How Busta Rhymes ended up in the seaside town of Morecambe
Morecambe is the last place you’d expect Busta Rhymes to visit, but the venomous rapper has a close connection with the seaside town. The ‘Break Ya Neck’ artist was born in Brooklyn, New York City, but had family in Jamaica, Canada and England, so his mum would send him and his brother to different places to keep him out of trouble.
One of those destinations was Morecambe, a small town in Lancashire. Busta’s auntie lived there, and the rapper spent two summers in the location north of Blackpool. During his time in England in the 1980s, he studied at Skerton Community High School.
“I didn’t live in England. My mother’s other sister Aunt Velma, she lived in Morecambe, England at the time, so we went down there to spend two summers,” he told GQ. “One summer when we went down there, I was 12, my brother was eight, so my aunt made sure that we actually went to school in England. Regular school, and then we went to karate school too.”
Morecambe was also the place he got into breakdancing, earning money at nightclubs when he was underage. “We also were on some breakdancing that was so crazy, we ended up actually getting work to breakdance in clubs as minors,” he said. Our cousins used to run us around and they used to advertise us as TJ and Paul because my government name is Trevor Junior.”
While away from New York, Busta also learned a lot about British culture. His memories of that time include Wham!, notably George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s haircuts, Boy George and comedian Benny Hill.
“At those times, Boy George was cool, Wham! was cool, the shag haircut that’s low up-top and thick in the back, that used to be cool,” he said on BBC Radio 5 Live. “The British guy that used to be the superstar back in our days was Benny Hill. Benny Hill was our favourite back then, to this day, I don’t think anybody is as funny or as charismatic as Benny Hill.”
Busta grew up with Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls, attending George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School together in Brooklyn, but those two were nowhere near as well-travelled as Busta at that point. He smoked for the first time in the UK and also witnessed interracial relationships – something he’d never seen on his side of the pond.
“I learned how to smoke cigarettes here, I learned about interracial relationships here,” he told BBC Radio 1Xtra. “Yeah, I’d never seen a white and a black person go together until I came here… When I was 11-years-old, that’s the first time I saw that in my life… in Lancashire, in Morecambe, in Preston, in Blackpool. Yo, it was a culture shock for me, in an incredible way.”
Fast forward to the present day, Busta is no stranger to the best of British rappers either. He collaborated with Giggs on a song called ‘The Hive’ in 2023, which appeared on his last album Blockbusta.