‘I can’t be perfect,” Skepta says, pulling a black Arc’tyrex beanie down over a furrowed brow with both hands. “But I can be conscious.” The self-proclaimed king of grime has always been a serious person, wary of fools and time-wasters. Focus is important to him, perhaps because he’s often multitasking: balancing his music career, his fashion label Mains, film-making and acting (his debut short, Tribal Mark, came out in 2024), his Big Smoke festival and a house music project, Más Tiempo.

He coordinates them all from the scruffy but functional studio in London’s West End where we meet. At one point, he picks up a Rubik’s Cube from the cluttered coffee table, and, over the course of five minutes of conversation, solves it. “This album has been winding me up,” he admits, referring to The Fork and Knife, which is out next week, 33 months after it was first announced. “But I think I’ve actually made something here that is what the people want from me.”

Now 44, Skepta isn’t just grappling with the rap elder’s struggle of how to stay relevant in middle age, but also the impact his words carry, and his responsibility to say and do the right thing. He seems newly attached to the idea of being a “conscious” rapper, and more mindful than ever of his past missteps. The mums of his children’s friends are going to hear what he’s spitting about on the radio while they’re all doing the school run, he says – there’s no room for loose talk any more.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I’m human. I’ve made ignorant songs, I’ve made ‘turn up’ [ie party] songs, there’s still that side of me. I’m still Joseph from Tottenham. But I’m growing and I’m learning.”

In person, Skepta is wary about not being seen as preachy, a stance bolstered by his experience of talking about politics to his two young children. “They don’t like getting into the isms and schisms,” he says. “That’s some adult shit to them.”

The task for the new album, then, is to “deliver these conscious messages, but still have a vibe”, he says. “I’m like, damn Skep, you’ve used your voice for grime, but what’s happened over time is your voice has become something that people believe in and follow – so what are you gonna use your voice for now?”

He chose his recent single Innocent Smile, featuring a guest spot from Suggs and hectic breakbeats from Chase and Status, to answer that question. “Don’t ask what happened to my innocent smile,” he spits. “Ain’t no love for an immigrant child.” In the first verse alone he references lyrics by Oasis, J Hus and Mobb Deep, criticises MPs’ scapegoating of immigrants, and celebrates his parents’ resilience, and the journey they made “from Nigeria to Meridian” – Meridian Walk, the Tottenham estate he grew up on.

The choice of Suggs for this grandstanding defence of multicultural Britain is no accident. Skepta pulls his collar aside to show me the two-tone neck tattoo he got 14 years ago. “I’ve always loved that movement,” he says. “That was the time when my dad came to the UK, and he was a DJ, so he was always playing ska tunes in the house. I’d see skinheads in my house when I was younger. My dad would come home with his friends from work and start playing his vinyl, and my mum would have her white friends round, Auntie Elaine and Auntie Susannah.”

Skepta sees multiculturalism not as an abstract idea, but as something that’s “second nature to me”. It is, he says, at the root of what he does – ska couldn’t have come from anywhere else but the UK’s unique cultural mix, and nor could grime. “A British outlook is a universal one,” he says. “All our kids are mixes of different cultures. Even my parents: my mum’s Igbo, my dad’s Yoruba, and in Nigeria, they’re not supposed to mix, they’ve had wars together. But they came to England, met each other, fell in love and had me. This whole ignorance towards immigration at the moment is horrible. It’s not British. We know who it is when we open the door to the Uber: it’s just people here trying to work.”

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Skepta’s ongoing reckoning with his personal responsibility is why it has taken him seven years to make his sixth album, and it’s the source of his pride in it, he says. The Fork and Knife, his first full solo record since 2019’s Ignorance Is Bliss, was announced on 1 January 2024, and now it’s complete, it’s not a full-on conscious manifesto but features a fuller sound enhanced by the wisdom of age.

Its 15 tracks range from the smooth Chippie, a zouk-flavoured R&B collaboration with French-Malian star Aya Nakamura, to Belly, a fierce eight minutes of grime packed with guest verses from a younger generation of MCs: north-west Londoner Kibo in particular shines through. The new stars are given the opening verses, and, in a clever nod to their roles as elder statesmen, the closing verses by Boy Better Know members JME, Frisco and Skepta himself balance new lyrics with classic old-school punchlines.

For two decades, Skepta’s rap style has prioritised sounding clear and direct on the mic over sound effects, gimmicks or skippy flows, but the decades’ battle scars have leant his distinctive voice the authority of experience. The rap swagger is still there on The Fork and Knife, but the sheer bravado of his earlier material (his 2007 debut was called Greatest Hits) has been tempered with epiphanies and reflection. Perhaps the clearest window into his state of mind is the poignant Revenge, a memoir of his mid-career missteps, his subsequent redemption and his resilience after 20 years in music. “It was 2008 when I lost my way … I fucked up the greatest run,” he spits, referring to a time when his reputation as king of the grime underground was clouded by a string of ill-advised mainstream dalliances.

Skepta is the rare artist who acknowledges his mistakes head-on: his infamous pornographic music video for 2011 single All Over the House, the playground transphobia of 2009’s Disguise, wearing Gucci and Louis Vuitton in a way that was not him, doing the Rolex Sweep with Timmy Mallet. As a result, these gaffes have become understood as part of his redemption arc – the awards, magazine covers and sold-out shows that have flooded his way since 2016’s Mercury-winning Konnichiwa and its hit singles That’s Not Me and Shutdown.

He apologised again in January 2024, when the artwork for the new album’s first single, Gas Me Up (Diligent), showed a group of men with shaved heads, one of whom had “GAS ME UP” (slang for “hype me up”) tattooed on his skull. There was consternation over its – inadvertent – evocation of the Holocaust; Skepta had intended to draw on the same interest in 1980s British youth culture as the Suggs collaboration. At the time, Skepta vowed “to be more mindful going forward”.

Today, he says the issue left him frustrated. He was trying to celebrate the unity found through youth culture that existed in his childhood, in spite of the racism in wider society; his dad would DJ at east London parties “where Black people and skinheads used to link up”. While he acknowledges the misinterpretation, his message hasn’t changed at all: “We’re still definitely British, definitely multicultural, definitely two-tone. This is an important part of my British story.”

Also in 2024, he apologised for the contract he signed with Puma in 2022. The sports brand has been on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign’s boycott list for their sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA). Challenged by fans on social media, Skepta noted that Puma would soon be severing their ties with the IFA, and said that in hindsight he wished he had stayed independent. “I’ve realised it’s a lot more than reading the small print,” he wrote at the time. “[You’ve] gotta do your due diligence … I am forever a student.”

“I’m from Nigeria, innit,” he replies when I ask about the Puma spat. “I’ve spoken about injustices in Nigeria all my career; we see injustices in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, everywhere. And I’m not at the point where I’m doing it for money – I don’t think I’ve ever done it for money.”

During the album’s long gestation, Skepta has been thinking a lot about rap’s history, as well as his own. “People like Run-DMC, Public Enemy and Tupac made their rap at a point when Black people were looked at as degenerate, and they made it sophisticated, they had messages,” he says. “But over the years, we’ve been paid – and bought – to start talking about twerking and drugs and foolishness.”

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Skepta’s engagement with public criticism is perhaps one reason he has more than once managed to recoup lost credibility, and moved forwards where so many of his peers have fallen by the wayside. The other is his unusual self-belief and persistence. It is 19 years since I first interviewed Skepta. On that occasion I arranged the interview by messaging him on MySpace – a few years into underground stardom, he still didn’t have a manager, a PR or a record label – and spoke to him at 2am after he played a small gig in east London. It was 2007, and after a few years of frantic energy, almost everyone had given up on grime. That night, Skepta told me he had had major label prospects, and a collaboration with Mike Skinner, dangled and then withdrawn again.

The Black British club scene was moving rapidly on to funky house, dubstep was beginning to take the international language of “wub-wub” bass to global dancefloors, and Dizzee Rascal had just met Calvin Harris. The received wisdom went that the arcane style and bright flame of grime was quickly burning out.

Implausibly, pigheadedly, Skepta disagreed. “I believe that we don’t have to change grime to make anyone buy it,” he told me then. “People are running away from grime thinking it’s not working, but they’re sellouts, man. That’s why Boy Better Know is easily going to be the best thing in grime.”

Nineteen years later, this August, he played to vast, raucous crowds on the main stages of the Reading and Leeds festivals. I tell him that the same festival I’d attended as a teenager in the 90s was so guitar-heavy that it would have had at most two rap acts on the bill each year. He smiles. “That’s the journey we’ve been on.”

Even back in 2007, when Skepta was one of the last men standing in a flailing grime scene being shut out by the British music industry and shut down by the Metropolitan police’s notorious risk-assessment Form 696, he told me he wanted to write and perform for as wide an audience as possible. In the mid-2020s, pulling in primetime audiences at Glastonbury, that hasn’t changed.

“I love the way rock bands can write,” he says. “I love the way they can write songs that are almost like nursery rhymes, but they’re so impactful, and they mean so much.” He references the unlikely trio of Jamiroquai, the Bee Gees and Oasis. “My aim every time I go into the studio is to make songs that are as big as Wonderwall. I even think about things that Shakespeare wrote that we still use now. It’s always been my mission to make classics.”

He recalls touring Europe playing clubs in the late 2000s with dubstep DJs Plastician, Mala, Benga and Skream, when something clicked. At a show in Prague, Skepta found that the London slang and references that were getting acclaim back home weren’t “really hitting. It wasn’t making sense.” It was time to write for an audience beyond the world he grew up in. “If you want to be a world rapper, you need to think of words that the world can say with you, and rap in a way that the world can sing with you,” he says. “Maybe I’ll get Liam Gallagher to come in on the next album and play some maracas.”

The fact this is a plausible option is not lost on an MC who grew up in Tottenham. “I’ll never forget the junior that used to sit on the wall in Meridian, swinging his legs,” he says, as if reminding himself as much as anyone else. “I won’t do him dirty.”

Not long ago Skepta moved out of London for a quieter life, and recently took his son back to the estate where he grew up. “Going to Tottenham brings up a lot of trauma,” he says. “If I ever go to Tottenham, it’s generally to process some trauma.” He wanted his son to understand his dad’s humble origins and the distance between their childhoods: what it means to have a garden, a nice house, financial stability, the humble immigrant dream.

What was his son’s response, I ask. “He didn’t give a fuck,” says Skepta immediately, and laughs harder than he has all afternoon. “He’s only four! He’s looking at me like, ‘Dad, can we go and get ice-cream?’” It’s been a long road from there to here, says Skepta. “But I knew it was only a matter of time until people were singing along with me.”

• The Fork and the Knife is released by Big Smoke/Epic on 6 November