Interview
Interview
Jacob Rees-Mogg was denied entry to an MC Hammersmith show
With a new show on the horizon, we get to know the world's leading freestyle rapper to emerge from the ghetto of middle-class West London
While at first the inherent coolness of a hip hop club might seem vastly at odds with the sweet but stereotypical nerdiness of an improv class, there is ultimately a strong bond that connects these two worlds. Both art forms pull the performer sharply into the moment, requiring fast-thinking and dextrous word play, while both – if executed effectively – rely on linguistic framework to further enhance these elements, create callbacks or progress their narrative. One such performer who embodies this bridging of hip hop and improv is Will Naameh, or rather MC Hammersmith: “the world’s leading freestyle rapper to emerge from the ghetto of middle-class West London.”
“The skill set that I borrowed from improv was very useful,” reflects Naameh after a run of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this summer. “Useful to help me know that if I make a mistake, the stakes are very low. I can keep digging deep into one idea, and if I make a mistake, fold that in, accept it and always be in the moment and not be too ahead or behind myself. The rest was just practicing every day and writing my own rhyming dictionary.”
Since developing the posh and privileged gangster rapper persona while at university, Naameh has memorised tens of thousands of rhyming words, so that he’s never searching for the rhyming payoff and can focus more on the set-up in the moment. “I’m never thinking, am I going to rhyme myself into a verbal cul de sac here, because pretty much for every single word or problem I get into, I will have a Rolodex of options to choose from in the space of half a second.”
It’s a skill that will be invaluable for his new show, Hippity Hoppity Get Off My Property, in which audiences imagine Hammersmith Hall via his bars, for what he jokingly boasts as “the world’s only improvised hip hop comedy show slash historical walking tour of a stately home.”
Before all of that, we get to know MC Hammersmith a little better.
Who would you most like to be stuck in a lift with?
I would like to be stuck in a lift with 90s rapper, Big L, he’s my favourite rapper. He passed away in 1999 and I would just ask him if he could read me all of his bars from his notebook that he hadn’t rapped yet and see his unrecorded lyrics. That would be my dream. I love his punchlines, I love his word play, his lyricism, love when he flows into triplets really quickly. I love his entire album, Lifestyles Of The Poor And Dangerous. He’s just such a huge inspiration. I had to think about that, but I think he would have to be my favourite rapper; I think it would be remiss me to give any other answer.
I know you’re more on the comedy circuit, but do you ever meet other rappers when performing?
Very rarely; I was lucky enough to do an R.A The Rugged Man show in 2022. There’s a video of it on Youtube somewhere. He’s one of my favourite living rappers by far, and he got me to do a five minute freestyle at his show, and that was a huge career highlight, just because, at a hip hop show when there’s 500 people in the audience and there’s a mosh pit in front of you, it really is an electric atmosphere, because it’s 500 hip hop fans who know and understand and appreciate the word play and conventions of hip hop. So when you start dropping bars, they go absolutely wild for it. And then the next day you find yourself in an old working men’s club, and weirdly, they don’t go as crazy for it.
The rare occasions when I have been on a line-up with people who aren’t comedic rappers, but who are rappers, have been a huge privilege. Although, every Edinburgh Fringe a bunch of freestylers do parachute into town, and so I put together a line-up of a bunch of freestylers at Monkey Barrel. So I was rapping with Chris Turner, Demko, Maxcshane and Daniel Delby and a bunch of the cast of Baby Wants Candy and Shamilton. Just being on stage freestyling with four or five people at once is my favourite thing in the world, because you get to bounce off each other. You’re on the same page. You set up and complete each other’s rhyme schemes. You join in on the punchline. It feels very much like a cypher, like the spirit of hip hop, what it originally grew out of. So yeah, that sort of stuff is huge privilege when I get to do it.
Who would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?
JK Rowling? I don’t like her. I think she’s bad. That’s as much as I’ll say without wanting people on Mumsnet to pile onto me.
What’s the weirdest interaction you’ve ever had with a famous person?
Jacob Rees Mogg tried to come and see my Fringe show last year. Now, as it happened, we were full, regardless of whether or not I would have wanted an abhorrent, evil man in my show. Maybe that’s not disguising my opinions particularly well, but regardless of anything, we were full. He was filming a documentary, so we politely told him no, but he still turned up trying to get in. So that was the weirdest interaction – the staff of my venue, telling his production team a very polite and firm no, and then them still turning up and trying to talk their way in, which was a pretty alarming sense of entitlement from them. But what else would you expect? Jacob Rees-Mogg and entitled to sort of go hand in hand. Oh, he doesn’t take no for an answer. Who’d have thought?
I wonder if that was because he was a fan of you personally, or if they were trying to make him seem like he likes culture or something for the TV show ?
I don’t know. I do know I was dressed like him on the poster; that show was called MC Hammersmith: The MC Stands For Middle Class, and people say I look like him anyway. I was dressed head to toe in tweed and a double breasted jacket and everything, so I feel like that was probably something the production team had noticed. I’d be surprised if he knows who I am, personally, but I’ve no interest in him coming back if he’s reading this.
What was the last show that you went to?
The last show I went to was at the end of The Fringe. It was called Ten Thousand Hours. It was a circus show and it was probably the best thing I’ve ever seen at The Fringe. It’s a bunch of acrobatic circus performers, and you can see the process of them putting 10,000 hours of work into their skill. So it’s quite an emotive theme to it, and it ends with three of them on each other’s shoulders, falling and tumbling, being caught by the others, and then mounting each other in all sorts of mad shapes and acrobatics. I didn’t stop gasping for an hour, it was just staggering what they were doing, just masterful. The best thing I’ve ever seen at The Fringe, I reckon, certainly up there, and so much cooler than comedy. The entire time I was watching, I went, why do I do comedy? I’m so lame, and if you can watch this at The Fringe, why would anyone come to my show? Huge shout out to the Ten Thousand Hours team.
What work of yours didn’t get the attention that it deserved?
I did a 62 second rap on TikTok a couple of years ago, and it was called 24 Bars, One Rhyme Scheme, and it was 24 lines with the same polysyllabic rhyme, and TikTok banned me for putting it up because their AI algorithm recognised it as unoriginal content, which was weird, because I had the beat made for me exclusively and I uploaded it myself, and the videos are me… So sometimes the algorithm can get it wrong, and unfortunately, that one didn’t pop on TikTok at all, not that I am big-headed enough to suggest it would have gone viral, but I was so proud of it and desperately wanted it to be seen by as many people as possible. Tiktok throttled its viewership, and I was quite devastated that that one never got the chance to spread its wings because it took so f*cking long to write, and I was really proud of the writing. So I might repurpose those lyrics at another point. But yeah, I’m happy for it to be a sleeper hit that has a cult following of, I don’t know, 1000 views. That’ll do.
What did 12-year-old you imagine that you’d be doing now?
Honestly, this is quite lame, but 12-year-old me imagined I’d be doing improv. I found improv at about that age, I think it was 12 or 13, and I knew from the first class that this is all I want to do. I’m not quite sure 12-year-old me would have imagined how much driving and travel is involved with doing comedy on the road, and especially with improv, how often it’s five of you crammed into a Vauxhall Corsa traveling up and down the M6 – there’s an awful lot of that, you know, collapsing in a heap in a service station sandwich at 1 AM – I don’t think 12-year-old me would have imagined that aspect of it. Equally, 12-year-old me never would have thought I’d be a rapper, and rhyming would be such a huge part of what I do. So yeah, much the same, but maybe a different side of the same coin.
How did you find improv at such a young age?
I was at high school and had a drama teacher who was really into improv. I think he’d read about it in a book or done some when he was younger, and so started an improv club when I was about that age, and I was quite an anxious child. I mean, I’m still quite an anxious adult, but I immediately found improv to be the art form of being okay with not knowing what’s going on. And I think if you’re anxious, or if you’ve got OCD, which I do, it’s such a meditative, freeing art form, and it’s such a cool headspace to be in. Also, you meet such cool people, and the culture of improv is so inherently positive and supportive that the improv community are the nicest people, which is why during the Edinburgh Fringe, I don’t hang out with stand up comedians. I hang out with improvisers because they’re nice and not competitive, whereas, as someone who is also in that world and on that circuit, stand up is so insular and can be very toxic. Improv is the nicest art form, in my opinion.
What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?
Someone said, if I wanted to do comedy, specifically improv, I should go to drama school, which, as a man with a famously narrow acting rage, that has never held me back in improv – where you know you’re allowed to show that you’re working a bit more and be a bit less naturalistic. I think there are already enough middle class, straight, white, privately-educated men in comedy without adding drama school graduate to that mix of privilege. So, yeah, I think if you want to be an actor, you should go to drama school. I think if you want to do comedy, you should fail at comedy thousands of times until you learn from it. I think that’s probably the best advice: drama school is not what I needed.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I worked at The George Hotel in Edinburgh, or as I call it, The George Hotel For Bastards. I was a food and beverage assistant during university, and my job was to basically do silver service and also hold a tray of champagne for hours on end. And my manager once told me off for leaning against the wall, and that’s when I thought, f*ck this, this is awful. So I have such immense respect for anyone who works in hospitality. It gave me such an eye opening insight into how brutal the practices can be in hospitality. So, tip your serving staff and bring your glasses back to the bar. That’s what I say.
If you had to have a song playing every time you walked into a room, what would it be?
I’m gonna say ‘Gz and Hustlas’ by Snoop Dogg, from his debut album Doggystyle. It’s probably one of my favourite rap tracks of all time. I think he has so much swagger, there is so much lyricism, so much ridiculous braggadociousness in it. The production is so funky, it’s such a cool song. It makes you forget that Snoop Dogg was once accused of killing a man and sometimes it’s good to just remind yourself, well, the artist is bad but the song can be good, so that’s fine.
I don’t think I even knew that to be honest.
Snoop Dogg is always such a punchline. Like there’s an article that went viral a couple of years ago, and the headline was, “Snoop Dogg has been streaming on Twitch for the past two days with his microphone muted, and he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care”. So there’s that Snoop Dogg, and there’s also the Snoop Dogg who has done some very bad things in his life. So while I can’t defend those, what I will say is the song ‘Gz and Hustlas’, from his debut album, Doggystyle, absolutely slaps. So it has that going for it, if nothing else.
What’s the skill that no one else knows that you’re great at?
I’m very good at Bananagrams, very good at Bananagrams. I don’t want to brag but, I love Bananagrams, just rearranging letters as quickly as possible to make my own scrabble grid. I’m f*cking sick at that. I’m not very good at many other things but, but when we were on tour with Shamilton and a good improviser friend of mine, Chris Grace, brought Bananagrams with him, and every time there was a lull in conversation between us backstage, he would just slap Bananagrams on the table, and it was like catnip to me. I went, right, we’re doing it, boys. I think when you imagine comedy and touring, you imagine it’s going to be rock and roll, you know, getting drunk till 5am, snorting coke off a bin, and instead you’re playing Banangrams with a with a Diet Pepsi, which is more my speed anyway.
What’s your controversial food opinion?
I eat cereal with what I’m told is too much milk. Anytime anyone has ever seen me eating a bowl of Cornflakes, they go, “How much milk do you put in those, that’s insane, it’s like soup?!” But I don’t want it to be crunchy and hurt my mouth. That’s controversial. Take that milk.
Do you have any superstitions?
No, I think superstitions are just horoscopes for cowards. I’m not superstitious. I’m very rational, logical. It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever met me. Thirteen is just a number. The month you were born doesn’t affect anything. Ghosts aren’t real, grow up. That’s what I think.
Hippity Hoppity, Get Off My Property is touring the UK in spring 2026 – find tickets to MC Hammersmith here
