London rapper Fredo on his new album Unfinished Business: ‘You’re never going to fully move on from your past’
London rapper Fredo has a lot to say. So much so that the three-minute beat his producer originally sent him for the first song of his new album, Unfinished Business, didn’t cut it. Not even close. Finding himself with more and more to get off his chest, “I kept having to go back and tell him to extend it, over and over again,” he chuckles.
My Story, the final version of the song, ends up clocking in at a staggering nine-and-a-half minutes, and is an astonishing reintroduction from one of the UK rap scene’s brightest stars. “I’m sorry if you’re missing me,” he raps in its opening bars. “If you want to know why I’m missing, listen to me please.”
Over the next 10 minutes, he delivers the answer to this question with a hammerblow. With elite flow and dexterity, he details the struggles of becoming a father, the death of a number of his close friends, and how he feels trapped between his violent upbringing in west London, his newfound parenthood, and the promise he sees in his new business ventures. Distilling this paradox, he raps: “If I focus on rap, I’ll be a deadbeat dad / But if I focus on being a dad, I’ll lose the bread we had / If I don’t play my role on the block they’ll say I’m acting different / But if I go back too much I’ll go back to prison.”
It was in 2021 when Fredo, 29, decided that he had to take a break from rap. “I never planned a break, but two of my friends passed away back to back,” he says, sitting in a photo studio not far from where he grew up. Softly spoken and considered in his answers, he speaks of the loss with tenderness but clear defiance. “It had a big impact on me. It was a crazy time in my life, and I needed a break. I didn’t want to rap about all this negative, sad stuff all the time.” After time spent working on his new collaboration with footwear company Kick Game and holidaying with his family, the plan was for Fredo to return to music in the summer of 2022. “Then another one of my friends passed away. That put another hold on things.”
He doesn’t disclose who they were today, but his friend, the rapper Muscle Gotti, died in a car accident in 2020; in the same year another, Billy McCullagh, known as Billy Da Kid, was murdered. On Unfinished Business, he raps of his late friends frequently, but says he doesn’t need to put the feelings down on tape in order to remember them. “They’re some of my closest friends – it’s easy to remember them. I’m speaking about them, but not trying to remember them through that. I remember them clearly.”
Instead, the album – and My Story especially – is a way for the rapper to set the record straight about his time off, and add context to his disappearance. “I just want people to understand why. I got a lot of messages asking why I’ve been quiet or slowed down. Why this, why that? It’s me giving an insight into that.”
Growing up on west London’s Mozart Estate in Queens Park, Fredo began rapping in early 2016 as a riposte to the music being made by his rivals. His first song, They Ain’t 100, took off on YouTube and gained millions of views. A few months after its release, he was sent to prison on remand for a stabbing charge that was dropped before it reached trial. A second prison stint came in 2017, for a shooting charge that was also later dropped.
Over recent years, the police’s attitude to UK rap music, especially in drill scenes, has hit mainstream headlines. Recent figures provided by the Met after a Freedom Of Information request revealed that the force have had 635 drill and rap music videos removed from YouTube between 2020 and 2022. A new BBC documentary, Drill On Trial, also examines attitudes between the police and the scene, and Fredo sees his success changing the way the police deal with him. “Normal day-to-day police definitely deal with me better, but other police deal with me worse,” he says. “When you do what I do, they feel like they know you already. If I see a basketball player that I watch all the time, I feel like I know them.” His fame, he thinks, “gives me a bit more safety”.
“Feds are getting younger,” he observes. “Maybe that’s because I’m getting older, but when I was younger they were definitely just all old, out of the loop people. These days, you get some young feds that have listened to UK rap and they’ll definitely be nicer.”
Amongst this tumult in his early years in music, Fredo continued to rise through the ranks of UK rap, releasing two mixtapes, 2017’s Get Rich or Get Recalled and the following year’s Tables Turn. In 2018, he also guested on Dave’s Funky Friday, the first UK rap song of this generation to hit Number One in the UK charts; in June, he featured on Stormzy’s single, Toxic Trait.
On much of Unfinished Business, Fredo grapples with feeling somewhere in between his unsteady upbringing and new status as a rap god. “I just want to be stable in life. My life’s just unstable. I don’t feel fully ‘out’ yet,” he says of escaping his past. “My whole life, my friends, my family, responsibilities – that’s all keeping me around where I wanted to stay away from. I’m not saying that I chill on the block all night, but if your circumstances change yet no-one else’s does, you’re never going to fully move on from your past.”
On My Story, Fredo recounts a time when he was so afraid of walking home alone or being attacked that he would take a knife into the shower to protect himself. “We’re strong men, and I never even had to use it,”’ he says of the memory, brushing off a question about the potential long-term psychological impact of such acute panic over a long period of time. After a long pause, he adds: “The only thing that’s difficult is when you lose someone. Everything else, it’s just what you want to do. That’s why I put myself in the positions I did back then, going to prison and stuff. But I don’t glamourise it, and I don’t plan to go back or commit crime anymore.”
Fredo doesn’t see his rap career lasting his whole life. Similar to footballers retiring in their late thirties, he sees the discipline as having a shelf life, and his collaborations with Kick Game and the launch of his own clothing brand and record label Parental Guidance serve as ventures for the future.
“It must be scary just rapping,” he says. “After rap, then what? Especially if you’re not Drake or something. Some rappers make so much money, but I don’t, so I’ve gotta keep pushing.”
Thinking this carefully about future planning has felt necessary for Fredo now he’s become a father, but has also been learned through past mistakes. “It’s only because I’ve done it before,” he says. “I’ve made and then spent all my money a couple of times. It’s such a fear of mine, and it’s always in my mind. You can easily slip.”
For now, he’s enjoying his return to rap and plans to take Unfinished Business on tour after he finishes a mixtape with Harlesden rapper Nines, which is “15 per cent done” and “made complete sense” to him as a collaboration. A sequel to 2018’s Tables Turn mixtape is also in his sights. “I listened to it recently, and it’s a trip down memory lane,” he smiles.
For many rappers and other musicians, creating is something that they would do whether it pays the bills or not, but Fredo scoffs at the idea that he would still be rapping if his audience and fame disappeared. “Rap is my blessing and I appreciate it, but I wouldn’t be doing it if people didn’t want to hear it.”
Instead, it’s a vehicle with which Fredo can continue to lift himself away from his past and provide for his family, as well as grow related business opportunities. “I didn’t grow up rapping – I do it because it gives me financial stability, and it opened up doors for me. If I wasn’t rapping, I wouldn’t have been in the light where I could have met people and investors and work with Kick Game and start my own clothing line. But would I do it if it wasn’t opening these doors and people weren’t listening to me? No way.”
