Blackpool Grime Revisited: How the Jokers Came Out on Top

Picture the scene: You’re in bed, asleep in your home in Blackpool where you live with your four-year old daughter. You get woken up by your phone blowing up with hundreds of messages. Kim Kardashian, a billionaire celebrity with 348 million Instagram followers has just used a song you wrote when you were 16 in a TikTok video. How do you feel? “Shocked,” says Millie B, AKA Millie Bracewell, one of the stars of Blackpool grime, the improbable music scene where it all started.

A short recap for anyone not familiar: Blackpool grime is a 2016-born internet phenomenon that started with sends (AKA diss tracks) between predominantly white school kids using shockingly vulgar language. It all played out on BGMedia, a grime-focused YouTube channel run by a mysterious character called Jack Wilkinson.

Its breakout stars were the cherub-looking, 12 year-old Josh Tate AKA Little T and Afghan Dan, a mixed-race older kid with a troubled past. Then along came Sophie Aspin, a 14 year-old who got a slice of the action by sending for Little T. Over 10 million views on two VICE films, a Channel 4 documentary and my own chapter in a book about Blackpool later – the rest, as they say, is history. 

No one expected the music to cross over to America, though. And no one – especially the Blackpool grime girls – expected to be making a living from what started as irreverent sends they wrote as school kids to beats they found on YouTube.

But a whole new afterlife of Blackpool grime started when social media influencer Bella Poarch started a viral TikTok trend using Millie B’s “Soph Aspin Send” in 2020. This was Millie B’s breakout bassline-influenced diss track, filmed in a local KFC one night after school, that primarily took issue with Aspin’s makeup application skills with lines like, “What the fuck’s your contour? Do you want me to lend you a blender?”

This viral resurgence catapulted the Blackpool grime girls, rather than the boys – who were more famous initially, but failed to capitalise on the success of the scene – to social media stardom. Still, it’s come at a price.

Now 22, Millie B cuts an unassuming figure when I meet her at a Blackpool Promenade-facing boutique hotel a few weeks after Kim Kardashian’s 2023 take on “Soph Aspin Send”, now known as “M to the B”. This makes Millie B go viral for the third time, resulting in interviews with the BBC and wild offers like being a character in a PlayStation game.

Wearing a puffa jacket, blue jeans and white Nike trainers, Millie B could still pass for a schoolgirl, but there’s a certain weariness in her voice too. “Can you cut this bit out?” she asks more than once during our interview, exhibiting the self-consciousness of someone whose every feature has been scrutinised online.

Born in Lancaster, Millie B was brought up in Blackpool by her stay-at-home mum who’s a full-time carer for her disabled younger brother. They always listened to Eminem and Lady Leshurr together, so when Millie B discovered BGMedia via Facebook, she was instantly attracted to the beefs, and would spend her evenings singing along. When she saw Aspin on the channel, it was a spontaneous decision to send for her – even though Millie B had never met Aspin in real life.

But when Wilkinson, who Millie B says was in his late 20s or early 30s at the time, filmed and uploaded the video for the song without her watching it to approve it, she immediately regretted it and asked him to take it down. By that point though, the song – whose catchiness has been confirmed by a Durham University professor – was already a viral success, and had been re-uploaded to other channels.

That was the start of Millie B’s long hard lesson in how the music industry is full of people trying to profit from your work – the harsh reality of which was compounded by the fact that “M to the B” had made her a laughing stock. She was dubbed the epitome of the quintessential British chav, in part because of her makeup, which she says was the accidental result of a look created by a well-meaning friend, that Wilkinson exaggerated with unflattering lighting.

Millie B was so traumatised by the jibes she’d get when walking down the street, she stopped leaving her house. Depressed, crippled with anxiety and short on cash, she went on to sell the rights to “M to the B” for $1000 to someone masquerading as a representative of Sony, in a shockingly bad deal with clauses which prohibited her from recording music for the next 25 years. She thought things had turned around after she was bought out by the real Sony, but she ended up having to repay the £5,000 it cost to get her out of the dodgy contract, with less favourable royalty terms than if she’d never signed it in the first place.

Manchester-born, Blackpool-raised Sophie Aspin says she went through a similar experience, as she sits down for our interview, handing over her nine-week-old baby Ophelia to one of her managers.

“I was 16, maybe 17, and management from America were interested in signing me,” she says. “When you hear that as a child, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing!’ But the contract they offered turned out to be really bad.” Luckily, Aspin recognised the red flags and refused the deal.

Wearing an expensive-looking green tracksuit, her long ginger-blonde hair waved perfectly, lips plumped, and fingernails freshly manicured, Aspin doesn’t look anything like the girl in the videos which sparked her fame. It’s hard to align this version with the one puffing on a ciggy while cursing out Little T’s mum. She also seems much more mature than her 20 years – she’s thoughtful, articulate and ultimately, sees opportunity in adversity and humiliation.

Aspin savvily parlayed her original viral fame into a career as an influencer. She’s got 1.7 million followers on TikTok and close to 300,000 on Instagram, with plans to start a YouTube channel too. She’s coy about revealing exactly how much money she makes, but says, “Yearly wages are being made in a matter of months,” and that she’s hoping to buy a house next year. 

Millie B similarly jumped on TikTok soon after Bella Poarch used her song, declaring herself the original “M to the B”, in what felt like a nod to her idol Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady”. Indeed, she’s been self-reflexively playing up the “M to the B” persona ever since the song first went viral, doing her own versions of the TikTok trends to fuel the fire – each time fighting for what’s rightfully her slice of the pie. 

Both Millie B and Aspin are now making music with hip hop producer Nat Powers, who’s worked with rap legends like Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels and Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah. While Aspin dropped her cheeky female empowerment-themed comeback “Don’t Take it Serious” in November 2022, Millie B quickly responded to Kim Kardashian’s TikTok video with her eye-wink of a reply “Meant to Bee”. 

“I see a lot of potential for these girls,” Powers says over email. “Sophie has an unrivalled personality on social media and in music, while Millie could easily have the crown as a female bassline artist.” The fact they’re both young mothers, he says, is a really powerful symbol.

Both Millie B and Aspin speak of making albums in 2023 but neither of them mention making another duet – the send they dropped calling out Little T, seems a lifetime ago to both of them. So does the original Blackpool grime scene, though it’s still active. Perhaps inspired by the girls’ success, Afghan Dan dropped “Little Muppet”, a Little T send, a couple of weeks ago, with Little T replying with his own diss, seemingly reigniting the beef. Still, it seems unlikely either of the artists – now young men – will manage to achieve what Millie B and Aspin have done. 

It’s arguably because the girls were always in on the joke: They knew they weren’t great at rapping, but they didn’t care. Crucially, they took the vitriol and turned it into motivation. Now, thanks to hard work and clever business moves, they’re the ones having the last laugh. In a town whose signature kitsch Cinderella carriages barely disguise the poverty that lurks beneath, this is a rags-to-riches story that doesn’t end when the ride (or TikTok trend) is over.

@kamilarymajdo