On stage, as in real life, Will Naameh tends to wear button up shirts, neatly combed hair, glasses and pressed jeans.
“I tend to gig in Glasgow three times a week – so if you can walk on stage looking like this you have to be funny.”
On stage he is MC Hammersmith blasting unsuspecting audiences with non stop comedy improvised hip hop.
“My show is an hour of improvised free style gangsta rap.
“I get suggestions from the audience and I incorporate them all into rhymes.”
The show features non-stop scattergun wordplay in a variety of styles, including drum and bass and R and B numbers – which allow for a change of pace.
He’s very clear that what he does is not a parody, but an homage.
“I practice free style rapping for thirty minutes every day. I’ll use a random word generator or use a news article.
“And I’ve compiled my own rhyming dictionary which is 20,000 words long.
“I think if you really love hip hop and you really love free style rap and you have an enthusiasm for it that will show.
“Hip hop is the most popular form of music in the world. I think hip hop is a universal language.”
“I think it is a lot more fun to be the subject of the joke. I spend a lot of time rapping about how posh and weedy I am and looking like I work in middle management.
“Because I went to a private school, (St Pauls) that is the kind of thing I grew up with. I don’t try and pretend to be anyone else. I don’t put on an American accent.”
He’s confident that what he does on stage doesn’t denigrate rap music and black culture but celebrates it.
Although comedy clubs are his usual haunt MC Hammersmith has taken part in free style rap battles and held his own.
In his personal life and his view of the world Naameh has come a long way from Hammersmith and St Paul’s. After doing Linguistics at Edinburgh University, he moved to Scotland and runs his comedy career from north of the border.
“St Paul’s is a very Tory school and I’m not that way inclined. Scotland for me is much more fun and much more wholesome.”
He enjoys delighting audiences by appearing to be one thing and then opening his mouth and becoming another.
“It’s the Susan Boyle effect. People see you on stage and they don’t expect you to have the talent you do.
“People come up to me all the time and say: “That was great. I didn’t expect it.”
His favourite style of music has always been classic eighties and nineties hip hop, which is celebrated for its love of language, sense of invention and sense of humour.
“Most hip hop nowadays is more commercial I love the old style Gangsta Rap you would get in the eighties and nineties.
“At the moment there’s even the rise of a genre known as Mumble Rap – because you can’t hear what they are saying – they are literally mumbling the words.”
Naameh first discovered his talent for improvised rap when he was a member of the musical improv group Men With Coconuts.
“I was always keen to do the rap break in the show.”
In person Naameh has a charming, quick thinking slightly hyperactive energy. And he’s going to need all the energy he can find this Fringe.
As well as appearing daily in his own show Straight Outta Brompton, he’s also taking part in the improvised rap musical Shamilton, joining the popular improv group Baby Wants Candy AND doing the occasional stint in the Improvised Harry Potter.
That’s a LOT of shows, a lot of improvising and a whole lot of rap.
“It’s going to be a challenge. I’m aiming to do three shows a day but on some days it might be four.
“I’m up for it. You jump through the hoops.”
MC Hammersmith: Straight Outta Brompton, 12:30 Monkey Barrel, August 2 – 27
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/mc-hammersmith-straight-outta-brompton
