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Many people might regard ‘Bonkers’ as the place where Dizzee Rascal brought grime into the average person’s life, but the truth is actually almost the opposite. The smash hit was the point where Dizzee actually deserted his grime roots in search of a far more widespread appeal.

Co-written and performed by house legend, Armand Van Helden, here was the boy in the corner’s real move to cross over to mainstream acceptance by melding his more abrasive street style with foursquare beats and a lusher production. The former Dylan Kwabena Mills was, by 2009 already established as a huge star in the UK and ‘Bonkers’ was from his fourth album. ‘Bonkers’ was his second number one single, third top ten single and eleventh top forty hit on the British chart. The winning combination of street styles drawn directly from his days on London’s pirate stations in Hackney was distinctive for its combination of rap (or more accurately ‘toasting’ which was inherited from earlier reggae stations), dub and electronica; often forceful and speaking to a class of kids who’d grown up on estates and in tower blocks. This was ‘grime.’

Yet as Dizzee’s success soared following his first album ‘Boy In Da Corner’ it became obvious that a certain amount of compromise would have to be reached to gain the bigger and more long-lasting rewards. There followed a series of collaborations with other artists from Lily Allen and Florence and the Machine to Calvin Harris. But ‘Bonkers’ is probably the epitome of how street style met popular culture in 21st century music in Britain. Dizzee even publicly stated that before the hit he ‘hated house music’, but in the new century artists not only had to compromise to gain hits but also found that to their audiences genre really didn’t matter