A Night With Meme Rap Geezers The Northern Boys – Stereogum

In a world of desensitization and saturation, it’s genuinely hard to be properly speechless anymore. All it takes, apparently, is a sweary rap single by three retired teachers from the north of England. “Don’t wanna fall in love, I just wanna get fucked,” Norman Pain of the Northern Boys raps to open debut single “Party Time,” a song which went viral on YouTube and TikTok last year and has launched the most unlikely of careers. Ray, alongside Patrick Karneigh Jr (AKA PKJ) and a man simply known as Kev, rap about taking unholy amounts of drugs, shagging, and their aging bodies.

Part of the Sindhu World collective – also home to fellow viral elderly British rappers Pete & Bas – the Northern Boys deal in shock value, both in their existence as a trio of men in their seventies as well as their jaw-droppingly brazen and profane lyrics. “Do you wanna make love to a sad old man?” goes the hook of “Party Time,” distilling their odd but alluring appeal.

Across their four songs so far, they have taught us about consent (“Can I spaff on your booblays? Feel free to say no”) and mental wellness (“I’m not used to these kinds of mental health issues, I just wanna live in a church and find peace upon my brain”), and rode for the trans community (“One time for the ladies / One time for the men / One time for everyone in between, yeah you’ve gotta love them!”), with bars outlandish and hilarious enough to become staple in-jokes of friendship groups. Lyrics go from vulgar (“Wank myself with a single finger, Captain Hook”) to hilarious (“Having a gangbang to Jackson Five”) to weirdly moving and vulnerable (“Do you want a back rub? / Do you wanna die? / Do you wanna catch up? Do you wanna cry?”).

At the dingy EartH venue in Dalston, east London this weekend, the Northern Boys stepped into the real world at the final date of their first big tour of the UK. The show was less a gig and more of a messy University club night. Bachelor parties started mosh pits to Limp Bizkit songs before the show began, and the between-song banter was pantomime-worthy. It’s always a gamble bringing something formed from virality and the internet into an IRL environment, but the whole tour sold out and there appears both fascination and adoration towards these three entirely unselfconscious men from a thousand feral Londoners all less than half their age.

Some people dull enough to turn three old blokes rapping about drugs into a conversation about authenticity have argued that the Northern Boys are simply a marketing exercise, and that their lyrics and raps are written and sung by others. Any idea of the trio not being rap fans was rubbished when PKJ and Norman opened the show with a pair of solo sets, performing truly terrible music very earnestly, and though the miming accusation is largely accurate, it feels deeply unimportant to the overall enjoyment of the band. During Patrick’s set, he spoke with genuine excitement about Snoop Dogg having heard his song, before singing solemnly about his late twin brother Roy Karneigh.