Do Watch That: Celebrating Fifteen Years of Tim and Barry

Fifteen years is a long time. Fifteen years ago we had about three channels on the telly, everything shut at 4pm and we lived off spam or something. Fifteen years ago I was marvelling at the fact I got to write '2000' when I dated the pages in my maths exercise book. Fifteen years ago, two young men in London were tentatively forming a working relationship that'd change the face of underground British music culture forever.

Like Cannon and Ball or Cheech and Chong, Tim and Barry don't need full names for full recognition. Since the turn of the millennium, the duo have quietly embedded themselves deep within the music industry, gaining — and giving — access to some of the most original, exciting, explosive talent the country's ever given birth to. Out of their Ridley Road studio, they have created a multimedia empire. On the eve of their 15th birthday — which they're celebrating with a massive 12hr bash at the Ace Hotel — I had a quick catch up with Tim. Barry was somewhere in the background, occasionally chiming in with dates.

Known to most of us as the blokes behind Don't Watch That — a website-cum-media-hub that's more vibrant, exciting, and enthusiastic than pretty much anything else that lurks on the wasteland of dead content that is the internet in 2015 — Tim and Barry started working together in unusual circumstances. The pair were living together and studying at what's now the London College of Communication (LCC) and a photographer, who Tim was working with, knew another photographer, who needed a table designing and building. Barry helped out and the boys decided to work together from there on in.

Together they went on to document the nascent Grime scene in all it's grubby glory. Alongside the pirate radio clashes, and the white labels, and Prancehall's VICE columns, Tim and Barry's photos are monuments to a moment in time that's seemingly more important now than it was then. Grime's surge in popularity and acceptance could, arguably, if we wanted to be a tiny bit reductive, be implicitly down to two white dudes in glasses: the MOBO winning video for Skepta's world-conquering "That's Not Me" was shot by Tim and Barry for £80. But how did two white dudes in glasses become such a pivotal part of the most exciting thing to happen to British music since Rampling and the boys got spangled in Ibiza back in 1987?

"I had a weekly residency at a club in Shoreditch, at the Electricity Showrooms," Tim tells me. "Me and a few other people used to play R&B, hip hop, bashment, garage. Garage was becoming grime but we called it garage back then." Week in week out, Tim noticed a regular attendee who'd always peer over the decks and try and scope out what was playing. "One night he gave me a mixtape. I didn't listen to it for a week or a two then I did and it was amazing. That was Twin B who now does the breakfast show on 1xtra."

After that, the likes of Jammer and D Double E ended up rolling through to the club and, eventually, having their photos taken by Tim and Barry. We were really excited by the scene. So we documented it. We were always waiting for commissions. We pitched Dizzee to a magazine," Tim explains, "and we were like early 20s yourself at the time and they thought we were trying to get our mates into magazines. So they turned it down on that basis. A couple of years later the same magazine asked if we could get hold of him. We were like, well, no."

That was a turning point for the pair. "We decided that to start self-commissioning. Which has been really important in our career. We decided to start going out a lot and photographing whoever we wanted to photograph."

In 2006, that sense of creative independence merged with a platform that handed the creation of content over to the user: YouTube. YouTube is now so embedded in our lives, so oddly central to our experience of culture and life at large, that it seems odd to think of it as it once was — an oddity. "Grime kids have always been really forward with technology and they got onto YouTube real quick. They started uploading all the DVDs, all the clashes, as individual parts onto YouTube. Me and Barry thought it was really exciting," Tim says.

Shooting on low cost digital equipment ("Film costs money but digital is free when you've got the camera.") the pair started capturing and uploading freestyles. From minute long rooftop blasts by Skepta to JME and Tempa T's absolutely classic snow day routine, Tim and Barry constantly put out some of YouTube's most consistently entertaining output. "We were one of the first people to make creative content for YouTube. That's what we were doing and everyone thought we were crazy for doing it. We'd put up a video that'd do 50/60,000 views overnight," Tim says. "We did that for a whlile, then sb.tv and Grime Daily started doing it. We felt like we'd done a lot of the freestyles that we wanted we wanted to. We didn't want to race through things. We didn't want to just put things out. All those guys had it covered. It wasn't our aspiration. That's when we started doing things like Just Jam and Beat This."

Just Jam, for the uninitiated, is a regular event that the lads put on in their blue-screened studio space in east London. Each week a few DJs roll through and play sets which are live streamed online. The artists — which range from everyone from RL Grime to Ikonika, Teki Latex to Ratking, Newham Generals to DJ Spinn — are usually picked by Tim, Barry, and Akin Davies (AKA Crackstevens). "All of us, we go out a lot, and because of that we're mates with quite a lot of promoters. That's the way it is. So we'll get a call from whoever it is, last time it was Scratcha DVA, asking to do something and it's like, yeah!"

What separates Just Jam from the likes of Boiler Room is that visually, it's more experimental than just focusing on a DJ playing records to a static crowd. The visual mixing is done live on the fly and gives the whole thing a freewheeling feel. The idea was floated back in 2008. "It was originally gonna be called Jam. The original idea was that it'd be a one off thing that we did as a stream from a warehouse building over a weekend. We pitched it to loads of people. We had brand interest. Midway through the discussion the credit crunch happened and they didn't want to spend their marketing budget like they were planning so it got canned," says Tim. "That was gonna be a big project. We were gonna have a blue screen area we did performances from. So basically we couldn't do the one off big thing so we brought it back as Just Jam in 2010."

After one cancelled event at the Barbican, late last year saw the boys bring Just Jam to life at the same venue. That night was an unmitigated success and saw the likes of D Double E, Omar Souleyman, Big Narstie, Traxman and Uniiqu3 tear up the place. Coming straight off the back of their well received footwork documentary, I'm Tryna Tell You, it felt triumphant. Two blokes who'd trodden their own path, remaining resolutely independent and self-defined, had infiltrated one of the country's most revered art spaces and made it theirs.

This weekend's party is a celebration of their self-created state of independence. "Basically, for our 10th birthday, we kind of realized it was about September/October 2010 and we'd missed it. We were so busy at the time," Tim says. "Earlier this year we were like we should do something. We started organizing last Sunday. So it's taken a week."

In that week they've managed to assemble a who's who of forward thinking club-focused UK sounds. There'll be sets from Future Brown's J-Cush, and Akito, Amy Becker and Neana, Rushmore and Motive, Marcus Nasty and Loefah, and a tonne more.

"I guess it's the biggest party we've thrown. It's a chance to celebrate the music of the last 15 years."

Head here for more information on Sunday's party.

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