Monday, December 16, 2013

Music Monday: King Krule on East Dulwich History (& filmed in Deptford)

It's been a good year for King Krule (Archy Marshall), with his debut album 6 Feet Below the Moon released in the summer and getting good reviews. Last week (7 December) he was interviewed on Gilles Peterson's BBC Radio 6 show .

19-year-old Marshall, who went to Forest Hill Boys School and the Brits School in Croydon, talked about his various pseudonymous music projects. At least one of these, Edgar the Beatmaker (which he uses for his more hip hop flavoured work), owes something to local history, as he explains: 'I started reading about the history of the area I grew up in South East London, around Peckham and East Dulwich. I was getting into the guy who created East Dulwich and Peckham and it was a man called Edgar the Peacemaker and he was the first King of England to unite all the kingships, and his brother was a man called St Dunstan and I was born in Dunstans Road'. Yes indeed the first mention of Dulwich comes from 967 when King  Edgar the Peaceful granted Dilwihs ('meadow where the dill grew') to one Earl Aelfheah; Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, was his close adviser rather than brother.



In the interview, he also mentions recording in Bermondsey with electronic music duo Mount Kimbie. In fact later in the programme, Peterson names three albums as the best of 2013, all of them with South London connections: King Krule's, Mount Kimbie's Cold Spring Fault Less Youth and James Blake's Overgrown.

The video for King Krule's Easy Easy shows him towering above the DLR line on Deptford Church Street (so assume he must be on the roof of the Birds Nest pub?). No doubt you can spot some other South London locations in it, including I think scenes around Surrey Docks/Rotherhithe (thought I spotted Stave Hill).







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