Richard Kylea Cowie Jr. MBE (born 19 January 1979), better known by his stage name Wiley (formerly Wiley Kat), is a British grime MC, rapper, songwriter, DJ and record producer from Bow, London. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential and most successful artists from the UK.
Wiley is considered a key figure in the creation of grime music and often labelled the "Godfather of Grime". In the early 2000s, he independently released a series of highly influential eskibeat instrumentals on white label vinyl, such as the first in the series "Eskimo" and is known as a grime MC both for his solo work and for material released with his crew Roll Deep.
Wiley first tasted success as a member of UK garage crew Pay As U Go, with whom he had a top 40 hit, "Champagne Dance" in 2001. Wiley has continued to make grime music while also releasing mainstream singles, such as the UK Singles Chart top 10 hits "Wearing My Rolex", "Never Be Your Woman", and his UK number-one "Heatwave". Wiley's eleventh album, Godfather (2017), peaked at number nine on the UK Albums Chart, becoming his highest-charting album of his career, and also won an "Outstanding Contribution to Music" award by NME.
Regarded as a pioneer in the British underground music scene with a prolific work rate and a versatile music artist with many crossover hits, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to music Wiley has been stabbed on several occasions. In 2008, a stabbing left him with a visible scar on the left side of his face.
On 24 July 2020, Wiley made a series of posts and videos on social media, widely condemned as anti-semitic.
Early life
Richard Kylea Cowie Jr. was born on 19 January 1979 in Bow, East London. He is of Trinidadian and Antiguan descent. Cowie's father, Richard Cowie Senior was a reggae artist during Cowie's youth in the 1980s and introduced Cowie to early hip-hop such as The Sugarhill Gang. Cowie's interest in music began when his father introduced him to the drums. Cowie moved around London a lot as a child with his father before moving to Chatham, Kent to live with his grandmother when he was ten. Cowie spent a year in Chatham and described it as a bad time, saying "I just wanted to go and live with my dad. I felt abandoned." Cowie eventually moved back to Bow to live with his father when he was eleven years old.
When Cowie was a teenager in the early-1990s, he began to sell crack cocaine and heroin. Cowie was introduced to drug dealing from a DJ friend who was making a lot of money at the time. Cowie stopped dealing drugs when a local drug dealer who was much older than him began to threaten him and his friend. Cowie began producing music after he stopped dealing drugs as an alternative way to make money. Cowie started as a DJ, and eventually began rapping, incorporating garage music and drum and bass into his produced instrumentals which led to the creation of the first ever grime beats such as "Eskimo", produced in Christmas of 1999 or 2000 and officially released in 2002. He broadcast his productions over pirate radio stations such as Rinse FM. Initially Wiley went by the name DJ Wildchild, until a woman from Kool FM began using the name Wildchild herself and surpassed Wiley in popularity. As a result, he changed his name to Wiley Kat, a reference to a Thundercats character, and later simply Wiley.
Though Cowie stopped selling drugs, he was still associated with criminal gangs and with people who took part in criminal activities. This led to Wiley being involved in many situations that were life-threatening. On one occasion Cowie's friend had solicited money from someone following a drug deal though the money never was paid, Cowie argued with the person who owed his friend money and eventually Cowie was ambushed when attending a show. The confrontation led to Cowie being stabbed seven times. Several weeks later, the same people attacked Cowie outside a sports retail store, which led to Cowie almost dying in a hospital in Hammersmith. Cowie has been stabbed more than twenty times in his lifetime and has been in numerous other life-threatening situations including being chased by a man with a samurai sword and being shot at with shotguns.