From pirate radio to mainstream DJ, Matthew 'Excalibah' Xia has helped kick start the careers of many UK hip-hop artists. But despite winning various accolades as a turntable maestro, Matthew turned his attention to directing in 2007 and since then has never looked back. Now he's jumped into the director's chair for Urban Development's 'Re:Definition 2010' and Nonny Orakwue caught up with him to get the lowdown on the upcoming show, his career and thoughts on the UK music scene.

How did you start out in music?

I started out in Secondary school with friends rapping, writing lyrics especially other people’s lyrics and trying to spit them. Then we started writing our own stuff and taking loops from Big Pun, DMX and Wu-Tang albums and began to rap over them in the most tin pan way you can think of - we’d have a microphone taped to a lampshade with us rapping. It was so ghetto and low budget. Eventually, it got to a point where I wanted to take it more seriously. We were out there performing as a group of rappers named Sanguinary but I was also in a short film and I used the money I earned to buy a set of turntables and started DJ’ing. I also got involved with the Sony Street Team alongside Semtex, Sway and Pyrelli. Then I started on a pirate radio station and used to invite my friends down, like Estelle, Skinnyman, Roots Manuva and Blak Twang. It was kind of a late 90s UK hip hop thing and then I got a call from BBC 1Xtra asking me to do a show for them.

So how did the directing come about?

I’ve always had parallel lives doing music and theatre. So even when I was on 1Xtra I was writing music for shows at the theatre and involved in musical directing. A guy that I’d worked with quite a lot called Awkz who directed Boy Blue’s ‘Pied Piper’ and ‘The Boys’, which I’d written music for, decided that he wanted to do a show called ‘The Blacks’ about what whites had done in Africa over the past three hundred years to celebrate the centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2008. He wanted to do it as a hip hop piece and him being a 60-year old white man, despite being in tune with culture, wanted someone who was in touch with that world. So I came in as co-director and caught the bug.

"I’ve always had parallel lives doing music and theatre."

Right now you’re directing Re:definition 2010 and it’s all about redefining urban music, but why do you think it’s different to any other show people can go and see?

For me it’s about stories. If you go and see a concert you’re going solely to listen the music. In most concerts the lyrics get lost and it’s just about the overall feel of the vibe coming out of the speakers, but with the way Re:Definition has been programmed and advertised it’s about the fact that the lyrics in the songs have been formed from experiences. We’re presenting them as snippets of people’s lives as opposed to a concert and the way it’s themed so it’s looking at life on the streets, London at night, the markets, selling your products becoming successful, the Olympics, the redevelopment, the evolution of music over the last fifteen years. So I just think that, that makes it a bit more of a theatrical event. The fact that it’s in a theatre and not where you’d expect it to be like in some club on Curtain Road or on 1Xtra but here’s black music on stage in a 125 year-old theatre.

What was the process that you went through to take a show like Re:Definition from a concept to something that can be viewed on stage?

It took me a while to get my head around it. I initially wasn’t sure how to make it work and stop it from being purely a concert as that was what I was really trying to achieve. So the first thing that I kept pushing on the team was to get all of the music, and once I had the music I could start putting it in some ort of order and then put them into themes. That’s what we did first, we listened to the music and wrote down what we thought the songs were about and chose the themes. I then thought about how to tie the themes together to create some sort of story that guides and grows and gets bigger, and ends with a bang. Once we had that I knew that Mox (visual designer) was involved it was about getting images to support the themes to help tell the story about the streets of London.

What do you think people coming along to the show can expect?

In my mind there are two groups of people – there are people who are fans of these artists and their music and they get to come to experience the music in a very different surrounding. It’s really interesting because it lets the words really breathe and the live band’s reinterpretation of these grime and dubstep songs that are electronic – how do you make these work on keys, bass, guitar and drums? The other group is the audience members from the arts organizations etc, who are probably from more middle class walks of life. For me it’s about bringing those two worlds together and saying don’t overlook these stories, they’re as good any book or classical music album you can pick up.

"We’re presenting...snippets of people’s lives as opposed to a concert."

What part of the show are you most looking forward to and have you got any tricks up your sleeve?

‘Me and My Bitch’ by Mikill Pane is going to be fantastic and the UDVC medley is going to be immense. I was just talking to the guys who are going to be lighting it and the sound team, about how we’re going to pull off the beatbox rendition of Ps & Qs with eight people – it’s going to be pretty impressive. Also a lot of the performers on the line up I’ve worked with or count as friends, they’re all great people so it’s great to have them all in the room.

Urban Development is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and has witnessed the genre grow from strength to strength. Who would you say has helped redefine UK urban music this past decade?

So many people, Soul II Soul and Shalimar. I actually have to think in waves, I guess Shola and the whole 2step garage scene with Pied Piper, EZ and Masterstepz that happened in the nineties. I absolutely hated it at the time but now I actually think back and wonder why I was being so stuck up dismissing it because it wasn’t UK hip hop.

So why do you think 2step redefined the UK scene?

It could only come from here and that’s the same with grime. The music was an organic thing and in a sense it came out of nowhere. It came out of kids in their bedrooms with very limited equipment trying to make music and that’s the sound that you got, this industrial, raw sound. I remember the first time I heard Dizzee ‘I Luv U’, I was like wow what’s this crazy angry music? I’m into it, it sounds fun. And of course drum n bass was something that could only come from the UK, not particularly London but Bristol had a big part in that, especially with the trip hop scene. Then there’s the funky house scene. People just keep redefining what urban music is and right now for me it’s people like Maverick Sabre and Plan B who sound like nothing you’ve heard before. Fo a whilte guy from Forest Gate to do a Motown album where he’s rapping on it and it’s going to number 1, that’s exciting.

"We’re not encouraging new kids to get into hip hop."

Throughout your career you’ve championed UK hip hop in particular, in your opinion why do you think that the scene has gone quiet?

In my opinion it was down to the fact the two very important shows got cut from scheduling. One was my ‘Tales from the Legend’ on 1Xtra and the other was ‘The Hip Hop Review Show’ with Tee Max and Fusion on MTV Base. Those two shows really pushed out hip hop and stopped it from being an underground music. For example, I was the first person to play Estelle on Radio 1 and 1Xtra and people like Fallacy. So now when people are asking where are they, if they haven’t gone to the States to become successful then they’ve disappeared from the scene. The same thing happened with Ace and Invisible’s show and they don’t air MTV Raps anymore so we’re not encouraging new kids to get into hip hop. Also with the demise of print we’ve lost major magazines like Hip Hop Connection which was a major mainstay to find out about releases. So the only people that are still around are those who’ve gone off and experimented with something else.

So do you think UK hip hop can make a comeback?

Well for me certain songs by Maxsta are hip hop songs. Plan B is making UK hip hop and so are Fumin and Mikill Pane. To be honest I think it’s just a tag that we need to forget about and just our own homogeneous scene.

What does the future have in store for both DJ Excalibah and Matthew Xia?

Excalibah will continue DJ’ing out in clubs. Just hit up the Myspace and the Twitter it’s all up on there. Matthew Xia is working on a piece called ‘A Clean Break’ which is a musical about a mixed race boy growing up as the only black person in his village and searching for his identity. Then I’ve just bought the rights to do a musical based on the film, ‘The Warriors’ which was about a gang in New York trying to make their way home. So I’m doing a big musical version if that in 2012, think ‘Pied Piper’ meets ‘The Boys’ meets Westside Story’. And of course Re:definition on 22nd and 23rd July at Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Words: Nonny 'MisssN' Orakwue

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