RECENTLY, while going through an old, dusty hard drive of demos recorded around the time he formed Bombay Bicycle Club as a teen, Jack Steadman stumbled upon a batch of songs which sounded a little different.
The tracks, dating from the mid-2000s, were less indie rock and more hip-hop – and a foreshadowing of what was to come.
Since about 2017, the singer, guitarist and producer has been exploring his love of rap beats under the moniker Mr Jukes (the name being a reference to a character in Joseph Conrad's Typhoon).
Now Jack, who grew up in north London, has found the perfect partner in crime – east London rapper Barney Artist, with whom he has produced an album during lockdown, The Locket.
"I've been making hip-hop the whole time," he tells me over Zoom from his London home, sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Barney on a cosy-looking sofa.
"It would slowly seep its way into Bombay's music, which later became very sample-driven with lots of electronics.
"The Mr Jukes project was an experiment to see what would happen if you didn't have to adapt those ideas into a band and just carried on going in the hip hop direction."
Barney may be a relative newcomer to the music industry but he has an easy confidence while discussing their creative process and recent string of live shows. These included opening Latitude Festival in Suffolk on the first weekend after so-called 'freedom day'.
Notably, their collaboration sees Jack relieved of the frontman duties he has carried out dutifully for nearly two decades in Bombay Bicycle Club.
"This is a dream come true for me to just be a bass player at the back half of the stage," he laughs.
"Just watching someone else do all the magic. There was quite a nice moment before the show where at first I was calming Barney down. I was like, 'Barney just breathe – it's going to be OK'.
"And about five minutes later I'm a wreck and he's calming me down."
Two days later, Jack helped close the festival with Bombay on the main stage – an uplifting sundown set while dappled sunlight played across the crowd.
"I was smiling throughout the whole event," he recalls.
"To see everyone's faces after all that time was beautiful."
How the pair met is the source of much hilarity now. As Barney tells it, Jack sent one of his "minions" (in truth a mutual friend) to reach out with an invitation to contribute to his solo work while Bombay were on hiatus.
Barney had never heard of Jack's band but their millions of YouTube views were enough to convince him. The pair became friends but only when the pandemic struck did they begin working on an album together in earnest.
The result is The Locket, an exploration of the kind of 90s hip hop purveyed by A Tribe Called Quest and The Roots with inflections of London's ever-shifting rap scene and Jack's love of woozy samples.
Prior to lockdown, Barney was folding jeans at Japanese clothing brand Edwin and pursuing music in his spare time – until he was made redundant at the start of the pandemic.
"It was such a whirlwind," he concedes.
"I'm very honest with my fanbase and whoever I'm around because it is the easiest thing to do. When I got made redundant it was like a real 'What am I going to do?'
"But it ended up working really well and was good in that I was able to pour a lot of energy from my fear. With the album there is a lot of positivity and that was both of us manifesting what we needed. The positivity we were longing for, we poured into the album.
"For me it has been a mad year but I am so grateful to be able to have the opportunity to be able to be OK and live and be able to do music and do it as a full-time artist."
The pair are clearly very close – the result of years of friendship crystallised by a pandemic bubbled together in the music studio.
"I do thank Jack for that," Barney adds.
"Jack is a legend in this. There's been a lot of conversations where Jack has been able to help me and advise with certain aspects of becoming a full-time musician – 'Maybe try this or that, don't worry about it, don't panic, that's normal' and that's been great to adjust."
Barney is at his most charismatic when discussing the merits of hip-hop. He grew up in East Ham in an area documented in the music of grime pioneer and actor Kano. His college was opposite the home of Ghetts, another originator of the genre, and Barney attended the same school as his younger brother.
"That's the most amazing thing about when you get it right," he enthuses, leaning forwards.
"With music, if you do it right, it should be accessible to everyone. And that's what we try to do. It's the family atmosphere.
"With some genres – but especially hip hop – people can feel alienated. They don't know how to dance to it or how to move to it and we really talk them through it.
"And it works really well that by the end everyone is screaming with hands in the air and going for it."
The record is an optimistic document of this bizarre, often desperate, time and coming up with its title was a challenge.
"We stuck on The Locket because the time period that we made a chunk of the album was obviously a really dark, difficult time," says Barney.
"It made us hark back to our families and memories and things that we have held dear to us.
"A lot of people did that during lockdown, which was like: 'What are the most important things to me?'
"And with The Locket the idea is that you keep it around your neck like the memories that we protect."
:: The Locket by Mr Jukes and Barney Artist is out now
