The Stool Pigeon

Words RICHARD HANSCOMB

Photograph Nathan Seabrook

A night on the tiles. You stumble your way to a bus stop, board and pass out on the top deck. Awakening, you find the N44 passing through a landscape of shattered buildings and the remnants of blazing trees, human forms roasting slowly under their branches, gunshots shattering the dawn air. Above you, a seven-foot scarred psychopath with a razor wire crown and a bloodied switchblade up the sleeve of his sinister uniform jacket stands chewing on the blackened flesh of your forearm. He laughs as you start to scream.

Dylan Richards, aka King Cannibal, is an affable bloke from Mitcham, south London, who works in a hardware store. At night he dons his musical alter ego to conjure up the dystopian menace that’s riddled through his debut album, Let The Night Roar. Three years in the making, Richards says he wanted to include different genres, from techstep to jungle and dubstep, without being limited by the constraints of BPM or the expectations of purists. Those influences were then filtered through the prism of a fascination with martial arts and horror films, “a sugar rush and too many cigarettes”, and nocturnal working.

The result is a threatening collage of compressor beats, sequencer brutalism and sampled gunshots, shattering glass and effects-heavy MCs dropping phrases like “the horror”, “you will cease to be”, and “I wanna slash your face”. ‘Colder Still’ is The Prodigy’s Jilted Generation played in the furnaces of Hades, while ‘Virgo’, featuring the agro French voices of female duo Face-A-Face could have been cooked up by an angry Diplo if the Cannibal had munched his missus. It is, like The Bug’s London Zoo, a prime slab of unnerving urban industrial.

“It’s not sunny day music,” says Richards, laughing. “I’m far from a violent person, but generally the music is made of its own identity and personality. Violence is not always bad, and there’s a personal violence that you can use for good, depending on how you interpret it, like trying to break out from this everyday grind. I put my darker thoughts into that avenue.”

However, he adds: “I think very few things I did were conscious. The label asked me if there was a theme for the album, and there definitely wasn’t when I started. But I think it’s a reflection of everyday, grotty surroundings.”

Richards says that his manor is in a state of decline. “The stuff you’ll find in Brixton has spread south, like some strange disease, getting further and further out of London. Mitcham is now quite a rundown area, and it’s not the safest place. Taking the night bus home, listening to the Gravediggaz, or the first Photek album... that has a bearing on what I make and reflects the underlying tension I feel on those journeys. It became more apparent as I made Let The Night Roar that it’s a fairly dark record.”

He’s no cannibal, but he’s certainly the king of understatement.

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