Dizzee Rascal almost didn’t release ‘Bonkers’.
The 31-year-old rapper has revealed one of his biggest hits nearly never made the cut when he was deciding what tracks to put on his 2009 LP ‘Tongue n’ Cheek’.
Speaking to Roman Kemp on Capital FM, he said: "Bonkers – the way that happened is mad because again that just got sent to me. And at that time that was me just like ‘shall I try it?’ I’d never really made that music before – I considered that house music. I’d never really dabbled too tough in that, so when it got sent to me I was like ‘right, let me just try it.’ And again that’s one of the easiest songs I’ve written. I didn’t even write that down. And then even when I recorded it, I sat on it for months. I didn’t think nothing of it, and I almost didn’t put it on my album or put it out. Coz I didn’t know."
The chart-topping track, which was produced by Armand Van Helden, stormed right to the top of the UK singles chart and was Dizzee’s second ever number one.
Meanwhile, the ‘Dance Wiv Me’ hitmaker has just released his new collaboration with Calvin Harris called ‘Hype’, which is his first release since his 2013 album ‘The Fifth’.
Dizzee said the song was made around the week of the Oscars and was based on the hype surrounding Leonardo DiCaprio’s first-ever win at the prestigious film ceremony.
Explaining how the track came about, he said: "It was Oscar Week, or it was about to be Oscar Week or something, and he [Calvin] said he had a track, that he had something for me, coz I’ve been saying ‘We should do something, we should do something!’ But he’s been working on what he’s been working on.
"So then I took it away, and then it took me a minute though – it took me a couple of weeks to write. And he was on to me, he was like: ‘oh have you done it yet, have you done it?’ And when he’s on to you, from when he cares – at the level that he’s at – from when he cares, you need to get on it!
"And he said: ‘I want it to be about hype, it’ll be about hype.’ So then I was stuck, I was like, I couldn’t really come up with nothing. I was doing other stuff as well.
"And then Leonardo DiCaprio won the Oscar. And I was like ‘ah… I feel like Leo with the Oscar’ – that’s where that came from."
Dizzee also revealed how he had to re-write a lot of the song in front of the superstar producer.
He added: "And then I wrote the rest of it and went to his house, went to the studio, then realised, ok, we’re just gonna get rid of the rest and just keep the first four bars coz we weren’t really feeling it. So then I had to rewrite the rest in front of him. It made it a lot easier, coz he’s so adamant about what he wants, so I was just like ‘you like the sound of that?’, ‘no I don’t like that’ ‘alright, cool, and then we got it done in like an hour."
Dizzee Rascal almost didn’t release Bonkers
