Twelve50 TV: The Grafter’s Archive Scotland Should Already Be Proud Of

‍“Seventeen point seven million views. Thirty-nine thousand subscribers. Nearly three hundred videos. All built from nothing.”

Seventeen point seven million views. Thirty-nine thousand subscribers. Nearly three hundred videos. Those aren’t vanity metrics for a PowerPoint deck or a grant application — they’re the real scoreboard. Almost a decade’s worth of cold nights, pissing rain, batteries coughing out their last breath, last-minute cancellations, train delays, and a tripod digging into your shoulder on the bus. The numbers tell a story of stubbornness. Graft. Refusal to quit.

Since January 2016, Twelve50 TV has been doing what no one else in Scotland had the patience or the balls to do — filming, editing, and archiving a living record of the country’s rap, grime, and drill scene without asking permission from anyone. No festival sponsorships. No polite nods from the “cultural sector.” Just the work, one upload at a time, until the platform was too big for even the snobs to pretend it didn’t exist.

At the heart of it is Kip Cozy. Cameraman, editor, scheduler, taxi driver, peacekeeper, the guy who can work out exactly how much usable light is left before a winter afternoon dies. You see a three-minute clip; he sees a week of DMs to lock in a date, scoping out locations that don’t have traffic drowning the bars, filming in freezing car parks while security patrols, and then an editing grind that runs past midnight until it’s tight enough to sit next to anything a major label puts out. There’s no assistant, no intern, no “content producer” on a grant-funded contract. Just Kip.

And the world he’s pointing his camera at? It’s a scene that, until recently, the wider UK barely acknowledged. In London, the giants of the online rap space — GRM Daily, Link Up TV, SBTV before Jamal Edwards passed — have been shaping the sound for years. Manchester and Birmingham have their own outlets, with styles and slang to match. Scotland? For the longest time, it was ignored or treated as a novelty. The wider UK industry still acts like anything north of the border is an exotic little offshoot.

Twelve50 is part of the shift that’s blowing that idea apart. The beats might have London DNA or transatlantic flavour, but the voices are rooted in actual Scottish streets, schemes, and small towns. Gilmerton sounds like Gilmerton. Aberdeen sounds like Aberdeen. There’s no need to fake accents or adopt someone else’s slang — this scene speaks its own language. And like its southern cousins, it lives close to the bone. These aren’t songs reverse-engineered for BBC daytime radio. They come from the same messy overlap between art, survival, and reputation that’s fuelled every great youth music scene since the first garage band plugged in. Sometimes it brushes against the law. Sometimes it lives there outright. That’s the point.

Which brings us to one of the channel’s most distinctive voices — and someone Twelve50 has been documenting since his earliest days — Poczy. Kip’s younger brother, sure, but there’s no family free pass here. He earns his space on the channel track by track. Gilmerton Boy is a straight-up statement of identity — planting his flag in his postcode, sketching the streets and the characters that shaped him with the detail of someone who’s lived every bar. It’s not just road talk; there’s a pride there, a sense of defending a place and a set of people that don’t get written about unless it’s a crime report.

Then there’s THE DIFFERENCE, a track that’s part self-portrait, part manifesto. It’s sharper, more reflective — calling out fakes, pointing to the graft, explaining why his perspective is different without begging for anyone’s approval. His delivery balances swagger and precision; it’s not about spraying 100 bars a minute, it’s about making every line land. There’s an eye for everyday detail — the sort of tiny observations that give a track weight — but it’s always framed inside the bigger picture of ambition and resilience. He’s not trying to be the Scottish version of someone from London. He’s building a voice that works because it’s his.

That’s part of Twelve50’s strength: it doesn’t just showcase the scene, it lets artists grow in public. Scroll back and you can see how Poczy’s style has sharpened over time, how the confidence’s built without losing the grit. The same’s true for other regulars — KA2 with drill flows that could cut glass, DM’s late-night melodic storytelling, UB bottling the manic, unpredictable energy of youth in The Young Team, Oddacity’s technical masterclass in DOUBLE TAKE. These aren’t one-offs. Kip’s camera catches careers in motion.

And then there’s the wider cast — Ransom FA, Metagold, Haas, DAZZA JFT — the features and guest freestyles that connect postcodes and pull the scene together. That’s the quiet work no one sees: getting two MCs in the same frame who might not have crossed paths otherwise, creating moments that feed the scene beyond the view count.

Call it “just a YouTube channel” if you want, but that’s like calling pirate radio “just people playing records.” Twelve50 is a production house, a cultural archive, a network, a one-man operation connecting Aberdeen to Glasgow to Edinburgh and beyond. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of those photocopied punk zines — built with no budget, no safety net, and no permission — except the ink is pixels and the staples are upload notifications.

Which brings me to the part where my blood pressure starts climbing. It’s right that Twelve50 doesn’t have to twist itself into the awkward shapes Creative Scotland loves. That independence is its power. But it’s wrong — insultingly, laughably wrong — that in a country this small and supposedly this proud of its “culture,” we still don’t fund working-class artists unless their work’s been sanded down for polite society. If Kip was filming an interpretive dance about “the semiotics of porridge” in a gallery, they’d be lining up to hand him a cheque. But record real, unfiltered Scottish youth culture? Suddenly it’s all “risk assessment” and “audience suitability.” What they call “criteria” is just classism with a funding form attached. The people making these calls aren’t watching these videos, they don’t know the names, and they definitely aren’t hanging out where the music comes from.

The best part? Kip doesn’t need them. Seventeen million views. Dozens of breakout moments. A decade of footage. All of it built without permission, without trustees, without a single penny of public money. No one’s telling him to “broaden audience reach” or “diversify his funding portfolio.” He films. He edits. He uploads. The audience shows up because they know it’s real.

The recognition is already there — from the artists who trust the lens, from the viewers who refresh for the next drop, from the comments full of people who’ve never been given a voice anywhere else. This is culture built the hard way, from the ground up, with no shortcuts and no safety nets.

In ten years, when someone wants to know what Scottish rap and grime sounded like in the 2020s, they won’t find it in a Creative Scotland archive or a tidy BBC documentary. They’ll find it here — in the freestyles under streetlights, the big set-piece videos in freezing car parks, the collabs that only happened because Kip brought two people into the same space with a camera between them.

Maybe by then, the suits will get it. But even if they don’t, the future’s already on film. And it’s not theirs to claim. It belongs to the graft. It belongs to the streets. It belongs to Twelve50.