An interview with the infamous Don’t Flop battle-rapper, and about his return to the scene
We were in a beaten-up old Rover – the front passenger-side door didn’t open from the inside – parked up next to a KFC on the outskirts of Nuneaton. It was 8pm, and outside was dark and cold.
Until very recently, Callum Clark has lost every battle he has been in. His two-vs-two battle with Chris Leese and Unanymous has been included on a YouTube playlist called ‘Don’t Flop Bodybags’, due to the severity of the put downs he received.
“A lot of people before the battle were like, ‘what you gonna be like’, because Unanymous and Chris Leese are known to get in people’s faces in battles” Callum says, “but it’s one of them where you know nothing’s gonna happen… you see me in the video, I laugh, I’m bobbing along to it, it doesn’t bother me at all.
“It’s like acting, or performing- all I can do is perform back.”
Don’t Flop is a popular battle-rapping competition which is broadcast over YouTube. Battle-rapping, for those not in the know, is a particular kind of a capella improvised rapping. The goal is essentially to berate your opponent into submission, using clever put-downs and high-class lyrical delivery.
To ‘flop’ is to be unable to deliver your next verse without hesitation.
Callum, more commonly known to fans of the battle-rap circuits as CallumBOOM!, has been pitted against some of the biggest names in the scene.
I met up with Callum to find out more about Don’t Flop, and to ask about his reinventing himself as Wobi Tide after a long hiatus.
As I was getting the levels corrected on my equipment, Callum Clark was rolling a joint and talking about his love of comic writers Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and also for the late fantasy author Terry Pratchett, renowned for his gentle wit and grasp of absurdity.
I decided to start from the beginning, and ask how it all began. Callum was brought up in Camp Hill – a notoriously deprived area in the north of Nuneaton.
“I could tell you one story of it where it sounds like a quaint little place, and you could look at it from a different point of view and say it was a rough area.
“I went out to swim in lakes, and fuckin’ build rope swings and stuff like that, which sounds like it’s out of a fuckin’ lovely little story… but also people have been killed there, and countless- mopeds, get stolen. That’s the perfect way to explain Camp Hill, stolen mopeds.
“But I enjoyed growing up in Camp Hill, I think it’s an interesting place, definitely.”
Callum started out back in 2009 in Nuneaton crew Unknown Outfit- ironically, they were far better known by their YouTube channel name, GrimeCC.
I asked him where the rest of the crew are now.
“Splinta,” – Callum pauses – “that’s one of my oldest mates, best mate of mine called Ricky. He’s getting on with family life now, still writing… when I first started writing it was me and Ricky, when I first started rapping, me and Ricky.
“He weren’t a rapper, but behind the scenes… Matty Chinn, he went on doing some filming for the Paedophile Hunter [Stinson Hunter].”
Callum entered his first Don’t Flop battle rap competition in 2012, against then-
newcomer Impact – “Big up Impact, he’s gone on to do good, big up Impact”.
Impact quickly took to the offensive and delivered some brutal bars.
“When it comes to raps, mine are like lightning strikes and thunder claps, entire galaxies are rent asunder when my lungs contract, you’ve awoke Cthulhu from his slumber, twat!”
CallumBOOM!, for want of a better word, ‘flopped’.
“Impact, you’ve never wrote a quick rap – you sound too si- ah, fuck.”
He accepts this post-mortem entirely- “Oh, I completely fucked up, 110%… I really didn’t take it as seriously as it was, I didn’t realise what Don’t Flop was, I didn’t understand how to write for an a capella rap battle… it is very, very different to writing stuff on beat.”
“My first round, the one where I fucked up the most, I wrote on the way to the battle… as I said, I just didn’t take the battle seriously, not in an ‘Ah, I think I’m amazing, dickhead’ kind of way, just… just that I was kind of a fucking idiot…
“After that, I got smoked, and that’s when I was like, right, I’ve got to do another battle now, to prove myself. I can’t let that be my last one.”
He then went on to do a few battles on rival YouTube channel RedJSD (due to a “lack of a call” for him to come back on Don’t Flop). One was against rapper Rogue– he maintains that “Out of all the battles I’ve done, I fuckin’ won that battle” – although almost immediately afterwards, he remands himself.
“I didn’t though, did I. They [the judges] voted against me, so I’m incorrect to say I won.”
In 2013, CallumBOOM! made his return to Don’t Flop. He teamed up with Two Can, first to go against rappers Pedro and Bamalam, before he had his most infamous battle against battle-rapping heavyweights Unanymous and Chris Leese.
Both Unanymous and Chris Leese later went on to individually contest Don’t Flop champion Tony D in a title battle, to become the champion of Don’t Flop. Callum described the battle with Tony D and Chris Leese as a “close one… some say that Chris Leese possibly beat Tony D then, but the judges went the other way.
“I really did go against two of the top people in Don’t Flop at the time, to see their quality of writing against mine, I was kind of put off looking at theirs and thinking ‘Jesus Christ, that’s quality’, and mine’s just a bit…” Callum blew a raspberry.
In battle rapping, very little is off-limits in terms of content. In CallumBOOM! and Two Can vs Unanymous and Chris Leese, the following lyric set, barked in tandem by the two competitors, demonstrated this rule completely:
Unanymous: “You’re looking a little stressed Callum…
Chris Leese: “We got a call from your ex, Callum…
Unanymous: “We found out you got placed under arrest Callum….
Chris Leese: “Because of the innocent little girl who wouldn’t give you any SEX, Callum!”
When I asked Callum about this, he said “That, is a good angle, you know? And they presented it well. It’s not true, at all, but… with the momentum they had… it was real good, they were a real good team together.”
He told me about how the bar originated from a real situation, in which a girl who was “a bit crazy for me”, accused him of “oral rape”. He was taken in for questioning, and the police swabbed his room for evidence. Nothing was found and the case was thrown out.
“It’s just crazy to me… nothing, nothing happened at all, and it all got proved that nothing happened, and it’s one of them sort of- maybe something should have happened to her for accusing me, because that’s a bit fucked up.
“Someone from round here who heard that, they were a big fan of Unanymous [told them]. So they said ‘You got arrested for raping this little girl’, when this girl who said this was older than me. Do you know what I mean?
But you know, it was a good angle, it was performed well, and fair-play.”
After this battle, CallumBOOM! might as well have walked into the sea- he released no new tracks, no new battles, nothing. In fact, CallumBOOM! wouldn’t ever appear again.
On the 19th October 2015, exactly one year prior to this interview, Callum Clark returned under the new name of Wobi Tide (after something his teachers used to say, “Woe betide the boy who stays out late”), with his new track Cedar.
“I hadn’t wrote for 3 years, just cause… I dunno, life was just a bit fuckin’ hectic, and even though people draw from things like that, I just didn’t have motivation at all, I was just a bit like… fuckin’, what’s the point, kind of thing.
“And then, I just, I dunno, got inspired again one time… I was just like yeah, I want to do it again, sort of thing.
“It [Cedar] was bars I’d previously wrote on a different beat, but didn’t record, so I was just like ‘Oh I’ll do it on this beat’… I found another beat, and it just gave it another push for me.”
“I’m currently writing at the minute, it’s just building a buzz at the minute, I might release a track every now and then but before I release a mixtape or anything like that… I want to release something that a fair few people will actually get and listen to.
“[For now] I’m just going to be doing freestyles, battles… I’d like to be a big battler, obviously, to not want to be number one would be stupid, obviously I’m not fuckin’ nowhere near any of that, but I’d like to do that… but I’d like to do music as well.”
Concerning his next Don’t Flop appearance:
“[I have now] won my first battle, before this, I’ve only won half a round [laughs].
“On my fuckin’ try-out bruv, geezer called Pete Cashmore – big up him, he’s someone who’s always reached out and been lovely, sound geezer he is- he fuckin’ gave me half a round on my first battle, and that’s the only vote I’ve had before.
“But yeah, I won this battle, 2-1 I think, one guy didn’t vote for me. Fuckin’ idiot [laughs]”.
Additional: This is the first non-health related item on this blog. As mentioned in the previous post, I am going to start broadening my scope with this blog’s content, in order to accommodate and promote some of the other journalism that I do.
Cut For Stone’s focus will still be primarily on health. Consider this an experimental phase, to see what works. Please let me know what you think, and leave comments below.
Cut for Stone 