I’ve got a mate, who we’ll call Lewis because that’s his name. He’s a good egg, one of the best blokes I know, actually. He’s got anime hedgehog hair and is easy in social situations. It doesn’t matter if it’s maiden aunts or Shanky Steve from Stockwell, he’ll give them a right as rain time of day and an appropriate anecdote. Short of a quid? Don’t worry, he’s got a spare tinny. Oyster’s given a triple beeper as you board the last bus to Orpington? He’s got a contactless card and no, don’t worry about it mate, it happens to the best of us. Everyone loves Lewis and sod it, he deserves it. You’d have to have an aorta of clay to dislike Lewis.

There’s one thing though, just one thing about Lewis, one tiny thing that’s not quite spot on: he’s got a piss poor taste in coach music. Imagine, if you can, a cunt that waxes reminiscent to you about a 16 hour school trip coach from Dundee to France when he first discovered Can’s Future Days. No mate, I don’t want to know. No mate, I believe you, it’s just that you’re a wrong ‘un. That’s not real coach music and I’ll be buggered if it’s school trip music. No, from Walthamstow to Wigan and beyond, all of us well balanced head-screwed-on-the-right-way-don’t-get-ideas-above-your-shitey-station folks know that the only legitimate soundtrack to a stale fag and cum stained seat aroma coach journey is DJ Ironik.

That’s a laboured intro, isn’t it? You know what else was laboured? Mid 2008, bombing down the M11 in an aluminium death cart commanded by Rotherham’s answer to Otto, rattling straight into the deep beige heart of every identical school trip that you went on to nowhere. That was fucking laboured, mate. It was laboured being Bebo dumped the night before, wasn’t it? Cunt-punted out of the top 16 and into cold, cheerless oblivion, three luvs to give and no-one to give them to. That’s when you sat 3 rows from the back, 10 hours in, with your dying iPod Nano tucked back into its pathetic little plastic case and your book stuffed into the crack between the seats. Sulking for a lost MSN romance with no appropriate tune to sulk to.

Ironik here, with the reanimated, waxed corpse of Michael Jackson

That’s when you looked at your mate next to you as he stared intensely out of the window, nodding his head in solemn, sage-like time, hands clasped around a durable Virgin megastore bought MP3 player: lost in music. “Oi, twat, give us a headphone”, you said. He gave you a headphone. As soon as the cool moulded plastic bedded into your waxy adolescent ear-canal, you heard “Stay With Me”, didn’t you? The following hours are a forgotten haze of introspection as your mates fat thumb hovered on the << to repeat over, over and over. Was that the Isle of White trip, or the Broadstairs one? You can’t remember. You can’t remember because you spent the rest of the week listening to “Stay With Me” through one shared headphone, didn’t you?

DJ Ironik is a really, really odd one. If I was to walk out into the street right now and take a random survey of 20 or so 20 somethings with vague memories of Channel U, you’d probably get the same response. Most would probably say, if anything, ‘fuck, that’s the “Stay With Me” bloke, isn’t it?’ I reckon about half would mention the squeaky, Chipmunk infested re-work of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”: a work of absolutely mental, twinkly keyed illogicality that is at least x300 times better than the original. One or two might recall “So Nice”, an early number about really loving your girlfriend and that love acting as refutation to all the dicks. There’s a slim chance that someone might even whip out a Motorola Razor and rub early Ironik’s take on Windows-Movie-Maker-fan-vid staple “Everytime We Touch” into the dry skin behind you ears. Let it be said: DJ Ironik truly is a few things to a few people.

“Stay With Me” is a belting example of this malleability. It’s about a mate/lover grimly hanging on to life, right? Wrong. It’s a textbook ‘Don’t Dump Me, I Love You’ tune, right? Wrong. Ironik wants you to ‘listen to the words’. He wants to listen to the words so much that every one of his tunes is prefaced by ‘listen to the words’. Stay With Me is about absolutely everything and absolutely nothing. It’s big, complicated emotions boiled into catchy platitudes, delivered through a-balls-in-a-garlic-crusher falsetto. Fuck alone knows how many times I’ve listened to the words and still, I have no idea what it’s about, aside from ‘life’s short, don’t muck about but do take your chances, hold your ground, pass your tests, pass them well, but don’t let anyone make you do any tests you don’t want to do, you don’t want to sit and think ‘what if’ and please, please don’t die: heaven has enough angels, they can wait for a bit, so come here and snog me’. You know what? The more I think about it, the sicker it actually is. Only an artist with big swinging bollocks can pull off a trick so vague and yet so intensely personal. Honestly, just go and look at the Youtube comments where really poignant, detailed recollections of loss are intercut with innumerable ‘holy shit, who remembers infrared?!’ numbers. Truly, DJ Ironik is a few things to a few people.

Ironik, looking quite pensive/menswear here.

One the oddest things about him is that despite possessing almost every necessary ingredient for being one of those instantly disposable, sugary punchlines to office water-cooler ‘whatever happened to’ nostalgia-wank conversations, it transpires that —right here, right now— in 2015, in Britain he is actually quite successful. Sure, he might have rocked the odd Freshers week Sunday night at mid-ranking universities, but so has Ellie Goulding. So have we all. He’s still releasing music that sounds quite nice, is slickly produced and no doubt decent to dance to after 30 Nail Varnish N’ Red Alert smoothies. He’s got 90k followers on the old Twitter, from which pours forth 140 character top-up platitudes about hating having to do the washing up, or waking up and going out and really making today count. He seems like a decent bloke, self-knowingly aware enough to retweet the “OMG DJ IRONIK WOZ A FUKIN LEDGE!!!!!” tweets in good humour, glossing the past tense and determinedly plugging the Soundcloud of the present. The sort of bloke who greets “DJ Ironik’s still making music?” with an “of course :)”.

And I’m thankful he is, for if there’s any justice in this shitty world, I hope that somewhere, right now, on an off-cream coach with broken heating, there’s a heartbroken teenager with their older siblings battered hand-me-down Nano pressing << all the way back to Slough.

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