CAUSING A SCENE - CHAPTER FOUR: THE LOCAL LADS

Frankie Stew & Harvey Gunn revel in being outsiders. A paradigm of independent spirit, I find the Brightonian duo grounded in their own reality, authentic to their own ethos, and with a bond that traverses sonic rapport. They don't need anyone but each other to succeed.

“I guess we're just such good friends,” Frankie Stew says. His tone is one of incessant hope, of unbridled security—a familiar one to those who have heard him rap. He’s gazing directly at his best mate, producer and creative counterpart, Harvey Gunn. “We're like the same person.”  

It’s later afternoon in mid-March, and Frankie, Harvey and I are sitting in a meeting room at the Rollacoaster offices. The pair lounge in their chairs, opposite each other, their attention flicking between each other and back to me. Earlier today, they travelled to London from their hometown, Brighton, for their Causing A Scene shoot. The following day, they will be performing at KOKO as part of The Silhouettes Project’s sold-out show, whose sophomore LP the duo are featured on. Frankie and Harvey have themselves just finished up a European tour spanning 10 dates.

“The tour was the first chapter of the year.” Harvey offers. “It was a big endeavour for us. But, do you know what? I came back feeling not too fucked, like pretty ready to get back into it. We were back at work the week after.” Frankie agrees, pinpointing their disciplined nature on this latest tour of many throughout their career. “We’re pretty legit now in terms of not partying. It really is work for us. And I've got a baby at home, so being away on tour is actually like my time off,” he exclaims, laughing. “It's more chill being on the roads than when I’m at home!”

Much has changed in the last decade for Frankie and Harvey. Inseparable since they were 15 years old, the boys connected over a shared love of music, and began writing together in their bedrooms as teens in their sunny coastal hometown. “I remember the only way our songs would get views was sharing it on Facebook and spamming people,” Harvey rekindles fondly. “I used to copy and paste the YouTube link to everyone that I had on Facebook,” Frankie adds. “People would just tell us to fuck off.”

As two young men with a passion for hip-hop music in the mid-2010s, Brighton was as good a place as any in the country to be situated. Plucking influence from the prevailing tendencies of early grime – the cyphers, rap battles, a collective ideology – a flourishing scene emerged on the South Coast, steered stylistically towards grit-laden boom bap rap. It featured some of the key underground MCs of the time, such as Dirty Dike, Ocean Wisdom and Jam Baxter. “There was so much music going on and it was such a thriving rap scene at the time,” Frankie says. “It was great to grow up around. That shit's not happening anymore.”

At the time, the youthful troubadours witnessed the scene, but never really felt fully included within it—standing defiantly on their own four feet, away from the Brightonian bourgeoisie. “I wouldn’t say me and Frankie were a massive part of it,” Harvey reflects. “That was [happening] when we were early on making music and first starting to realise that we were carving our own lane a bit. We always were different from that scene.” They were never really invited into the Brighton inner circle; fuelling a fire that still burns over 10 years later. “We never really got shown the love,” he continues. “So it was like, ‘Cool then, we're just going to do this on our own.’ When people shut doors, it gives the inspiration to kick a different door down.”

Like any scene that enjoys a period of galvanisation, a plateauing sentiment inevitably ensues. The Brighton scene, which blossomed in the glory days of Facebook and YouTube, soon trickled down into the internet’s abstract corners, squeezed out by an age of musical conglomeration: the empirical empire of playlisting. “Not many people were able to survive that jump,” Frankie says. But the duo, through an uncompromising work ethic and an incessant desire to succeed, ascertained the crossover to the tedious new world of streaming and social media reliance.  

“Throughout that period, when things jumped from what they used to be to what they are now, we were playing shows in both those eras,” Frankie says, reminiscing on travelling across the country to play shows in empty rooms. “I used to go to fucking open mic rap events and we'd go up north and play shows in Manny, in Brum. And this is before we were big.”

Trials and tribulations didn’t tamper with the pair’s ambition, instead easing them into the bigger milestones that have come since. “For true artist development, I just don’t think you can skip it,” Harvey says. “Back then you couldn’t, because virality wasn't a thing. Now you do have the opportunity to skip it which is a great thing for the discoverability of artists, but also, could you imagine blowing [up] off TikTok and then your first show, you could be selling thousands of tickets for it and you've never played a show before? I’d be so fucking scared.”

Their rise has been steady and measured, fully mirroring their DIY artistic ethos, devoid of indecision or malaise. The friends have had to continuously work, building their careers off of their own backs and within their secular vision of success. Just as they did within the Brighton scene in their youth, Frankie and Harvey stand behind their own shadow, observing, ardently independent. They’ve never relied on the inner mechanics of an industry that has done them no favours; they control their pathway. “Not only [are they] from Brighton but we've gone a non-traditional route as completely unsigned artists. We've never really been in the music industry,” Frankie explains. “You won't catch us at the events,” his counterpart jumps in. “We’ve never been invited.”

Frankie and Harvey have enjoyed over a decade of achievements as musicians, individually ameliorating their craft during that time, something that is blatant to hear when you listen through to their discography. Since their 2014 debut record, The Morning, they’ve shared a cacophony of albums; each project a snapshot of their lives, a glimpse into their mindset at the time of writing.

“Our music is just like me and you in a bedroom making tunes,” Frankie says to his producer. “It feels authentic, you can grow up with it rather than grow out of it. You might fuck with it when you're 21 and still fuck with it when you're 35.” They write and work with a seamlessly dynamic energy, avoiding over-conceptualisation and instead relying on instinct, their bond and their sonic chemistry. “We’re always on the same page,” Harvey says.

Frankie’s post-Mike Skinner spoken word musings and Harvey’s emotionally potent garage-tinged hip-hop-leaning instrumental palettes are synonymous with them alone. From the vividly relatable growing pains of adolescence in their earlier work to their mid-discography uncertainty of navigating adult life, and the more recent grounded tales of fatherhood and philosophical meanderings, the duo’s catalogue is a sprawling and stingingly accurate portrayal of what it is to be a straight, white, lower-middle-class man in contemporary Britain; its mundanity, toxicity and beauty alike. Listening to the pair is an immersive and personal experience and one that feels unfiltered and wholly real.

“It’s a weird thing to do as your job,” Harvey ponders. “We’re just thinking, man. I think you have to keep your craft at its essence, as much as you can. If you’re a creative or an artist, then you are also probably the type of person who can let the mind run wild. As soon as you start taking it too far out of the essence of what it is, you can end up in a rabbit hole. Us, we’re just two fans making music, pretty much doing the same thing we were doing ten years ago, just with more people listening and more at stake.”

The last few years have been especially transitional for Frankie and Harvey, in their personal and professional lives. They are pushing 30, one of them has had a child, and both have settled into the joys of simplistic living. “I like to think I’m quite an ambitious person, but ultimately I care less now about a lot of the things I cared about before,” the new father, Frankie, says. “In terms of typical things that people see as success: being famous, being festival headliners, having loads of money. Now it’s like, ‘I’m doing what I want to be doing as my job, I’m able to provide for my missus and my son, I’ve got a car and a house.’ Like shit man, I’m pretty content. I don’t strive to be a fucking pop star. We live in reality.”

In 2022, Frankie and Harvey shared their seventh album, Nothing New Under The Sun, their most ambitious body of work to date both theoretically and sonically, which features contributions from heavy-hitters in the Alt-Rap space such as Kojey Radical and Causing A Scene contemporary Lex Amor. But they were faced with learning curves when making the album—mistakes that they were driven to reconcile on the following years’ The South’s Got Something To Say.

“To be honest with you, with Nothing New Under The Sun we tried to make something perfect, and quickly realised that you can’t do that,” Frankie admits. “The process of making it wasn’t that fun; there was a lot of pressure on it because we’d spent more time and money than before. We learnt from that. We said if we were to make a project again, it had to be back to the roots of me and Harv having fun together. And that’s what The South’s Got Something To Say is.”

The latter and latest album, which was released in September 2023, is their most cohesive, mature and intelligible. The LP finds Frankie as playful and perusing in his writing as ever before, whilst Harvey cherishes the chance to flaunt his assured, breezy and experimental production identity. The project was constructed quickly, decisively, and with thorough enjoyment, reigniting the boys’ creative spark. “With [NNSTS], the topics were challenging,” Harvey offers. “It was a deep, difficult album and quite a hard time personally in our lives. So [TSGSTS] was a bit of a liberation from that. We loved making it and it made us fall in love with the process all over again.”

Throughout their musical tenure, bar the odd feature, the duo have never worked with anyone else, a rare occurrence amongst the constraints of the modern industry. Hell, their artist alias, “Frankie Stew & Harvey Gunn”, epitomises the significance of equality and diplomacy within their artistic framework. They exist, musically, socially and spiritually, in tandem. “The older we get, the more I realise how similar we are,” Frankie affirms. “We want the same thing from music, and we're both content, introverted people. I was fortunate enough to have my best mate, who I was with every day, as obsessed with making music as I was about writing bars.”  

The guys have had a busy start to the year thanks to their aforementioned European tour, as well as the release of stand-alone track, “Book Worm”. A run of single releases is how they see this year panning out, with a potential “big UK show” on the cards for later in the year, and the whiff of a new album never far from their noses. Soon, and not for the first time, they'll be heading out to the countryside for a week-long writing camp, taking “the dogs” with them. “I think we're both massively inspired by our environment,” Harvey says. “There's something special about when we go away and we’re in a fresh environment. Particularly somewhere that's got some aesthetic beauty to it with nature as the setting. Somewhere secluded.”

As it always has been – on their escapade from two Brightonian music lovers making tunes in their bedrooms to metamorphosing into one of the most consistent and likeable acts in UK hip hop – Frankie Stew and Harvey Gunn are a vessel of their music. They submit to its odyssey, are steered by their passion, and love every second of the imperfect utopia that they’ve found themselves living amidst.

“The music will take us wherever it wants to,” Harvey shrugs. “We’ll always be making it, whether or not people are listening to it.” Frankie watches his best friend closely, nodding in agreement as he finishes his point.

Photography by @niallhodsonphotography

Styling by @monicajiang

Interview and words by @tibbitsben

Grooming by @fp_mua

Fashion Assitant Tim Soliman

Editorial Director @charlottejmorton

Editor-in-Chief @ellaxwest

Creative Director @jeffreythomson

Art Director @harry_conor

Assistant Art Director @beth1owri

Production Director @bencrankbencrank

Production Assistant Lola Randall