Six artists Annie Mac says to watch in 2016

Annie: "As grime gets more and more ubiquitous, there are more MCs breaking through from outside London. CoCo killed it at the end of 2015 with ‘Big Bou Yah’, a dancehall-sampling, spacey banger. His bars are sharp and funny and memorable and I’m super-excited to see him break through in 2016."

Grime is still undergoing a serious and continuing renaissance, and one of its prime new talents is CoCo. Known to his family as Leon Riley, CoCo moved from his native Sheffield to London in February 2015. To keep body and soul together he landed a job as a business broker in Aldgate, but his true passion will always be music.

“I want to reach out,” the 24-year-old MC enthuses. “Money would be good if it came, but that’s not the reason I do music. I just want as many people to know about CoCo as possible.”

You can’t fault his ambition and, fortunately, he has the talent to back it up. Over the last year his hyper-speed flow has drawn much attention on bass-basted tunes such as ‘Big Bou Yah’ and ‘Target Practice’ recorded with Toddla T for the latter’s Girls Music label.

“Everyone thinks me and Toddla T go way back because of the Sheffield connection,” he laughs, “but I’d never seen him there, only in London. We have a mutual friend, the bass producer DS1, and he played Toddla a tune I’d made. I went to night at XOYO and met him. A week after that, on our second session in the studio, we made ‘Target Practice’.”

CoCo has also cropped up to notable effect guesting on BBC Radio 1Xtra and made a huge impression with his appearances last summer at Ibiza Rocks and the Notting Hill Carnival. The younger of two children to a single mother who works as a nurse, he fell in love with the local grime scene while at secondary school.

“It was very good in Sheffield when I was younger,” he recalls. “The best it ever was. I aspired to be like people around me. I don’t know how I found this passion for music or MCing but somehow it just stuck. It fitted with me.”

He formed a collective with older local MCs such as Shinobi, MDK and Smiley – who initially had to smuggle him, under age, into venues. By the time he was 17 he was appearing regularly at venues such as West Street Live and Plug, and his YouTube videos, including the catchy ‘Hey Mambo’, were drawing tens of thousands of hits. He puts his crisp, distinctive mic style down to number of factors: “My mum’s well–spoken and I’ve always been quite a perfectionist. I used to draw very carefully and I have neat handwriting. I take pride in what I do.”

So we can conclude that his mother was also a big influence, then?

“She was a supermum,” he says, “Although when I was young she was always telling me to turn my music down and focus on school, on the real world. Now that I live in London she doesn’t stop ringing me – ‘I heard you on the radio again!’ – she just can’t get enough of it.”

CoCo’s mum may be his No 1 fan but, with big plans for 2016, she’ll soon have a whole lot of company.