It’s been 10 years since Theophilus “Theo” London has been in his own backyard. That would be Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the artist and rapper was raised among the diaspora of his birthplace, Trinidad and Tobago.
On Thursday, London was back in the Borough of Kings to introduce a posthumous collaboration with Virgil Abloh: a new magazine called Bebey, which they developed during the making of London’s 2020 album of the same name. The photo-driven zine has an intimate, raw quality with candid shots of London and his creative partners including Kevin Parker of Tame Impala.
In the intervening years, London has been living in Los Angeles (in a house once owned by Humphrey Bogart) and hopscotching the world, including Milan, where Abloh lent London his then-disused Off-White office. It was around this time that he also befriended Karl Lagerfeld, who shot the album cover for London’s 2014 EP, “Vibes.”
London and Abloh were close friends and frequent collaborators; they released a Bebey-branded capsule collection (including T-shirts, track suits and embroidered cowboy boots, a pair of which they gifted to Rihanna) in 2020.
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On Thursday, London planned to unveil the magazine with a “piano and microphone set” on the Lower East Side. He also will bow his short film, “Life’s Work” and another capsule collection of tank tops featuring embroidery by Brooklyn artist Jade Ellis and screen-printed Bebey T-shirts made in collaboration with Trini Brooklyn-based designer Joshua Joseph from Rebels to Don. He’s planning additional performances and capsules timed to New York Fashion Week in September.
The magazine and film were originally intended to be released in 2020.
“All the sleepless nights, all the moments (that go into making an album), that’s what turns on a light inside of me,” London told WWD. “These are moments that I feel need to be documented. I almost went crazy compiling thousands of pages. I’m so happy to finally let it come out, because I want to tell this story before I tell my next story.”
London took the death of Abloh — in November 2021, after a two-year battle with a rare form of cancer — very hard. At the time, the world was still in the grip of a terrifying global pandemic, and the loss of Abloh coupled with the disruption and alienation of the pandemic seems to have forced a reckoning.
“I had to recalibrate,” said London.
London made headlines in late 2022, when his family filed a missing-persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department, after they had spent months trying unsuccessfully to contact him. He resurfaced in January 2023, and refers obliquely to his time off-the-grid as a “hiatus.”
“I was on some Wild, Wild West excursion in L.A., gold rushing, trying to bring my culture to L.A., to no avail,” he said. “I’m just so happy to be back amongst my family and friends. I love going to church every Sunday with my family. I love the food. Everybody taking turns cooking Trini for me.
“I want to tell stories, that’s why I became a writer,” he continued. “When I was young, I would write these stories that then became songs, but they weren’t anything that I lived out yet. They were just fantasies in my head, but they were very vivid.”
He’s writing new music, which will feature some of his frequent collaborators including, he said, Parker, jazz trumpeter and composer Theo Croker and Kanye West. (London was a key collaborator on Kanye West’s 2021 studio album “Donda.”)
“I don’t want to give (away) too much, but I’ve definitely been back in the studio this year,” said London. “I’ve been working on the variety of different genres. As a writer, as a poet, I could jump on any style of music. So I was back to trying a lot of different things, and seeing what I’m happy with, seeing what’s fixed. And I’ve been humbled just to be back in my community.”
