Dean: In Search of Lecs Luther’s “Fish & Chips”

Do you recall the name “Lecs Luther”? The ability to answer that question in the affirmative may qualify as “showing your age”. It’s a good 15 years now since Luther materialised out of the blogosphere with a series of raw, jazzy rap tunes; an MP3 apparition who distilled his love of Dublin through the internet’s weirdest filters. Luther would go on to repackage himself as Rejjie Snow, ink deals with major music industry firms, and spend more and more time off the island, rubbing shoulders with rap luminaries like Kendrick Lamar and Future.

Of course, readers with a sharp memory may remember me mentioning Luther on these very pages earlier this year. While writing about the emerging Dublin rapper Curtisy, I compared his scintillating song “Landmine!” to “Dia Dhuit”, Luther’s break-out track, from 2011.

“What a monumentally important moment in Irish rap that was: a blog-era classic from a MF DOOM-worshipping ‘charming little rapper’… with a style that was already so dexterous, so fully formed, and presented in a bare-bones but visually arresting video that reflected how MTV had become old hat and YouTube was the future,” I wrote.

Another thing about that “Dia Dhuit” video: It ends with a preview of the cover of what was to be Luther’s debut EP, Fish & Chips. So clearly inspired by such classic rap albums as The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die and Nas’s Illmatic, the artwork features a picture of Luther as a bright-eyed and mischievous child, photoshopped to be wearing three gold chains and a North Face jacket. “Buy that shit,” the screen caption suggests.

The hype around Fish & Chips was immense. For her blog Harmless Noise, Nay McArdle wrote that Luther “suddenly has everyone appraising the state of Irish hip-hop again … Needless to say, all ears will be on Lecs Luther when the Fish & Chips EP does drop”;  it was “shaping up to be the most important release in Irish hip-hop history”, Hot Press declared.

But the EP never happened. Luther quietly vaporised the project and shuffled on to new ideas. As far as I can tell, no details of Fish & Chips were ever revealed beyond that striking cover. And so it exists in the pantheon of never-to-be-released possible classics, its potential theoretically limitless. How formulated was Fish & Chips in the artist’s own mind? That remains open to speculation. But speaking to him in 2016, I tried to crack open the mystery.

“It was so early, man. I look back and it’s a little cringey,” Luther, by then known as Rejjie Snow, told me. “I think some of them are great because the ideas are cool and it showed potential. [Fish & Chips] never really got released properly. It was just a bunch of random songs I guess people made up.”

For many years, fans of The Beach Boys would try to piece together their own version of Brian Wilson’s abandoned masterpiece Smile! from the available fragments of the album. In the case of Fish & Chips, a similarly wonderful thing happened. I do not know who was the guiding hand, but at some point, at least a decade ago, a version of the project appeared online. Rather than an EP, it’s a 10-track suite of material released under the Lecs Luther moniker. You can listen to it right now on YouTube, as both a single video or playlist of the individual cuts, or on music streaming platform Audiomack.

The audio quality is all over the place, likely the consequence of the guerilla nature of an unsigned kid recording music any way he could, and evidence that these songs were never meant to be presented as a unified set. But who cares? This edit of Fish & Chips is 34 minutes of blog-rap bliss; slick raps and stray ideas over blissful beats and a sense of Tumblr-era teenage cool that will be instantly recognisable to disciples of Odd Future. I’ve listened to it so many times it’s embedded in my consciousness as the definitive version of the release.

Yet the tracklisting is very curious. Apart from the opener “Harlem”, every song appears in alphabetical order. For nine consecutive tracks to be arranged in this way cannot be a coincidence; my theory is that it’s the result of the original compiler simply dragging and dropping MP3s onto a playlist with minimal effort. Whatever the case, the presentation really works! Song to song, Fish & Chips flows harmoniously.

If “Harlem” broke free of the alphabetic quagmire, maybe it was because it felt too natural, too perfect, not to be positioned as the opener. Fish & Chips stirs to life with a sample of the dreamy 1970s cut “Prelude a (60round)” by French fusion jazz band Cortex. Luther immediately sounds at ease over the instrumental; his wordplay is stop-you-in-your-tracks stupifying: “He stood alone with a book and a camera/ Snap, snap, snap, put the ‘V’ in Viagra.”

DOOM fans will recognise this penchant for rapping about oneself in the third person. But Luther further leans on the metal-faced supervillain by weaving in a myriad of left-field pop culture references into his rhymes. “Harlem” alone includes nods to, among other things, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas the Tank Engine, Dr. Seuss, Slumdog Millionaire, the Charleston dance, and “The Thong Song”. And in the middle of all this prismatic weirdness, Luther describes himself as having “green, white and orange in his fucking blood”, while, in a skit-like moment, a thick Dublin accent bumps its way into the mix to ask, “Here, shop keeper, where the hell are your signs gone?” He’d later (unfairly) receive plenty of sneer in his home city for abandoning the local scene, but Fish & Chips has Dublin coursing through its veins.

The vibe of the tape remains dialed back until the lively “Dia Dhuit” (present here under the title “Luther”) is unleashed. “68” could have been recorded in an ancient tomb, with Luther’s voice tuned to a deeper, murkier flow that, as Rejjie Snow, would later become his favored vocal style. The simply titled “Freestyle” rides a smoky jazz sample, with Luther declaring himself “your granny’s favorite rapper”, while revealing the novel way he dealt with childhood foes: “I used to rip their braces out their faces with my shinbone.” Because if, like DOOM, you’re going to declare yourself a villain, you need a villainous command of language.

Later, we get the masterful “Meddling Loops”, a bugged-out, haunting song featuring spots from obscure British rappers Crave Moore and Jesse James. Moore goes to great lengths to insist that he does not smoke weed (“Never smoked cannabis/ Tuna pickle sandwiches” while claiming its “Second hand smoke kinda clogging up my arteries”) but the vibes are of the most blissful smoke session.

Fish & Chips also includes the best beat to come off the mixing desk of Blindboy Boatclub. The “Sally Skag” instrumental loops and swoops with both the drama and weirdness of a Saturday morning cartoon, with Luther, in full freestyle mode, rising to the occasion by adlibbing a pack of entertaining gibberish. There’s more bugged-out, psychedelic silliness with “NeverMore”. And, down the stretch, you get the impossibly cool soul-bop “Trumpets”, in which Luther awakens to survey the post-party wreckage. Complete with a narrative and chorus courtesy of Fergus Alan, it’s the most fully realised song the mostly rhymes-over-beats Fish & Chips has to offer.

Cancelling the EP without announcement was indicative of the persona Luther would seek to construct. He’s been an artist who has enjoyed cultivating a sense of enigma around him; a now-you-see-me elusiveness that’s become increasingly rare in the crush of social media. I’ve spent some time in his presence and witnessed firsthand that the details he has provided about his life don’t always sync up with reality. It’s as though he’s always trying to wrap himself in two cloaks of mystery.

A first official EP eventually came in 2013 with the gorgeous four-song jazz-noir suite Rejovich, introducing the world to Rejjie Snow. If you’re enamored by this era, there is also a set titled Dublin, purported to be an unreleased mixtape but almost certainly another fan-made set. And it’s exceptional, a set of dimly lit Slum Village-nodding jazz rap that bridges the gap between Luther and Snow, starting with “68” and ending with a couple of official Rejjie Snow singles. Some songs in the middle were likely recorded during his Luther era and, thus, might have added even more ripples to any unofficial Fish & Chips, should you be inspired to craft your own version.

Five years slipped by. Label interference almost certainly shackled Snow, but, finally, in 2018, his long-awaited debut album Dear Annie, which I liked very much, was released. Another period of limited output followed. A huge personal highlight for Snow came when he was afforded the opportunity to collaborate with DOOM himself. But, by 2020, the scarce amount of new music had become enough of a puzzle for me to write a piece on the drought.

There’s been a couple of albums since. The pleasant Peace 2 Da World was released in 2024 but barely made an echo. The man who always sought unbrightened corners has almost slipped totally from view. Rejjie Snow may still reemerge with a more hardened resolve and fresh sense of purpose. Or maybe he won’t. But we’ll always have Fish & Chips – or, at least, the fan edition, a cobbled together classic. The will was too strong to let Lecs Luther sink without a trace.