British party culture and clubland classics shaped the world of Babymorocco and his debut album, ‘Amour’. Read our latest Dork Mixtape cover feature.
Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Iris Luz.
It’s a rainy, freezing cold late-November evening, but inside London’s Kentish Town Forum, things are heating up big time. In an opening slot for party mogul The Dare, the whole Babymorocco show is going down. This involves, on average, one litre of vodka (this evening, it’s Grey Goose), two gossiping girlies welcoming him on stage, at least three strip teases, and a boat load of bangers. It’s intense, divisive, campy, sexy, exactly how Babymorocco likes it.
“I don’t have any clothes left because I always chuck them into the audience,” he says, just to give you a flavour of what we’re witnessing.
A week on from the show, and we’re chatting over Zoom. We have to do this in the afternoon because Rocco’s mornings are taken up by going to the gym; Rome may not have been built in a day but it did only take Morocco a year to achieve his impressive physique. It’s something he’s considering cutting down on this week, what with having too much to do in the run-up to the release of his debut album, ‘Amour’, but only considering.
“If I had my way, I would have dropped the whole thing as a project rather than singles, because I love that now, that that can exist, where you can make the world, and people can go into it themselves. I like bodies of work. There are songs that are really strong on their own, but I think it’s kind of unrelenting, that whole existence together.”
“Appreciate the trash and you’ll feel better about yourself”
Unrelenting is accurate. ‘Amour’ is a sort-of concept album based around the character Babymorocco, a British party boy, going to Paris with two girls, where he meets the French boy Jean Paul, and the bisexual love affair that plays out between them all. It’s a lot to take in at first, especially coupled with the intensity of Rocco’s chosen soundscape, which merges fuzzy French electro with donk-heavy British club music.
Aesthetically, Babymorocco looks a bit like a WWE superstar if they were raised in a regional English comprehensive school, and is about a Dappy hat and a Paul’s Boutique bag away from being a total pastiche of 2010s UK culture. For the uninitiated, it’s easy to see why he’s mistaken for doing ‘all this’ ironically, but trust us, it’s (nearly) all sincere.
“I love the UK. For all its fucking awful shit, I love it. I love the culture of the UK, I do. Even when I see TikToks about British cities, and they’re like, taking the piss, I love it. It actually offers me comfort. The reason why people shit on so much of the UK is because, and not to make it super deep, but we have a massive classism problem here. So there’s this aspiration to shit on all of that stuff. But generally, that is, I think, where the strongest culture is born in terms of music and art. But also, on top of that, I appreciate everything about the country. Do you know what I mean? The luxury is only one facet of something that many people never reach. Appreciate the trash and you’ll feel better about yourself, like for real. I like it. I was born to be trashy.”
Babymorocco was born in – you’ll never guess – Casablanca, Morocco, but moved to the UK as a child and grew up in the Bournemouth suburb Boscombe. He seems to have lived a thousand lives before reaching his ultimate pop star form, having already experienced a bout of viral fame in 2013, when he announced plans to have his virginity taken in front of a live audience as part of an art performance while studying at Central Saint Martins, and again in 2016 when he became Tumblr-famous for his hyper-sexualised webcam photos.
And although he’s always loved performing (and being the centre of attention, obviously), it wasn’t until he discovered PC Music in 2014 that he realised pop stardom was his destiny, finally taking the plunge and doing music seriously as recently as 2022.
“I always wanted to be a pop star. I just didn’t know I could be with the skills that I had. I can’t play an instrument, but I can write. When I was 13, I wrote a musical, with my friend who played piano, so I always knew I could write to melody and stuff like that. When I’d sing to music in my room, I would always imagine like, what if I could do this on stage? I started realising you can kind of do it in any way you want when PC music started becoming a thing. I loved the way that they were utilising whatever they could to make pop music.”
It’s easy to see the collective’s influence on Babymorocco’s own artistry, and he notes that people often compare him to GFOTY, in that they both portray a sort of caricature of their genders and perform very dry lyrics over electro beats. Behind all the novelty and artifice, though, are some very real stories pulled directly from Rocco’s lived experience.
“I think sometimes people think I’m very ironic, but I’m not as ironic as people think,” he explains, “because I actually live this shit. Like the shit I’m talking about, I’m not joking. This is the stuff I get up to.
“I actually am from a very working-class family,” he says of his track ‘Crazy Cheap’, the video for which was made with a budget of £100. “I’m not fibbing about that. My mum stacked shelves in Wilkinson’s; my dad works for a union. There’s no money in that shit. I have this billboard in New York right now, huge billboard, and I can’t even buy myself a pot of fucking pasta. It’s insane how it works. I feel like I’ve given this very pop image, but I’m broke as shit.”
“I always wanted to be a pop star. I just didn’t know I could be with the skills that I had”
While most pop stars use the concept of ‘relatability’ to pen the saddest, wordiest songs possible, Babymorocco taps into a different side of it, offering familiarity for those who blasted Clubland classics out of phone speakers and whose teen years were spent drinking Glen’s vodka and blue VK in overgrown back gardens. The references he pulls from are deliberately low-brow, think peak Basshunter, Cascada and Scooter, Blackout Crew’s ‘Put A Donk On It’, and those pitched-up ‘chipmunk’ remixes done by a YouTube DJ neither of us can remember during our chat but he probably meant DJ Boonie. ‘Amour’ might be about a holiday to Paris, but it sounds like one to Magaluf 15 years ago.
“That’s such a compliment, you don’t understand. Actually, on a real one, I want those kids listening to my shit. I want them everywhere, whether they’re on the internet or not. I would love people to be listening to that crazy one, ‘Red Eye’, that big EDM track, just like turning up to that in their gardens at a barbecue.”
He’s on a mission to bring a new character into the British pop sphere: the common Brit lad. Babymorocco The Character is intentionally the villain, an extension of the kind of person he doesn’t find aspirational. “I think lying and playing characters is a fun way to be a pop star,” he says. “I don’t need everyone to be honest constantly. I don’t seek that. I seek a lot of fantasy. I’m playing the boy that I would have probably fancied at school. Hyper masculine in the way that I present myself, the hard sound, all that stuff. I probably would have been bullied by the boy that I’m playing now, right? So that’s what I mean about playing the villain.”
This character might not have long left, though. The music videos for the ‘Amour’ project have seen Babymorocco get bruised and bloody, even shot and run over in ‘Bikinis and Trackies’, and he contemplates changing his name twice in the half-hour chat we have.
“I would say that I am the king of metrosexuality; maybe that will be my name in the future. I love Robbie Williams. He’s the pinnacle of where I would like to get to in terms of success as well. That’s how crazy I’d like to go for Babymorocco. But I might change my name from Babymorocco to Rocco, because I don’t think Babymorocco is very everlasting.”
Whatever happens, the next phase of Babymorocco is already on the horizon. He promises a new big club EP in 2025, saying putting out music constantly is the plan.
“Just know that it’s gonna be a record that rocks your world, no- a record that Roccos your world.”
Babymorocco’s debut album ‘Amour’ is out now. Follow Dork Mixtape on Spotify here.
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