To announce the tour, Stormzy said: “I was thinking what’s next, cos we’ve done 3 O2s, shut that down. I said to the team, we gotta do something bigger, something better, something different.

His responses, in these moments, are less personal and pensive than collective and reflexive. “I’ll go on a march and then someone will write an elaborate think piece on why I’ve done this or that. But when it comes to my journey with my people and that side of things I just think, What are we on? What do we need to do? Do we need to grab the mic? What are we on? And of course it’s great to be someone who can use their platform and their voice so I never take that for granted because my involvement might get more coverage. But at the same time I’m just a musician and I’m not really in it.” What makes them even cooler is the fact that both Stormzy and Jama have used their platforms to talk about personal subjects that matter to them. Jama has spoken of the pain she felt as a child when her father served multiple jail sentences. (She is no longer in touch with him.) “When I was starting out I felt a bit nervous about people finding out, because I thought they’d think less of me,” she says. “But then I decided I should be that person that speaks about it.” Last year she made a critically acclaimed documentary, When Dad Kills: Murderer in the Family, about children of fathers who are incarcerated, or addicts. The growth in question was both metamorphic and cathartic. Stormzy says he left for Jamaica a boy and returned a man. “I know that physically, in my face and how I stand in the world, and even my age says I’m a man. But deep down I knew that I was a boy. And that used to scare me, that God might bring me to a position where I’m successful and my life is set up and I’ve climbed these ladders and been on this journey and I’m still a boy inside.” So what is the necessary work I have to do to make sure I’m not in this position again? That means growth, accountability, changing my character, changing my routines, my habits, my tradition, my values, my morals. Because how I feel right now and how I’ve made someone else feel and how I’ve devastated a world that I was living in – I just never want to be in this position again. So what do I need to do?” Stormzy came to fame more abruptly. He attended a notoriously tough school in the London suburb of Croydon and worked briefly as a manager on an oil rig, watching grime videos during his lunch break. He’d always loved music and performed where he could. In 2014, he released an independent EP. Instantly, without even having a record deal, he began getting awards and bookings on national TV.

No, not at all, man,” says Stormzy, known to his mother as Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr., surveying the restaurant’s purple, gold, and velvet decor when we meet in the downstairs bar. It is not, he says, their “kind of scene.” This realisation, he says, was driven by self-accountability, not self-pity; he does not lament the childhood he had, but simply recognises its limitations.“I realised, especially growing up in South London in the environment I grew up in, there’s never going to be a time anyone encourages man to go deal with his feelings.” Stormzy says. “That’s a very adult thing to think, I’m gonna go deal with my life and my character with who I am and who I want to grow to be,” he says. “There is power in vulnerability.” Joseph Vambe, Drew Chateau and Stormzy. Photograph: Karis Beaumont/The Guardian Stormzy and the students

I feel like there was a period when music was about the industry. People worried about whether a radio station would play them,” he says in his basso profundo voice, referring to a fear among artists of speaking out politically. “Now people are just walking their truth.” The exchange made the British tabloids, and their fans couldn’t get enough of it: “Stormzy and Maya Jama are actually goals,” read one typical tweet.Stormzy is also part of a consortium of buyers, including Croydon-raised footballer Wilfried Zaha, who took on ninth tier football team AFC Croydon which, “without sounding cliche”, he hopes they’ll be able to build up naturally with the help of community engagement. “The automatic comparison is Wrexham, but for us it’s just very much like, this is our home town,” he adds. Stormzy grew up in Croydon and Norbury, and is unabashedly proud of his south London roots. I tell him that he once came down to support the south London football team I play for, the Lambeth Allstars. “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” he says enthusiastically. “I know some of them boys.” Jama, who grew up in Bristol, has steadily built a reputation as a front woman on TV and radio. At sixteen she moved to London, where she set up her own YouTube channel and was hired by MTV. She was recently a host for the popular Saturday-night TV game show Cannonball and is soon to appear on Sky One’s extreme-sports program Revolution. DC If there’s one thing I want people to take away from the scholarship and our stories, it’s that your struggles are your own, and you can be successful. For all the ways he may have grown during that time, his politics remain much as they were. He’s still a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, even after Labour’s 2019 trouncing at the polls under its former leader. When I ask him how he felt about the election, a long sigh fades into short silence as he seeks to conjure the appropriate metaphor. “It’s like when you encourage children to make the right decision and they make the wrong one even after you’ve explained everything. And you think, A’ight, that’s your decision… you try have your cake and eat it then.” He shrugs and then lets out a big laugh. “Even the way things have panned out… I’m not gonna say I told you so, but…” Stormzy says he thinks of them as his younger siblings. Although he and his team have no say in who is chosen for the scholarship, Chateau and Vambe both happen to be from south London, and the trio share commonalities in life experience . “I’ve seen them at least once a year since the scholarship. We got together at Cambridge,” Stormzy says. “I just feel it was very spiritual. You know, I’m proud of them. I love them from afar.”

There’s Alec Boateng, known as Twin, co-president of 0207 Def Jam records, who has been collaborating with Stormzy for years. “I would not feel comfortable being on this musical journey without him,” says Stormzy, who was one of 0207’s first signings. “I know it sounds cringe, but if I’m a Jedi Knight, he’s Yoda. I’m great without Yoda; Yoda is great without me, but his guidance makes me better.” These last scenes of the day, in their own way, all say something about Stormzy. A man with ambition but also with intention, who is trying to keep it real. He’s sitting in a space of joy and faith, but is also concerned by the idea that he might come across as cringey or insincere. He’s not perfect, and he knows it, but he’s trying to be better and move with humility and kindness towards people around him, regardless of who they are. And that counts for a lot. Academically brilliant students’: Joseph Vambe and Drew Chateau. Photograph: Karis Beaumont/The Guardian

Out of The Ends

Before the interview began, Stormzy was mic’d up, trailed with a camera by director Jordan “Zebie” Boza. I wonder if we’re going to be filmed – no, it turns out, but they are recording the audio. His team say it’s for a documentary, but Stormzy says the collection of footage is just part and parcel of his everyday life. Is it all right, always having someone in your space like that, I ask? “He’s my brother,” he says of Boza. “Not my blood brother, but … He’d be there anyway. It’s been happening. He’s been doing it for years now.” For someone who claims to be a homebody, most likely to be found spending time with his two rottweilers – Stormzy calls them his “sons” – being documented 24/7 seems like the most unusual aspect of his lifestyle. That, of course, and the fact that he’s throwing a literal gala for his 30th birthday. I feel, as a man of God, I hold myself to a higher standard. That’s the thing, that’s the thing that I need to stop copping out about. And I’ve never actually said that out loud in an interview, but I think that’s a big thing I’ve realised in recent years,” he says. I’m a public-facing human who’s just 29. I’ve gone through all these motions of becoming a man in front of the world His desire to change was in no small part driven by unresolved emotions he held about his painful split with the radio and TV presenter Maya Jama, whom he dated for four years before they broke up in 2019. “I think my break up with Maya was still really heavy on my heart. I’d never experienced a breakup and the feelings that come with a breakup. And I never wanted to ever be in a position again where I felt what I was feeling. Because it showed me that I was a boy. And I do not want to go any further as a boy. I’ve seen how that manifests in other people. And I don’t want to be like that.

In the van, recalling it, Stormzy gestures with his hands in front of his face, snatching at the air for words. The fast, thrusting, hostile-by-default register that characterises grime music is not to everybody's taste. Whatever you think about Stormzy's genre, though, this rapper is by any standards a first-rate lyricist. He's exact, economical, a master-hand at the necessary rapper's bluster and often very funny. ("I come to your club and I f*** shit up," raps this Manchester United fan in popular song Know Me From, "I'm David Moyes.") The Notes app on Stormzy's phone is crammed with fragments and couplets and chunks of verses - "bars" is the word Stormzy favours when discussing his lyrics. And his oral dexterity as a rapper extends to a general talent for chat. For now, though, as he contemplates the spring's unlikely commercial triumph, the words that tend to come to him so easily just won't. "I can't even. I can't even," Stormzy says. Out of The Ends If so, how did Banksy get Stormzy to wear one of his works unknowingly? Did he leave the vest in the Glastonbury dressing room with a note: “From an anonymous well-wisher?” Surely the rapper was in on the stunt, for the vest was perfectly coordinated with the rest of his show. Its stark design showed up powerfully against the spectacular swirl of multicoloured lights and flashed-up messages. It seems too much to believe that Banksy happened to infiltrate a work of art that balanced the optics of the performance so precisely. Overall, he’s looking forward to his birthday, though. “In a beautiful way – because I mean, I thank God I’ve done a lot of growing these past four or five years. I’ve done the serious bit, so now it’s just enjoy,” he says. Today’s shoot is in part a celebration of the news that HSBC will be sponsoring an additional 30 scholarships at the university, and some of the past scholars’ achievements. Drew Chateau, who studied law and is now a trainee at a top firm , and Joseph Vambe, who studied human, social and political sciences, and is now a Labour councillor, were the first two students on the scholarship. Until today they have not been publicly named – Stormzy, and the university, wanted to protect them from any unnecessary pressure during their studies. You know, when you do something half positive, people are like, woah, you are Mother Teresa. And it’s like, yo, chill man

Stormzy and the 'paigons'

As the first recipients of the Stormzy Scholarship to Cambridge in 2018, Drew Chateau and Joseph Vambe didn’t know what to expect. They had already been accepted, to do law, and human, social and political sciences respectively; this was the flake in the 99. Joseph Vambe My politics teacher kept me behind after class and was like, “You should think about this course at Cambridge.” That’s when it happened.