlets borough, which is basically the poorest borough in the UK. There was one little youth club and once that closed down we literally didn’t have anything to do. We realised we were either going to be out on the streets ending up getting into no good, or we could try and find a hobby.
There were drug addicts on the estate and it was not a very nice place to be. But at the same time, when you are born there, you don’t really know any different. It was just our area. We used to do our music in the evenings after school, after college, and then once we got some radio airplay on a local pirate station called Rinse FM, we had another thing to drive for.
They used to have phone-ins and the phone would never stop ringing when we were on, so we knew we were really onto something.
It would have been easy to drift and go the other way. Most of the people I grew up with, apart from a core set of friends, have drifted off to who knows where.
We are aware now that a lot of kids look up to us and some even follow what we say and do, so it’s definitely a responsibility. We don’t feel that we have to preach or be activists or anything, but at the same time it is in our minds when we are planning our shows and making our music.
That’s why in the last year or two we’ve done tracks like Bad Man, which was used by the Operation Trident anti-gun campaign, and a lot of work with Love Music Hate Racism. Those kind of things are off the back of us knowing that there are people out there that we can get a message to maybe better than a politician or a policeman or whoever.
I think we were lucky that we didn’t end up going the wrong way. It could have easily happened. But the music gave us something to drive for.”
www.myspace.com/rolldeepofficial