“We use the street as a studio”: music video pioneers Tim & Barry on capturing the early years of grime

Before the millennium, before Boy in da Corner (2003) wins the Mercury Prize, before Stormzy gets 150 million views and headlines Glastonbury, east London MC and soon-to-be grime figurehead Jammer was at a rave, looking for someone to take pictures for his mixtape.  

“I was DJing grime,” remembers Tim, one half of underground music video pioneers Tim & Barry, as he tries to unpick their origin story. “Well, it wasn’t even called grime then, just garage and dark garage. This is like ‘98. Jammer came down, he knew DJ Twin B and he was asking if he knew a photographer? And Twin said, ‘Well… Tim’s a photographer.’” 

More than quarter of a century and hundreds of photos and videos later, Tim & Barry arrive at the BFI National Archive this week with a new commissioned film, marking the preservation of 11 of their works as part of our ongoing celebration of online video.

So, who are this secretive duo?  

Tim continues: “We started doing mixtape work, just giving people images, trying to be supportive of the scene as much as the scene was supporting us, because it was giving us something to document.” 

As the Web 2.0 era dawned in the early 2000s, this mixtape work led to producing hundreds of profile pictures for a new music sharing social network called Myspace. Tim says: “We started putting our logos on the pictures. People said to us, ‘It’s kind of like a badge of honour’ – having a Tim & Barry photo meant you’d made it… you were part of the scene.”

By this time, the video culture of British garage and grime existed on the satellite TV station Channel U and through hugely impactful independent grime DVDs such as Risky Roadz and Practice Hours. A uniquely British visual identity was evolving, far from the glitz and glamour in American hip-hop videos.  

According to Barry, the arrival of YouTube changed everything. He tells us, “It was like a massive break of the gatekeepers. With YouTube, we were the editor, we were the producers, we were everything.” Tim continues, “We used to roll with a lot of the DVD guys, but the young people that were listening to grime were very tech-minded, and as soon as the DVD came out, they were uploading them to YouTube. Everyone else has stopped, so someone’s got to do it. We’ll do it.” 

As film archivists looking back at online video across all genres and forms in the 2000s, we see ‘tech-minded young people’ such as those in the grime scene breaking new ground everywhere. In forums focused on flash cartoons, GIFs, vlogs and music and sport subcultures, video makers were competing and experimenting, building the foundations of the modern online moving image universe.  

Within grime, creators like Tim & Barry, SBTV, Link Up TV and GRM Daily would define how this music culture was to be seen in the internet era. It was these creators’ use of online video that sent the wider world of grime far beyond the boroughs of London to become a nationwide and, eventually, global phenomenon. 

Already embedded in the scene as photographers, Tim & Barry took any opportunity to film. In early videos we see Tinchy Stryder freestyling as he gave the duo a lift back from a photo shoot, or Skepta on a rooftop in London while the Roll Deep crew were on a break from another shoot. 

During this emergence on YouTube, they began to sonically expand on the street freestyles of the DVD era by ‘multi-tracking’: recording the main vocal along with the classic studio techniques of double-ups (a second recording of a whole bar) and stabs (a repeat of the second half of the phrase). In this way, Tim says they began to “use the street as a studio”. Visually, they shot multiple angles, editing together video work that sits somewhere between one-take freestyles of the DVDs and the fully produced (but also fully dubbed) music videos being seen on Channel U and MTV. Once Tempa T filmed a video using the full multi-track effect for Dickhead Ting (2007), they were up and running.  

Barry: “We were part of the scene; there were certain people that we were really close with. D-Double, Jammer, Skepta, we were close with Jme, we were close with Tempz, and once Tempz had done it, we had something that we could send other artists. And it’s like… this is it.”  

More than any technical approach, though, it was a spirit of collaboration and humour, marked from the start of many videos by a ripped Looney Tunes fanfare and logo, that truly defined the Tim & Barry style. 

Snowed Under (2009), with Jme and Tempa T, is perhaps the ultimate expression of this spirit and of the directors as collaborators and as instigators of the action, rather than just documenters. Seeing an opportunity as a snowfall hit London, the MCs are out in the street, their studio-grade SM58 microphones in hand, rapping and laughing as they dodge snowballs thrown by Tim, off camera. 

And the street itself provides its own uncontrolled moments. In Tempa T and Rage’s After the Dance (2008), a bunch of kids spot them filming and start singing along to the hook, so they end up in the music video, providing a backing chorus alongside the MCs. 

Barry says: “We embrace the sort of ‘imperfections’. If they’re performing live and some kid drives past on his bike and shouts something, we don’t go, ‘Oh, stop, let’s do that again’… We’re on the street. So that kid’s in the shot. And that’s what happens.” 

In the 20 years since they posted their first videos on YouTube, Tim & Barry have continued to innovate. They pioneered livestreaming events with Just Jam and filmed producers creating beats against the clock with Beat This. In the Just Jam series, they experimented with blue-screen, live video mixing overlays straight to the stream. This technique is yet another throughline, defining their stripped-back MOBO-award-winning video for Skepta’s That’s Not Me (2014) and resurfacing in their Overgrounds series (2026).   

And now Tim & Barry are invading the BFI National Archive. “If someone had told us this 25 years ago,” Barry reflects, “we would have laughed. But it’s amazing. To now be sat alongside incredible directors that we’ve grown up watching. It’s just bonkers. It’s wild.”

Tim & Barry’s work has been preserved as part of the Our Screen Heritage project, with support from the National Lottery. A wider selection of works from the BFI National Archive’s online video collection can be viewed for free on BFI Replay.