A supremely unlikely battle champion, the 30-year-old Grist rolled up wearing a teacher's suit that made him appear to be on the verge of giving Year 7 a lecture on To Kill a Mockingbird. At the other end of the spectrum is Mark Grist, an MC who was still working as an English teacher when he first appeared to battle. He stalks the stage snarling intricate cascading narratives, gothic fantasies of murder and revenge as lyrical as the poetry of playwrights. Fan favourite Shotty Horroh, a tall, almost translucently pale Mancunian, looks like a Dickensian villain on day-release from the workhouse. As they rose in popularity, they gradually started unearthing rappers who elevated the delivery of threats and insults into a finely honed artform. Nutters aside, as Don't Flop continued to film battles and put them online, they found themselves tapping into an ancient British hobby taking the piss. I was like 'Why have you bought this guy? I'm trying to do something positive here.!' As it turned out he was actually alright at battling…' I was like, this is not the dude that's battling today? He was just headbutting and shouting at the fence over and over again. 'One of the battlers in one of our Northern events was bought by one of his friends,' Eurgh remembers, 'and he was drunk out of head, headbutting a fence when I met him. Don't Flop gradually started putting on events around the country, although the quality of performers was - ahem - variable. For the first three years, the Don't Flop team ground away, becoming a word of mouth institution where one rapper would come, battle, then bring two more friends the next time. Things have changed since these early days. We had to get someone to hold an umbrella over the cameraman. The second battle was filmed in the pissing rain in the park down the road because we had nowhere else to film. 'The hotel staff came into the basement and really shakily asked us to leave - they were really scared because we were all congregating in this big circle. Started in 2008 by two battle loving MCs, Eurgh and Freddie Crugar, the first recorded Don't Flop battle took place in the basement car park of a Brighton hotel. 'We had a shitty little video camera,' Eurgh remembers, 'We'd put a thing out on a forum saying we're starting a new battle thing come down, and about 30 or 40 people - way more than we thought were gonna - came down.' Predictably the hotel was less than enamoured with a mini horde of kids rocking up to their car park.

Somewhere between the chest beating theatrics of a wrestling match, and a four am trawl through the endlessly inventive invective of 4Chan's notorious /b/ board, everything is permissible in the land of battle rapping, no insult is too taboo, and to say that battle videos come with trigger warnings is like calling Little Boy a Rio Snapper.ĭon't Flop is the premier YouTube channel devoted to the form.

Shotty horroh vs arsonal 2