It’s certainly been a long time coming for the Heavytrackerz. Originally formed in the early 2000s by two secondary school students, the team has produced a number of tracks over the years for some of the biggest names in the UK, such as Wiley, JME, Ghetts, Big Nartsie and others. More recently, they produced the top 20 hit “German Whip” for Meridian Dan, and it’s off the back of that success that they hope to build a foothold in the industry – firstly with the release of their debut single “Old Habits”, featuring Yana Toma.
While I’ve mostly been interviewing grime artists in the past few weeks, the Heavytrackerz present a different picture. I’m meeting with two of the three – Teddy, the senior of the group, and Ras, the youngest. The third member, Tank is unable to attend, but the two that are present do enough talking to make up for his absence.
Unsurprisingly, they both hail from musical backgrounds. Teddy, a former international basketball player originally hailing from the Ivory Coast, moved to England when he was 13. His uncle was a big name in Ivorian and Congolese music, owning a studio in Paris which was the choice of most big name African musicians when recording their albums. “I didn’t even know that until last year!” he tells me, laughing. “My mum just decided to tell me. Coming from an african family, they always tell their children to be doctors, or lawyers. Everything else is secondary. But when we got the publishing deal, my mum decided to tell me the history of music in my family.”
Ras had a similar experience with his family, “Someone was telling me they knew a reggae called Hawkeye from North London, and I was thinking it was one of my dad’s friends. Then I realised it was my uncle!”
“It’s crazy how parents feel like they have to hold that back – there were so many times when I wasn’t confident or sure about making music, but if I’d know that my family were so musical, I would never have doubted myself!”
Teddy and Tank formed the group when they were in school. “I met Tank as I was friends with his brother in school. We used to listen to grime when it first started, and we felt that we could do that,” Teddy explains. “I taught myself how to play keyboard, and got involved in the choice at Church with my sisters. Tank was heavily into loops and beat making.”
“He (Tank) was heavily into grime, and I would come in and want to add instruments like pianos and strings. I felt that if I couldn’t play this music to my mum, then I wasn’t making proper music.”
Ras, the junior of the group, had a different introduction to music. As a teenager he was signed with Arsenal, but suffered a serious injury when he was 15, breaking his tibula. Facing a year out of football, he was looking for an outlet. “I had a lot of spare time,” he says, “I needed a hobby. My uncle played bass for Marley, my brother was doing music, my cousin Jammer was heavily involved in grime – I was hanging around in studios and I thought I should do something. So I started making beats.”
Those beats brought him to the attention of Tank and Teddy, who by then were looking for younger members to add to the Heavytrackerz. “I was already a fan,” he reminisces, “but when we met up and they started hearing my music, they recruited me as a younger.”
“Tank presented Ras to me,” Teddy adds. “When I heard his tracks I was taken away. He fit so well with what we were doing.”
Heavytrackerz had taken on quite a few young members with the intention of forming a connection with a younger generation, but a lot of them didn’t take it as seriously. “We wanted someone younger to help us relate to the younger crowd,” Teddy elaborates. “We’re from Walthamstow, and we wanted to form a crew, a movement to represent our area. Ras is 6 years younger than us (22 to Teddy’s 29), and is more in tune with what’s now, while I can figure out how to take what’s now, and apply it to a bigger audience.”
Unusually, while they were making music, both Teddy and Tank were still working full time, Teddy in Business Development, and Tank in Graphic Design and Photography. “We didn’t have much success,” Teddy tells me, in a frank assessment of their early work. “We were working full time and putting music out on the side.”
“I think it’s because of the story of our music. Within grime there’s a certain pattern, a certain way of making it, and we didn’t really fit it. Our grime was too musical – there’s too much piano, too much strings. Instead of the beat telling a story, the MC should tell a story. We had a few tracks out on mixtapes, but we never made it to the single stage.”
“We made it into a lot of people’s projects,” Ras interjects. ”Somehow they always needed something we could do.”
“They always needed something more musical with a singer,” Teddy continues, “At the time we were working with a lot of artists, so we were the go to guys for that.”
Ras joined up with the group in late 2012, but the group was going through a few troubles. Teddy had quit making music to focus on his career in Business Development, leaving Tank and Ras to continue without him. “I was only concentrating on the 9-5,” he tells me solemnly. “We had lost a few studios by then, and I had given up. Tank was still coming to my house and making music as a solo producer, but just I wasn’t focused on it.”
“Then I reached a point where I thought this couldn’t continue. I went through a phase where everything in my life was failing, I lost my job, and I thought that I couldn’t let Heavytrackerz fail as well. So we brought Ras in, and rebranded everything so that we weren’t making tracks as individuals, but as a group.”
It was from here that they got the idea of wearing masks “We’d done so much work on people’s projects as individuals that bringing ourselves in as a group was difficult,” Teddy discloses. “That’s where the idea of the mask came from,” he says, referring to the red mask that has become one of their trademarks. “I don’t care about fame, I don’t want my name to be know.” Ras hears this and interrupts jokingly, “I think he just like wearing a mask!”
With Teddy unemployed and Tank still in university, the group were still looking for a home. When “German Whip” starting getting attention in 2013, they had been producing from Ras’ house. It was at that point that Teddy’s business development experience came into play, when they pitched their ideas to Rich Visions, an organisation that offers various types of assistance to startup businesses.
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“I wrote a huge business plan,” Teddy tells me, becoming more passionate as he details their vision for Heavytrackerz. “We all have different skills – Ras is amazing at graphic design, Tank has mad skills in photography. We all make music. We wanted to form a group that can do everything. Need a video? Contact us. Need music? Call the Heavytrackerz.”
“We managed to secure business loans from that – the group expanded from 3 to around 12. Now we’re renting a building where we can do everything, graphic design, photography, and music.”
After digressing so much, I’m eager to get back to the subject of their music. With a bunch of EPs under the belt, the success of “German Whip” helped propel them to the mainstream.
“In a weird way it took about 2 and half years to get properly released,” Ras explains, taking the forum back from Teddy. “We made the track in 2012, it was picked up by PMR Records in 2013, and it was released in 2014. Honestly we didn’t think much of it, but then it started blowing up, and suddenly we’re in meetings with labels and contracts are flying our way.”
Despite the success of “German Whip”, a raw grime track, their latest release, “Old Habits”, is a hard hitting house song, which will come as a surprise to many.
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“We’ve been pigeonholed for a long time,” says Ras, almost grimacing at the thought.
“We were going into meetings with labels and none of the tracks we were playing were grime tracks,” Teddy recalls. “They were amazed to hear our tracks with our own singers – they came to us for grime, and then had to rethink their approaches and draw up new offers.”
“Even though we love grime, we don’t just listen to grime. Ras is from a reggae family, I listen to a lot of African and French music.”
Now that they’re established in the UK, their attentions have turned to a greater market, the US. Teddy leaves me with a final thought.
“If you make it over there, it’s a lot easier to come back and conquer. If you make it in the UK, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will be successful elsewhere.”
