A Life More Wild - Series 6, Episode 1

At the age of 20, Jordan Stevens achieved his dream when Rizzle Kicks’ album Stereo Typical went platinum.

He'd always loved music and had seen it as a way he could transform the lives of himself and his mother. With the album's success and his career soaring, he should have had it all, but it's never that simple. 

Join Jordan for a walk along the shore as he takes some time away on the Isle of Sheppey and talks about the problems with selling young people dreams of fame and wealth, making mistakes, walking dogs, his mixed feelings about the city, And starting it all with raps that dissed his teachers.

Sometimes, when I do workshops with boys, I'll tell them that like, you know, I sold this many records and had this much whatever, and then I decided to stop. Me and my friend decided to stop for our own well being. They struggle to understand that, because it’s quite difficult for people to understand the idea of somebody being like, I don't mind not earning money for a bit to make sure that I don't like… break inside. 

Okay, we're on the Isle of Sheppey currently stood looking out onto a beach with the tide coming in, a beach known for its shells. The sky is grey, very British winter. The sound is soothing, smells salty. I'm here with my two rescue dogs. One's called Mimi, one's called Spike.

We’re going to go on a walk to a bird hide, and I'm looking forward to it. I want to brave the conditions, because that is an essential part of being a human being with dogs, and also because I want to talk about how nature is positively affecting my life every day. Off we go.

I moved to Brighton when I was 10, spent my teen years there, and I loved being by the sea. That was one of my favourite parts of Brighton. Ever since then, I've found some sense of home in Margate, which is another seaside spot. So I'm really happy to be by the sea. 

I have to live by these six tent poles of, I guess, 10 poles of stability or harmony or and whenever I feel a bit out of whack, I know that one of those tent poles is off. So the tent poles are nutrition, exercise, sleep, community and solitude, creativity and then nature, in no particular order, but engaging with all of those things for a human being, in my belief, really helps us settle. Certainly does for me.

I have two dogs, two rescue dogs, and they bring me a lot of joy. I really learned with Spike. I actually write quite a lot about Spike in the book that I just released because rescuing Spike was a really big moment for me. It helped me understand love, I guess, in its simplest form.

So my mum and dad, both musicians when I was born, both wrote lyrics, and my mum would often leave her lyrics, actually on the living room floor. And my grandma was an English teacher, so I've loved words for a long time, and when I went to secondary school, the way in which I dealt with many of the frustrations I felt was actually by writing raps and recording them. My first ever recorded rap, I'm pretty sure, was a diss on my school form tutor. So it just became quite immediate, the desire to use music to get out how I was feeling. And then as I got a little bit older and and realised that me and my mum weren't in the best financial position, I realised it was just the thing that I could do, all the time. 

After school, I would make CDs and, you know, make covers and stickers and press packs, and I'd post them through all the local record labels, and it was just something I could chip away at constantly. And so that was my main focus. I actually wanted to be a footballer until I was about 14, but then I realised that, I don't know, that there wasn't anything stopping me from trying to move forwards the whole time.

Rizzle Kicks was… the vibe of Rizzle Kicks is quite a vivid memory. It was actually established by me and Harley sat in his parents’ house and we listened to this song by Jurassic Five called Great Expectations. And it's this kind of old school Golden Age Hip Hop feel. We were like, I like this. We like this. And that was a real union because me and Harley actually kind of like different styles of music, but we definitely meet with a mutual appreciation for that sound.

Then, like, you know, obviously The Streets were a big influence, because Mike Skinner used to get these singers to sing the end of his lines. And initially, I just reached out to Harley because I knew he could sing, and I just wanted some singing in the song. That was it. And we did the song, and it was good. And then we did another song where Harley sang like a whole verse on the song. And then suddenly all the people around me were like, Oh, this is really good. And I went, Oh, right, maybe it is really good. Then I thought, well, actually, there aren't really any, duos that one raps, one sings. And so we went alright, we’re gonna give it a go. We went to the same college. We went to BRIT School, which is a performing arts college. He did theatre. I did, well back then it was called BDC, which is broadcasting and digital communication. So I was also running around with a recording machine doing Vox pops. But, yeah, it was so we were spending every day with each other, at least on the train journeys there. 

My relationship with bird watching! I don't say I'm an active bird watcher now, but when I was a kid, I used to get these like Readers Digest books of British birds, and then I used to watch them outside of my estate. Pigeons are my current bird obsession! Like, how great are pigeons? Because I used to have quite a disparaging view on pigeons based off of the fact there's loads of them, and, you know, you kind of associate them with being dirty. But then I just did a bit of research and realised that how smart and intelligent they are, and you know, all our perceptions of them are based off of the world we created. It's not necessarily them as creatures, you know, they're not rats with wings. They don't carry around diseases. They're just surviving like everyone else, and they've actually done very well. They're all over the world, you know. 

So we are finally here at the Bird hide. It's a wooden box currently dark in colour because of the rain. Actually, it's on stilts, some steps. It's going to be a nice view. Let's check it out. As we get into the bird hide, I'm sure you listeners will hear the change in sonics as it is a little box, basically, here we go.

Here we are inside bit of reverb, a bit of echo. Hello! We're in the bird hide! The view's beautiful, by the way. Stark today, but I can see this being a very serene place to spend an afternoon. You know, the windows open, the hatch is open, the requirement is to shut them again after but, yeah, turn up here with some binoculars and some food, and you'll probably be quite happy. There's a lot of interesting scratchings and writings and graffiti around there too. It's fun.

My book is called Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak and Dogs, and this book is about... it's a window into six months of my life. I do throw back to various memories and experiences that are important to that window of time. But ultimately, I was going through like quite a profound heartbreak, of my own causing, and I think it was important for me to make it clear at the beginning that the only way in which fame or success or finance helped or informs that period of my life was just the fact that I had more time to sit in how I felt and I could afford therapy. But other than that, my experience of grief isn't any different to anybody else's experience of grief, and that's what's so powerful about learning more about emotion.

And I don't mention Rizzle Kicks, which most people know me for, it actually genuinely isn't important to that story. We have an unfortunate shift of perception, at times, with money and our belief that I've actually witnessed, especially with boys and men recently, where money does not require the person to be emotionally mature to earn it. It doesn't require the person to be connected to themselves or the world around them. That is one of the biggest paradoxes of the current system that we live in. And I think, yeah, I'm not sure so much about money specifically, but certainly, like celebrity and notoriety, it does remove, I think, a sense of perceived humanity. I think because, you know, we're taught that's what you want.

We're taught that's what to aim for, to be, you know, to receive adulation from the public and I do think there is something inherently animal about status, you know, I do get that, but there is a grief in being a public figure, because anonymity is gone and the expectation that you can survive through like fundamentally strenuous situations is, I don't think, reflective of the actual experience. From my perspective, the hardest challenge with boys is making an immaterial existence seem sexy. That's the hardest thing to do. Because you know, let's be frank, a well designed car is cool, you know, a nicely designed watch… I mean, I'm not into watches, but it seems cool. 

Our old, even our new forms of superheroes, still carry some kind of remnants of this, so I have to just go like, Look, we all need to earn money to be able to get this boot off our neck slightly. But there is a point at which it doesn't benefit anybody to chase that money at the expense of connection to self or the people around us. And that's hard to do, because historically, that idea can be, like… even the word hippie is still derogatory to some people. That's mad to me. You know, you can just throw it aside as, like, oh my god, we’re talking about emotions again. It's easier to detach from our bodies and just go through life cerebrally because it's less painful. But you also don't get to feel the same level of love. How do I prove to a boy that love feels incredible? It's difficult. I can't show them. I can't show them like a formula. I just feel good. How do I prove that these are the challenges we face, you know? How do I prove to a boy that the emotional world will change their lives?

I currently believe that I'm done with the city life. I really believe that. But, you know, I say that from a perspective of someone who's not been away from the city long enough to long for it. I do know people, there's people I respect, who have done that and are then appreciative of the city. But for me, personally, especially London, the return on investment there is just crazy to me. I was just away over the new year, and I was at a place in the world where it was warm. Was by the beach. Hired a little scooter. I didn't have to pay for parking. I wasn't surveyed constantly. And listen, I was entering there with my currency, and the exchange rate was great, and I understand that context of it, but just that pace of life, I don't know, man.

It's quite a codependent relationship that people have with places like London. I like the peace and quiet of the outdoors, but I've not been tested. I've not spent months away. And maybe I should. And maybe the feeling of not having some kind of money in the city. Maybe not having that is really scary. You feel like you're locked out of somewhere. All I know is that I'm not… what I can comprehensively say is I don't love the city.

Everything we're looking at is currently coated in the grey sky, so the colours are quite, what’s the word I’m looking for, stark or phased out… wish washy, but in like, a beautiful way, very reminiscent of the kind of colour palette you might see on Nordic noir. It reminds me one of my favourite TV series, the bridge. I feel like I might be walking towards, you know, some a clue that someone has discovered whilst walking their dog.

We've just got, we've just got back into the warmth of the residence and there is, fortunately, the opportunity for us to make fire. There’s a log burner in the bungalow, so I'm gonna try and do it. But I feel revived. I feel actually quite vitalized by the fact that I've just braved these British winter conditions. Man, it's part of the experience. You have to take the light with the dark, the hard with the soft, the rough with the smooth, balance, Yin Yang.

All right, so I'm about to light the fire. This is nice. There's a log burner. We're gonna light it like this, try and create a vertical, upwards thing, because fire travels upwards. You know, I've not been in scouts, but have been stranded on an island and taught briefly how to do it. But you know what? I forgot most of it. Okay, now waiting for the tea, the kettle rather, to boil. 

Opening up is an interesting phrase for me personally, because one thing about me throughout my life is I kind of narrate. I'm very heart-on-my-sleeve kind of person. So even when I had a confusion as to what it was that I felt, I would say what was on my mind, to a fault. Actually, I've had to condition myself. I'm kind of working in reverse, I think, to a lot of men, where actually I've been very open but now I understand the power of openness. I'm actually trying to train myself to be a little bit more closed, not in a negative way, just in a conscious way. I think I definitely had troubles with friendship in my mid 20s, because I would be very would be very, like, searingly honest about things, rather than sensitive about what it is a person might want to hear or how they want to hear it. That sensitivity is obviously really important.

For whatever reason, we're still confined by an educational system that was invented over 100 years ago. We think that how to be around people is something we pick up intrinsically or from experience, and it's just isn't true. So basically, this all came to a head with a relationship I had with a woman, where we were together for not that long, five months, and I cheated on her, and then I told her that I cheated on her, and then she left me, which is what the book's about, basically. And the reason I thought it's worth exploring, I mean through a current understanding of good and bad, I'm definitely the bad person in that situation, but I feel there was a lot more to be said, because that kind of stuff happens all the time.

Betrayal’s horrible to experience, and I think it's worth noting that, certainly in my position, it was also awful to be that person. And I had done this three or four times, with anyone who got close to me, I would just self-sabotage and destroy the relationship. So I went sober. That was the first step, because it was very clear that a lot of this stupidness happened when I was drunk, and then taking other drugs off the back of that. And then I did a bunch of therapy, you know, knowing why, why am I doing these actions? How can I how can I, like, I use something called the change triangle, which is a form of AEDP, which is somatic therapy, and it basically just allows me to look at my power and the behaviour, and then make healthier choices based on those patterns.

It’s the same as you would with anything else, you know, like, same as somebody would at the gym, whatever. If they think, why am I lifting this weight today? Oh, maybe because I didn't eat this or this, or I didn't rest. You know, that same thing can be said, Why am I smoking 10 cigarettes today? Oh, it's because I had this interaction yesterday. And okay, so I feel sad about this thing. You know, we can trace our patterns and then help us make healthier choices. That was a game changer for me.

Jordan’s reflectiveness really makes you think about what you’re chasing, and why. Maybe it’s worth stopping for a second and working out what’s really important in your life. Or just get a dog!

Jordan stayed at Sandy Toes in Kent. Take a listen to more of his reflections from his time in nature here.

Join us next time for another walk with another great guest and please remember to rate and review A Life More Wild wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help.