Contact Admin. Up until three years ago Bashy was a London bus driver. This month he is on a world tour with Gorillaz, with whom he performed at Glastonbury this summer, and next year he co-stars in a feature film called The Veteran. It's no wonder he's seen as Britain's answer to the American rapper-turned-actor Will Smith.
How did he get so far in such a short time? It comes as no surprise that, when we meet, he is wearing a loud T-shirt from his own range with the words "Bish Bash Bosh", which is also the title of the new album that he is working on. It's clear that he feels the world is at his feet all of a sudden: "I'm in a happier place because my dreams are coming true. I'm acting in feature films and I'm travelling the world. Before I was just broke," he says. It's about seeing an opportunity and taking it.
Bashy was encouraged by his mother to start acting classes at the age of eight, and had soon added rapping to his repertoire by He attended the Brit School for Performing Arts at 16 β after a brief spell in Dominica,in the Caribbean, where he was sent to live with his disciplinarian grandmother, after he was expelled from his primary school.
Before resigning from his job as a bus driver he got mobbed by his female fans after he released the song "Black Boys" in Routes such as the from Pinner to Golders Green experienced delays as "people started to take pictures of me driving the bus".
The track sings the praises of everybody from Dizzee Rascal to former newsreader Trevor McDonald, and Bashy became a spokesperson for the Stop the Knife campaign. It was full of samples from Clarke's film Kidulthood. He asked Bashy to record Adulthood's theme tune, "Kidulthood to Adulthood" in before re-employing him as music supervisor for this year's film, 4. Bashy soon set to work on his debut album, Catch Me if You Can, which was promoted with a mini drama, The Ransom, in which he plays somebody who gets kidnapped.
