IWe’ve had live jazz bands playing Mario Kart and a full orchestra interpretation of Sonic. But there’s a whole subgenre of video game music artists who would happily describe their sound as even nerdier. “Nerdcore has been around for 25 years. It’s hip-hop about nerdy themes, predominantly video games,” says Nick Box, 41, from Blackpool. Box has been in all sorts of “weird, silly bands”, such as electronic horror punk band Deep pink wastewaterwhere “all I did was dress like a cripple and press play on the backing track.” He now performs solo as Glitchard Cliff And it’s even stranger than you think.
“It’s all set against the backdrop of a ZX Spectrum running an AI clone of 90s TV presenter Noel Edmonds,” he explains. “The show starts with the Spectrum loading screen, then a pixelated Edmonds tells the audience he’s responsible for every celebrity death, political decision and major disaster of the past 40 years. I run around shouting about trashy celebrities and end up having sex with Mr Blobby on stage.”
Box tells me that the nerdcore rap band from Sunderland from the 2000s Type B are his main inspiration, “probably the biggest nerd rap band in the UK right now.”
“In the early 2000s, there was an explosion of video game soundscapes mixed with punk rock, hip-hop and rap,” says Steve Brunton, 39, also known as BType. “The first game that got people excited about its music was Final Fantasy VII, which led to remixes and covers.”
BType has covered Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Mortal Kombat and Cannon Fodder. “Every song is a love letter to the source material,” he adds. The band plays with a hacked Game Boy and a live beatboxer. “I would describe our sound as the Beastie Boys working for Nintendo,” he says. The shows attract a potpourri of fans, from “metalheads to nerds and geeks that you can recognize by their T-shirts. When we started, it was a huge untapped pool. Now, a lot of people identify themselves as fans because everyone plays video games.”
“You should talk to Mega Ran“He’s a former English teacher from the US who started out rapping about Final Fantasy VII and Mega Man, and is about to open for Wheatus on their UK tour. He’s an absolute sweetheart.”
“The second golden age of hip-hop was in the early ’90s, when Snoop Dogg, Nas and Wu-Tang Clan released their most influential records,” explains Philadelphia native Raheem Jarbo, 45, also known as Mega Ran, over Zoom from LAX airport while waiting for his delayed flight to London. “A few of us were like, ‘Let’s write a song. ’ But we weren’t popular kids. So we just wrote about our lives playing video games.”
Mega Ran released his first album in 2006. He stopped teaching in 2011 when Capcom offered him a job writing music for Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. “The songs are still nerdy, but the line is blurring. You can put on Kanye West and hear a video game reference. Before, I thought no one would recognize my Marvel Comics references. Now, Marvel is one of the biggest franchises in the world.”
Mega Ran supported Wheatus on their UK tour in June and took to the stage with the band to rap during Teenage Dirtbag. “There are references to Nintendo Power, AOL, Yahoo, all the stuff we did as kids in the early 2000s,” he says.
“Have you heard of Mr B (The Gentleman Rhymer) and Professor Elemental?” he asks. “They’re great British nerdcore artists who have compliment battles where, instead of disrespecting each other, they compliment each other: ‘You look great, your haberdashery is the best’. You should talk to them. They’re lovely.”
“I’ll be particularly pleased to get some positive press,” says the 49-year-old from Brighton. Pablo Alborough Also known as Professor Elementary. “Ten years ago, Michael Gove mentioned “He liked my music and ended up in the Guardian. I had to get in touch with him and tell him that if he came to my show I would make the audience beat him with sticks.”
Alborough describes his character, Professor Elemental, as “an eccentric, mad, optimistic but wildly incompetent British explorer and inventor.” He has been performing for more than a decade, including at Glastonbury this year, where you would have seen him in a rainbow suit and pith helmet, with chimpanzees and lions as background dancers.
Like Mega Ran, Professor Elemental has written music for Sega and Nintendo. If you want him to write you a personal song, it’ll cost you £500 each.
And what do you think of your nerdcore contemporaries? “Sometimes I hear about someone rapping to Mr. Blobby and I think, ‘I can’t stand all this newfangled rap, it’s not real hip-hop. ’ Then I remember what I do…”
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Mr Blobby-themed rap brings us to 39-year-old Dan Buckley, who fronts the Mr Blobby-themed grindcore band. BxLxOxBxBxY.
“I love the mix of music, comedy, surrealism and good-natured weirdness,” Buckley says of his 20 years in the business.
BxLxOxBxBxY (pronounced “Blobby”) is an impromptu stage show featuring a guitarist, a drum machine, and Buckley in “skinny pink underwear, bowtie, painted head to toe in Bobby paint. I’m built right,” Buckley laughs, and also—he shows me—a thigh tattoo of Blobby lying in a martini glass, which “went viral on TikTok.”
“I just scream the word Blobby into the microphone over and over again,” he says. “It’s very chaotic, which channels the Blobby energy. You don’t want the joke to end.” The sets only last 10 minutes. I ask him why Mr. Blobby is all the rage. “I think the wave of nostalgia moving forward has caught up with the ’90s,” he reasons. (The real Mr. Blobby joined the band.) Self-esteem on stage at Hammersmith in 2023, and was gathered (with Edmonds in June this year on Good Morning Britain).
Buckley organised and performed at the alternative Hoersfest festival in York in March. Also on the bill were punk rave band Petrol Hoers (also Buckley, but dressed in a horse mask), Cliff Glitchard, BType and perhaps the most intricately specific piece of video game nerdcore ever: a live reading of the script for the 1997 PC game Theme Hospital, by original voice actress Sarah Green.
She invites me to a demonstration.
“Staff announcement, staff announcement. Patient with head swelling disease…”
How did he get it? that job?
“I had trained as an actress and lived in a house full of animators, one of whom was working on Theme Hospital,” she says. “I was doing voiceovers for ‘Have you had an accident?’ type commercials. I sent in my video and they hired me… There’s only one voice in the game and it’s mine – I play the receptionist who guides the player through the game.”
Green has only performed his Hospital theme on a handful of occasions. Sets last about ten minutes. “Nobody would want to listen to me for a whole night,” he laughs. “It’s a nostalgia trick, isn’t it? People were teenagers in the 90s when Theme Hospital came out. They’re 40 now. It’s sweet how much they enjoy that nostalgia of hearing my voice. But there are younger people too, because their father played it.”
When was the last time you played Theme Hospital? “Never. I’m terrible at computer games, although I did like Wipeout.” Green was hired to voice the mother in the never-released sequel, Theme Resort. She is now a voice coach for students at a local college and also a playwright, having completed a version of Doctor Faustus and another play about a young autistic comedian.
Do you recognise her from her role in Theme Hospital? I ask. “Maybe someone will ask me for a photo or to record a birthday message,” she says. “I’m not on Tik-Tok, but I am on a social network.” video of me “The Hospital track has had over 450,000 views. I’ve had people stop me at the co-op and say, ‘Are you the TikTok girl?’ That’s been pretty fun.”