Aitch

Meet the baby-faced spitter taking Manchester — and the rest of the UK — by storm.

Towards the end of my conversation with Aitch, the nineteen-year-old rapper taking the UK music scene by storm, I asked him how he’d found the photoshoot that accompanies this article. ‘It was sick you know, I enjoyed it – they had me wearing some funky stuff, but it was alright ... I’m gonna be a model next’. This sort of reply is typical of Aitch: self-confident, funny, optimistic and gracious. You can practically hear him smiling.

Aitch – real name Harrison Armstrong – is enviably young and talented, but he wears his newfound fame with ease and self-assurance. He exploded onto the scene in May 2018 when he dropped his first music video, ‘Straight Rhymez’, on his YouTube channel. He tells me that he had no idea how big that video would get, or how quickly: ‘I thought it was gonna be a standard, steady freestyle. I thought I was gonna get the views I was previously getting ... That one took off randomly’. There’s nothing random about the success of ‘Straight Rhymez’, however. Aitch’s freestyle is more than steady – it’s implacable, relentless and direct; tightly bound with assonance and delivered with a cold confidence that belies his young age. Nevertheless, his bars are also full of mischief and humour: ‘I’m not a fraud, don’t flex for the cam. Summertime, watch a white boy flex with a tan’. Soon enough, Aitch’s impressive lyrics and impish demeanour began drawing a lot of attention. When GRM Daily shared his video on their Instagram, Aitch knew he’d struck gold: ‘from then on I just refreshed my Instagram and I was just getting another thousand followers, another thousand followers’. As of this moment, Aitch has 421,000 followers on Instagram and ‘Straight Rhymez’ has well over 10 million views on YouTube.

Not long after the success of ‘Straight Rhymez’, Aitch consolidated his rising status with an appearance on Kenny Allstar’s 1Xtra show. Hundreds of thousands of new fans were inducted into the Aitch cult, delighted in particular by the line that, for many, has become his calling card: ‘After this, I’m linking Bethany and Kelly’. On the page, these words seem unexceptional, but in the booth, Aitch’s Mancunian drawl brings them to life. Given this lyric, it’s perhaps unsurprising that ‘girls’ are one of Aitch’s favourite topics. ‘I’m not out here looking to make songs about girls every time,’ he says, chuckling, ‘but like you said before about my age, there ain’t really too much going on other than that’.

Despite his good humour, I get the sense that this idea of Aitch – as a typical girl-obsessed young man – occasionally frustrates him. When we come to the topic of braggadocio in rap, Aitch describes how ‘[a] lot of people say, “ah, Aitch is spitting about girls,” so I just thought that I had to come out and say, “listen, don’t say that I’m only spitting about girls when everyone around me is just spitting about so and so”’. To fill you in on context, the ‘so and so’ to which Aitch is referring to here is jewellery. Whether it’s flexing for ‘the cam’, or sporting ostentatious chains, misplaced confidence and superficial peacocking are frequent targets of Aitch’s wit, as is the case in his 1Xtra freestyle: ‘I move steady, I’m tryna buy a gaff / I ain’t stressing ‘bout no Fendi. / Gyal love a man with jewels / But I still be getting plenty’. Confidence is a cornerstone of Aitch’s charm, but his sense of self-belief runs deeper than trappings of wealth. ‘Sometimes I feel like everyone’s getting a bit over-excited about jewellery and whatnot,’ he tells me, half-jokingly. ‘You gotta think outside the box sometimes [and] go against what everyone else is doing’.

I ask Aitch if he’s always been a confident guy. He has – ‘from day one’. The way Aitch describes his first foray into rapping feels incredibly familiar, even relatable (the enormous success it has led to, perhaps less so). His career was launched – as every English teenager’s ought to be – whilst drinking with his friends in a park. ‘We were on the park and we were drunk and that – back in the day – and I just got overconfident ... and just started spitting all my bars out. And then everyone was saying, “oh shit, you’re actually quite good, innit” ... I just needed that one person to tell me that I was good and that was it – I was off’. That one person? ‘We call him Webs, cos his second name’s Webster ... He was the one who told me [I was good] ... and then when all the mandem were there on the park that time and I said, “right, I’m gonna spit these bars,” obviously he already knew’. Webs (née Webster) ‘was certified the first person to ever, ever hear an Aitch bar!’

Despite his brimming self-confidence, Aitch had never taken rapping seriously prior to this point – ‘it was just a joke,’ he says. Nonetheless, Aitch attributes the courage he found to get up and perform for the first time – albeit drunkenly and to a crowd of friends – to this lack of seriousness. To this day, he tries to maintain that sense of playfulness in all his songs: ‘[I try and] keep it as much fun as possible – that’s when the best music comes out’. It would be foolish, however, to assume this means Aitch approaches his work carelessly. ‘At the end of the day this is how I make my money; I need to be consistent with it’. By and large, Aitch is in the studio every day, unless he happens to be away from Manchester on business. ‘Some days I might go in and not even start a song, it might just be talking for hours: blah, blah, blah,’ he says of his process. ‘But other times I might go in and then my guy, YJ, might play me a beat and it just clicks instantly’. This is all part of Aitch’s ethos and outlook. He places a great importance on working hard – and being consistent most of all – but he is unafraid to ‘take it as it comes’. This manifesto applies to everything in his life, not least fame: ‘You just gotta get on with it ... it’s just what comes with my job, innit. I don’t mind it, I’m not complaining’.

In fact, Aitch never complains. Throughout our conversation he constantly assures me that he’s ‘got nothing to complain about’. When I ask him if he’s ever felt intimidated opening for big rap and grime acts such as Wiley, he says that he hasn’t personally; it’s ‘all smiles so far’. However, he is genuinely empathetic for other young creatives who are made to feel unsettled because of their age or relative inexperience. ‘It’s hard, man,’ he states. This comment might not seem significant, but it is. Aitch’s confidence is magnetic, and like all charismatic people, the secret of his charm is an air of effortlessness. ‘Straight Rhymez’ was doubtless the result of many hours of hard, hard work, but to hear Aitch tell it, his breakout was simply a matter of dropping a video and refreshing his Instagram. When Aitch tells me that he feels at home sharing bills with people like Wiley – ‘Sometimes I feel like I already know these people before I’ve met them’ – I can’t help but think this is because he has confidence in the quality of his work, the time he puts into his lyrics and into fostering a solid sense of self-worth. ‘I consider myself to be strong-minded,’ he says. ‘Nothing phases me too much. I’ll get over it the next day, anyway’. I believe him. Aitch holds his own amongst the pantheon of British rap artists to such an extent that his success almost feels fated, but it would be a grave discredit to him to overlook his talent and work ethic.

It is obvious just how important self-belief is in the music industry, but I wanted to hear Aitch’s words on the matter. He replies, ‘if you’ve not got confidence in yourself ... then no one’s going to’. One of the biggest hurdles Aitch has faced as an artist is that he has had to fight for others to believe in him: ‘the big thing down here in Manchester is that people don’t believe you can do it’. He tells me that this is in part down to a lack of ‘consistency’ among Manchester artists, but also to the lack of exposure Northern rappers enjoy compared to their London-based peers. Until recently, ‘it wasn’t normal for someone from Manchester to get a hundred thousand views ... and now everyone from Manchester is getting a couple thousand views’. For ‘people from London and those places,’ however, ‘it’s a minimum of a million’. A cynic may say that while change is coming, it’s not coming fast enough. That said, it is hard to resist Aitch’s assurance: ‘That will come with time,’ he stresses – ‘there are more eyes on Manchester’.

But how do you inspire so much confidence in such an unforgiving scene? ‘It’s a persona thing as well,’ Aitch states, ‘... if you believe in something, then something will happen and everyone else will [believe in you]’.

Given the apparently unshakeable calmness and self- assurance of Aitch’s demeanour, I can’t help but be fascinated by this idea of a ‘persona’. He assures me, however, that he is ‘not saying try and be something you’re not, but if you genuinely believe you can do it and you come across like that, everyone else will as well, and it actually will happen’. A persona in Aitch’s terms, then, is more than just a stony-faced mask of confidence or a rictus grin of self-belief; it is an inward energy and optimism. The best word for it may even be “faith”. Aitch’s conclusion is typically understated: ‘Energy is a good thing,’ he says.

Aitch is full of good energy. Very early into our conversation, he describes what he considers to be his greatest asset and contribution to the music scene in the UK. Aitch brings, in his own words, ‘a bit of energy and a bit of youth that wasn’t there before’. His youthful self-confidence is mixed with a wisdom beyond his years, and a deep and sincere gratitude. When asked where he would like to see himself in five years, he stops and thinks for a while. ‘I mean, a couple number ones under my belt, one of the biggest albums about ... and just happy, that’s it’. For now, though, ‘it’s takeover season’.

Photography Vicky Grout

Fashion Ola Ebiti

Words James Coward

Special Thanks Kaileidescope Studios