Roll Deep are back for the first time since they topped the charts twice with the huge singles 'Green Light' and 'Good Time'. We sent Georgi Lavers along to meet Breeze, Brazen, Flow Dan, J2K and new girl Tania, finding that a lot has changed with the London collective and that some things have stayed very much the same.

PopDash: Your new single is called Picture Perfect…where was the video filmed?

All: Marbella!

PopDash: Better than the carpark shoot for ‘Take Control’? (Roll Deep’s single featuring Alesha Dixon)

All: (laughter) Yes. Definitely.

PopDash: Any changes in lineup from your last album?

Tania’s a permanent fixture now.

Tania: they can’t get rid of me.

PopDash: Members of the group have been quite fluid…is there any tension when someone leaves?

Breeze: Nah not really, you might get the odd shit on Twitter, but for the rest of them it’s the same old same old…nothing but love. I haven’t seen Syer (an old member of Roll Deep) for a while though.

J2K: Was he ever really official?

Breeze: For about a week

PopDash: What’s the process for becoming official?

J2K: Knowing Wiley. No seriously though, you just have to earn your place and be involved. Whoever’s here is here.

Flow Dan: Also if you’ve been able to cement a purpose, a specific thing that maybe you do well, that will always be needed. Usually you find is when people aren’t a part of it, what they do has already been done within the group. They might not be needed

Breeze: Surplus to requirements.

J2K: See ya!

PopDash: What’s the best thing about being in a large music collective?

(all) The fun. Banter, banter, banter…

Tania: It’s fun, definitely. The tourbus! Imagine all of us in the tourbus, joking, watching dvd’s…

PopDash: Can you all fit in one?

Tania: yeah!

Breeze: Just about…

Flow Dan: Sometime’s someone’s got to go in the boot

Tania: Me!

PopDash: Any pranks played on there?

All: All the time….

Tania: They put my Uggs in the fridge. I walked out with fluffy fake tits that one of them had put in my hood around this event. That was really nice.

J2K: Manga usually gets it when he falls asleep. He likes to sleep a lot, so he might just wake up with a bunch of books and leaflets on his head. Mouth open as well…dangerous.

PopDash: What do you think about people like Wiley and Dizzee that have gone onto bigger success?

J2K: Of course you’re not going to be envious, that’s a part of what we do. People flex and they don’t flex on their own. The Dizzee and Wiley situation is totally different. Dizzee hasn’t been a part of Roll Deep for years, Wiley is a part of Roll Deep, he just does solo movements, so there’ll never be envious feelings towards him. Or to Dizzee, actually.

PopDash: What’s the secret behind a massive club anthem like Green Light? Is there a formula?

Brazen: You could say there’s a formula. Sometimes you just hear when something’s gonna work and you’ve got to release it.

Breeze: As a musician you know when something sticks out. It’s not a formula as such, we don’t say right we’ve got to do this, that, and the other to get a number one.

Flow Dan: The vibe of it just sounds right. It’s been said with ‘Good Times’ and ‘Green Light’ that we had the big hook. We don’t sit down and try and plan it out, it’s more of a natural process.

PopDash: Describe a typical day in the studio...

J2K: You get in, play a beat, agree on it – or don’t agree on it! – it’s more like a majority vote. If the majority of us are feeling it then we go for it, if the majority aren’t then we don’t. Then its first come first served. You get your bar down, write what you want to, and we all come up with a concept idea for everybody to writes towards. It’s very democratic, there’s so many members that you can’t afford to be selfish. So that’s the process. Get ‘em down and knock ‘em out!

PopDash: What do you think about grime becoming so mainstream?

Flow Dan: I think it’s only right. Or fair. I feel like it’s a good thing because the sound should be shared with the masses. It’s not a good thing when people are like, ‘oh, grimes becoming this way’, or saying that grime has sold out.

J2K: We deal with negative press by keeping it moving. At the end of the day if you wasn’t doing something, then no-one would be talking, so you’re always going to get people talking about us. It’s only elevated us to other places and other worlds, and another life. We ain’t doing nothing bad, so you just crack on with it really.

PopDash: What’s your response to people saying you’ve moved from grime to pop?

Flow Dan: It’s jarring, and boring. The main heading for me is music. We didn’t grow up listening to one type of music. We’re music lovers. So when people say, ‘oh that’s your type of music’ or, ‘oh that’s your vibe’ that’s limiting it. We’ve got a lot of vibes.

Brazen: A lot of people need to wait for the album. If they listen to the album they’ll expect everything to be pop, but on the whole our look of it, spectrum, it’s a lot of what we used to do as well. The last few singles we’ve put out have been dance music, so it’s fair enough for people to say that, but you listen to the album and you don’t know what’s coming next, we’ve got a lot of other stuff.

J2K: It’s like Flow was saying, we’re music lovers and we’ve come from a background of all different types of music. There would never be grime without these external influences. Roll Deep, and people are from that era was the people that made grime. Grime came from a fusion of a lot of music: bashment, hip hop, jungle, drum’n’bass, garage, grime would never have been made if we wasn’t influenced by these things in the first place. No-one can’t chat to man, basically!

Flow Dan: I want to add one more thing, though. When people say Roll Deep turned mainstream, or whatever, our first official album had tracks like Shake a Leg and The Avenue on there. These were daytime radio, good songs, and that was like 2004/5. It’s too late to say we’ve turned pop. You could say we were doing it since the beginning, if you want to say that. When people are speaking about us selling out these days, it just proves that they don’t know us.

PopDash: What do you do in your time off?

All: We play a lot of football, basketball. Bit of the gym.

Breeze: fencing. (laughter)

Flow Dan: I just think that regular, day-to-day stuff is important. We see a lot of each-other -  enough! - because of our careers. So it’s about going home and doing the most normal things, because our lifestyle isn’t normal.

Tania: Kids. Families

Brazen: Go down the shops. (laughter)

PopDash: Tell us about your clothing line, Swaggamuffin

Breeze: Well we’ve got an online store but it’s all a bit mad at the moment, we’re thinking about introducing something else, Swaggamuffin is just directed to the younger generation, not everyone will want to buy it.

We’re getting there. We’ve got a few meetings next year to get it right, not just put it out here there and everywhere. It’s a work in progress. No names yet, not for the new one. With our clothing label, or any merchandise…any success we’re gonna have with it is only if we ourselves are successful with our music.

PopDash: Best gig?

Tania: Mine’s still (everyone chimes in) Wireless! Mostly watching Jay Z. Our gig too, but for me it was just standing at the side of the stage watching Jay Z! Wicked! There were loads of people.

Breeze: I liked Mobos. We got to open it last minute, so that was good.

PopDash: Worst gig?

All: Scotland! There was probably 10 people. But it was our best gig though! Soundwise.

Flow Dan: That’s why for me I feel Glastonbury was the worst show we’ve done because it was such a big moment for us too. The sound was awful, our organisation wasn’t up to scratch. We learnt a lesson, so we’ll be back! We’re gonna kill’em next year.

PopDash: Do you think maybe people think you’re pop because your first single is usually a club tune? Is there pressure for the first single to be mainstream?

Flow Dan: We’ve been in this game a while now, unfortunately the music business only works one way, we wish it wasn’t like that but it is. So we put effort into things that will make them happy, but it would be silly not to do things that we know have to be done.

Tania: Also Roll Deep obviously had your old set of fans. But last year there was a whole new fan base, who only knew Roll Deep as that dance group, and are expecting tunes like ‘Green Light’ and ‘Good Times’, they’re kind of expecting those kind of tines. We play the back catalogue too but…you can’t make everyone happy, can you.

J2K: Throughout the year we release underground, individually and as a group. We do our work, you know. If anyone wants to talk…at the end of the day, if you ain’t being talked about, then you’re doing something wrong.

PopDash: When it comes to videos, who hogs the camera?

All: Target! Make sure that gets in. That question’s done.

PopDash: Is there any period of music which you get nostalgic for?

J2K: Definitely. Nineties rap, I like a lot of that. I like Eighties soul as well. Not necessarily wish I made it, but occasionally I listen to bits and bobs and think, oh yeah, I remember my mum singing to that.

Tania: Nineties dance. I wanted to be making music around when all that was just starting up. Raving!

Brazen: I like the Motown era. Yeah. I wanted to be James Brown.

Flow Dan: It’s mad, but before grime I never wanted to make music. I always used to mess about with MC-ing, but never wanted to actually make music before grime. I feel like grime was made for me. Before that I used to think I was a dancer (everyone laughs).

MC Hammer and things like that. Wiley showed me a beat that he wanted me to MC on, and I was like, I will! And from then on we just moved on.

Breeze: We made grime, so we could make it to fit us, rather than the other way around.

PopDash: Do you all write differently?

Brazen: Occasionally I just get behind the mic and see what happens. If I’m in a rush or can’t be bothered to write, I’ll do it.

Flow Dan: When we’re taking it serious we don’t. I write in Italics. Big font. Bubble writing.

Breeze: Scratchy is all over the place. He uses four corners of the paper and writes in triangles. Like hieroglyphics. The writing styles show themselves more when you hear the product.

PopDash: Funniest video?

J2K: Club 7. We did a real crap one called Club 7. I don’t know man, it was bad times. We was doing everything…cloaks and masks on, down an alley…. V for Vendetta was the theme. Don’t try and Youtube it, you don’t wanna see it. It’s rubbish. But hilarious. It was a mess!

PopDash: Has anyone got any signature dance moves?

All: Breeze. (everyone laughs) He’s got a special thing that he does, I call it the Breeze left to right sway (demonstrates). It’s on specific punchlines that he’s got. That’s what he does.

PopDash: What’s your unappreciated masterpiece?

Brazen: I think the whole last album should’ve done better. But it’s out of our hands now.

J2K: The one song that should’ve done better? Take Control, probably. Just because it came off the back of two number 1’s we had. But the video (shakes head). We would’ve expected that to have done better because of the climate we were in. Not necessarily because it’s the greatest song.

PopDash: After the riots, a lot of London culture had to defend itself on how it influences youth. How much do you think music shapes behaviour?

Brazen: It can influence you. I remember getting influenced by songs and that, getting into things…I don’t know what I’m talking about (laughter). I don’t think any musician influenced anyone to do anything in the riots, let’s put it that way. But it definitely has authority in people’s lives.

Flow Dan: I’d like to say, it depends on the individual. You can put a song on right now and it will affect us all differently. Some of us might go out and dye our hair black and put black nail polish on and change our whole image because of that song, but you might not.

Breeze: We can get deep and say it depends how you were brought up at the end of the day. You can hear something and think it would be wicked to go and do that because it sounds so glamorous, but if you were brought up right then you know that’s not the right thing to do.

Brazen: Music has kept us out of trouble. It affects everyone differently. It could easily be a different situation for any one of us, where we grew up and how we grew up, but we’re better off now.

Flow Dan: There’s certain things on songs that I would love to do but would never try. I definitely have met people who tell me ‘you know I do what you say, right?’ and I’m like ‘you idiot, cos I don’t.’ You waste money like that! I don’t wanna give too much detail, but you get me…

Roll Deep's new single 'Picture Perfect' is released on January 23rd.