Stig & Rob!
Earlier this week HHC met up with Stiggy Smalls for an interview - in a pub, naturally - and, of course, the rumours of him working with Robbie ‘Port Vale’ Williams came up.
We’ll be dropping the full deal in a soon-coming issue of HHC, but in the meantime here’s the official line, straight from Stig’s mouth:
“The dude got at me on MySpace. It was really funny actually - all it had was ‘Rob, Beverley Hills’. I got some message from some guy saying, ‘It’s Rob, I really need to speak to you. You won’t believe who this is!’ I’m thinking, ‘Who do I know from the past called Rob?’
“Then he sent me a message saying, ‘It’s Robbie Williams.’ And I said, ‘Is it fuck!’ It was stupid O’clock in the morning and he told me he was out in Australia at the time and was off to play football and we’d speak later.
“So I rang the number from my mate Ben’s phone - didn’t have any credit on mine - and some dude answers. ‘Hello? It’s David.’ Or Michael someone. So I’m just about to think it’s a wind up and this voice goes [does Robbie Williams impression], ‘Is that Stiggy?’
“My opening words to him were, ‘Are you taking the fucking piss?’
“I’m like this polar opposite to the guy. It was surreal. And it turns out he’d saw the Asher D battle, he looked for some more shit, read a few interviews, liked the humour, the subjects and the character.
“He said, ‘I don’t know what we’re gonna do but I wanna work with you.’
“Now having spoken to him, he seems like a genuine guy, and if it comes off it’ll be a blessing, but I went through an element of, ‘How will this affect my career? Will it be a complete balls up?’
“Going from one extreme to the other - me to him - is almost a bit of a contradiction to work with a pop star. But when I spoke to him I said, ‘You do understand I’m not a pop star?’
“He said, ‘Well I’ve seen what you do and I like it. And I’m not a rapper.’
“But he knows his hip-hop, you know - I was taken aback when he was talking about Stetsasonic and Souls Of Mischief…”
Stay tuned to HHC for more on hip-hop’s latest odd couple, and in the meantime cop Stig’s very excellent EP.