Currently on tour in NYC with The Gorillaz and appearing on Cipha Sounds' Sirius show on Thurs if any of you US readers can catch (shout out to Ciph's for putting him on!), Dynamo and myself made the front pages on the Guardian Guide last weekend. He truly deserves it and I hope the guy has all the success in the world. Seriously.
Here's my story, as appeared in the paper last saturday.
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ACE IN THE PACK
He looks like he’s stumbled straight from a Dickens novel into the modern world, yet Hattie Collins discovers 21-one-year-old Bradford magician Dynamo is in fact ushering in a brand new style of street sorcery.
Three young men in a battered BMW screech to a halt. The crew, carrying expensive camera equipment look around warily; this is a deserted backstreet in East London after all. “Oh. My. God,” squeals an excited voice as the driver window slides down slowly. “I seen you on Richard and Judy the other day, innit?”
The cameramen breathe a sigh of relief as the actual object of the teenage trio’s attention – a slight, pale, young boy – tips his customised cap toward them. “Alright lads,” he nods in his thick Bradford brogue. “Wanna see some magic?”
It’s a scenario that has played repeatedly throughout the last 14 years of Stephen Frayne’s life. Picked on at school because of his oh-so-slight stature, Frayne created alter-ego Dynamo, whose unique brand of street-styled sorcery has gotten him out of a number of sticky situations. “I ‘ent the biggest guy, so magic’s saved me life at times,” Dynamo muses after the wowed BMW three have skidded off again. “It’s pretty cool what a card trick can do when someone’s trying to jack you.”
Standing at 5‘6” in his socks and weighing in around 8 stone soaking wet, he doesn’t cut a particularly dynamic figure. Yet Dynamo is one of the most charismatic, creative illusionists you’ll meet; just ask Richard Madeley. “This kid is gonna be a massive star,” he pronounced when Dynamo performed live on the show in March. Madeley isn’t his only fan; Dynamo’s disparate list of dedicated followers includes everyone from Grime Godfather Wiley to Ian Brown, Pharrell Williams, Paris Hilton, Will’s Smith and Young, and Avid Merrion. Even Dynamo’s predecessor, David Blaine admits he considers the young magic-maker serious competition. “To be honest I’m as happy performing for a group of kids in a youth club as I am the likes of Jay Z,” he shrugs of his success so far. “I’m just me and I think I’m quite real. There’s loads of rappers out there, but there’s only one 50 Cent, you know?”
From card tricks on the pavement to blagging his way backstage at concerts, Dynamo’s trademark trickery sees him bodypop while slamming the ace of hearts through the windows of moving tube trains, biting coins in half and levitating pencils through thin air. “Fuck me. That’s the greatest magic I’ve ever seen,” gasps Chris Martin on Dynamo’s self-made and self-financed DVD, Underground Magic: Volume 1, which also features the shocked expressions of everyone from Snoop to Mike Skinner. Boasting a brilliant blend of close-up magic, the DVD chronicles Dynamo’s skill at winning over everyone from initially hostile kids in Birmingham to the likes of Lil Jon. “I call myself an entertainer. I don’t perform magic,” Dynamo says of his act. “What you see and how your mind perceives it is the magic. Without the spectator there is no magic, it doesn’t exist.”
So far his jaw-dropping trickery has taken him everywhere from the streets of the Ukraine to the corridors of Clarence House. “I’ve peed in the same toilet as the Queen,” he points out proudly. “P Diddy ain’t got nothing on Prince Charles when it comes to putting on a party; Charles throws the best parties.” So impressed were Channel 4 after seeing Underground Magic, they commissioned a documentary. Titled Dynamo’s Estate Of Mind, the one-hour one-off sees the magic man doing his routines round the London circuit as well as returning to his old roots in Delph Hill, Bradford.
It was here that Frayne was born 21 years ago. A 20 minute bus ride from Bradford Town Centre, the estate is a bleak, low-rise clustering of council properties set high on a hill. Crime-ridden, poor and riddled with drug problems, it nonetheless made him the magician he is today. “For a lot of the people who put me down, this is a Fuck You; the best form of revenge is success,” he reflects back home in Bradford, a few weeks before the BMW incident. “I nearly died two years ago when I got an abscess on my bowel so now I just focus on my main goal.”
Diagnosed with severe Crohn’s Disease as a child, he was always the smallest kid in the class and therefore an easy bullseye for bullies. “Imagine you’ve got a big, deep cut on your arm or your leg. Every time you eat, it’s like rubbing dirt onto it. That’s Crohn’s,” Dynamo explains. “There’s no cure and no matter what, it gets worse everyday.” As well as following a diet that excludes everything from most vegetables to sesame seeds, Crohn’s also causes other complications including anaemia and brittle bones. “My body aches all the time and I have problems sleeping cos of my scar,” he says, pulling up his Evisu sweater to reveal a chunky six-inch serration across his chest, the result of the aforementioned life-threatening operation two summers ago. “Going to the toilet, often it’s bloody,” he says, less moaning, more matter-of-fact.
Home-life too was complicated for young Frayne. His mum, a hairdresser, had him when she was just 16, while his dad continues to be a frequenter of Her Majesty’s Pleasure for crimes Dynamo is cautious to reveal. “Not cos I’d get in trouble, but you might,” he says mysteriously. Frustrated by his mum’s “prickish” boyfriends, Frayne left home at 15 to live with his great-grandparents. It was his Gramps who introduced the then-seven year old to magic by teaching him a trick involving two matchboxes. “He wasn’t a magician really, he just used to do tricks so he could win a beer,” he remembers. “Blagging runs through the family, I guess.” Dynamo was instantly hooked and slowly Stephen morphed into another being. “Dynamo is the inside of Stephen Franye getting out. Does that make sense?” he wonders, more to himself. “I have all these visions and thoughts, and Dynamo is how I express them, how I get them out of my system. Dynamo is what’s inside me.”
Realising the streets of Bradford could take both Stephen and Dynamo only so far, Frayne did what few from Delph Hill ever do; he got on a train and headed to London. His great-nan, Nelly Walsh points out she worried about him being down south alone, but understood his need to succeed. “I didn’t like him going there, but it’s what he always wanted to do, so I told him to follow his dreams,” says Mrs Walsh, who lives with Gramps on the nearby Wyke Estate. “We think such a lot of him, you know. I don’t really tell him, but I love him to bits. We’re so proud of him. I really pray he’ll get to the top.”
Once in London, he quickly impressed the local rap and grime scene by hanging out at hip hop haunts like Deal Real. Nowadays he’s as much a part of the music scene as he is the Magic Circle. “At first they thought I was destroying their idea of magic, that it wasn’t supposed to be done on the street by a guy in a hat and a hoodie,” he says of the covert Circle.” They like it now because they can see I’m inspiring other kids to get into it, ultimately that helps the art-form keep going.”
Back in East London, the Channel 4 crew wrap up. For Dynamo though the day is just beginning; there’s this interview, a shoot for RWD magazine and a Streets secret gig to attend. There’s also an MTV special, a technology conference in Monterey alongside Al Gore and his second DVD all to prepare for. Does he ever stop? “No. Because I feel good now. I don’t feel like an outsider anymore.” So it’s the fame and fortune then, all this magic malarkey? Oh no, he insists, suddenly serious. “I don’t give a fuck about money.” It is, in fact, a desire to prove to his mum that she did a good job that keeps him up at late-night events and jetting round the world at all hours, despite often being in crippling pain with his Crohn’s. “I feel that she feels she wishes she could have done more for me as a kid,” he says slowly. “Even though I know she couldn’t, cos she was so young. I love her to pieces but I want to make her proud, so that she knows she did a good job. The only reason I’m doing this is for her and me family. And,” he adds with a grin, “I do love watching people’s reactions when I pull off a new trick – I’ll never get bored of that. Never.”
Underground Magic is available from www.dynamoworld.com Dynamo’s Estate Of Mind airs on Channel 4 in May
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