Talking at Howler on 8 September, the British multi-hyphenate will advise creatives on how to make it in unconventional ways.
A mere few seconds into an interview with Elijah, you realise you are dealing with a character who means business. No nonsense, no small talk – he’s someone who can see right through the noise and extract what really matters, a trait that has clearly left him in good stead for a career in an industry as sharp as music.
Dialling in from Walthamstow, London amid an all-consuming British summer, Elijah appears fired up and ready to go. And for good reason – he’s is soon due to appear down under for a series of talks known as, Elijah The Talks and the Yellow Squares lecture. In this, he will share his knowledge on sustainable art, grime, social media, building an audience for your art and more.
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Having forged a career as a record label founder, designer, artist manager and DJ, Elijah is the perfect person to do so. However, as he tells me, he wasn’t always supposed to find himself in this position.
Born in 1987, Elijah’s first taste in music was around the age of “six, seven or eight” when he was introduced to jungle and reggae. Coming from a Jamaican background, he couldn’t help but have this music spark something in him.
“I’d listen to pirate radio when I was a kid. They played jungle, then garage, then later grime. Then also coming from the place where grime was born, I couldn’t help but be a part of it. It was where I felt I could contribute something interesting to. If I was born earlier, it might not have been that, but grime was an amalgamation of my early influences.”
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As a result of this, Elijah got involved in pirate radio and started DJing. He also threw himself deeply into the grime scene.
“When I had my radio show in ‘07, I began to practice with records, but this practice was in public so I was literally learning while broadcasting.” There, he learnt a love for his trade and began to understand more about the logistics of the music business.
“Grime is like our electronic and rap. It felt like our own thing. But during this time of grime being at its peak, no one was actually buying the music. A lot of people were listening, but no one was buying it. Because of this, a lot of first-generation grime artists didn’t make any money.”
This changed around the time streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music came to the forefront. “That stabilised things,” he says. “If you’re from a major label, and you’re getting paid per record and you sell lots of records, you will make money. But if you’re doing niche music, it’s harder. So, having some listeners is better than having no buyers.”
While setting this precedent, Elijah began to rethink the mechanics of the music industry. “I wanted to create something that allowed people to make a living,” he says. He set about devising several ways independent grime artists could explode despite not having the big label backing.
“No amount of money will ever buy you an audience. They can survive longer without earning, but in no way does that make your music more connected to an audience. In the grime music scene, no one had money, so it’s not as much of an issue in the music scene close to me.”
It’s this ingenuity that caused Elijah to rethink the traditional methods of making it within the music industry. He didn’t intend for this to become his thing, but somehow it has.
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Inadvertent success seems to be a running thread in Elijah’s career. In 2021, during one of London’s brutal lockdowns, Elijah began to write his thoughts and ideas onto yellow sticky notes and put them on the wall. He eventually began to post them on Instagram. It immediately began to resonate.
“When things were opening up, I just wondered what the music industry would look like,” he says when reflecting upon the meaning of Yellow Squares. “I was just writing down a bunch of ideas I thought people would find useful. Then it started to grow. People had more ideas and questions.”
While Elijah has enjoyed making the Yellow Squares, he’s giving himself until December to finish off the project. As to a reason why, Elijah offered, “It just gives me a sense of urgency to finish it off, otherwise it could just go on forever.”
This intuition has clearly been instructive in Elijah forging his career. He knows when to end things and move on to the next. These droplets of wisdom are what he intends to impart to his Australian audiences.
“The lectures and events are for people sharing ideas in general. It’s about the DIY end of the industry. About flipping the conventional wisdom on its head and applying it to people with less resources. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in music. A lot of people making other stuff have found it useful too, so come with an open mind.”
“So”, he says through one final grin, “I’ll see you on the other side?”. I think you know what my response back was.
Here For Good Talks With Elijah will be at Howler on 8 September. Tickets are available here.
