This Thursday 12th June, Peckham’s Bold Tendencies rooftop will host a special event that feels as much like a homage as it does a ritual—a chance to step into the dreamlike, metaphorical worlds of seminal rap legend MF DOOM, whose 1999 Operation: Doomsday remains one of the most transformative underground hip-hop albums of all time. Operation: Doomsday – A Tribute and Response, will feature an array of creative voices, with bill daggs and Abbas Zahedi leading the charge alongside other artists like feeo and James Messiah, all responding to DOOM’s groundbreaking LP in the form of live performances set against the backdrop of a former multi-storey car park in south London.
I have been a huge fan of DOOM since Operation: Doomsday was released. At the time, I struggled to get my head around it, as it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The beats were rough, the samples strange, and the entire album had a raw, cryptic energy that was distant, yet oddly familiar. Something about it felt like a revelation: a world I’d been waiting for, but didn’t know I needed. The way DOOM spun his narratives in broken, fragmented rhymes, the comic book references, the absurd humour mixed with profound wisdom—it was a world I wanted to dive deeper into, even if I couldn’t fully understand it yet.
This upcoming event at Bold Tendencies promises to unlock some of that mystery while paying tribute to DOOM’s unparalleled ability to build a world out of fractured ideas and discarded fragments. bill daggs, who grew up in the diverse and vibrant landscape of Willesden, North West London is no stranger to this creative process. As an artist and musician, he reflects on the playful, almost surreal quality of DOOM’s work. “Doom was humorous,” Daggs says, remembering the raw, experimental quality of the beats. “There’s a lot of playfulness in it. The beats are smashing, man. They’re so nice. It’s not dark in the way people think—it’s light-hearted, but it hits hard.”
What strikes Daggs most is DOOM’s ability to achieve so much with so little. “He used just one sampler, a microphone, and probably an eight-track recorder. It still sounds fresh today.” That low-tech approach, paired with DOOM’s visionary lyricism, speaks to the enduring power of creativity stripped of excess. “It stands the test of time,” daggs adds, noting how listeners continue to find new layers of meaning in the album, even decades later. For him, DOOM’s work isn’t just about music—it’s a way of world-building, of taking fragments of culture, memory, and personal myth, and spinning them into something larger than life.
bill also emphasizes the metaphysical and nostalgic quality of DOOM’s music, something that resonates deeply with him. “It’s metaphorical, memory-driven, dreamlike,” he says, reflecting on how the album plays with ideas of identity, time, and space. “It creates these hazy worlds where it’s not always clear what’s real and what’s imagined. Memory becomes blurred, and everything feels like it exists in a realm between dreams and reality.” For daggs, this is the magic of DOOM: the ability to create music that isn’t simply about technical mastery or lyrical prowess but about creating an entire world—a feeling, an atmosphere—that listeners can lose themselves in.
This spirit of world-building also resonates strongly with multidisciplinary artist Abbas Zahedi, whose own creative journey was deeply influenced by the grief he experienced following the loss of his brother. For Zahedi, Operation: Doomsday is much more than an album—it’s a meditation on loss. “DOOM’s music has always been more than something I admired—it’s been a kind of companion, especially in grief,” Zahedi explains. “Operation: Doomsday is often seen as an underground classic, but to me, it’s a grief album. Just like Rumi’s Masnavi was written after the death of Shams, DOOM’s work was born out of the loss of his brother Subroc.”
Zahedi sees this process of creation as a response to the rupture that grief creates—a way of remaking the world around an irreplaceable absence.
Zahedi’s art practice, much like DOOM’s music, is fragmented and layered. He uses sound, sculpture, and performance to channel memory, loss, and cultural dislocation. He draws parallels between DOOM’s fragmented rhyme style and his own artistic process: “His rhyme style isn’t clean narrative. It’s episodic, like collage, more akin to what a painter or a photographer does than a traditional storyteller.” Zahedi’s contribution to the event will blend these ideas—pulling from DOOM’s fragmented atmospheres while filtering them through his own abstraction.
“I’m pulling more from the album’s atmospheres—its stutters, loops, and fragments—rather than quoting it directly.” For Zahedi, this isn’t just about revisiting DOOM’s music but about entering the same space of spiritual exploration that DOOM’s work always embodied.
The event itself will create a space where memory, grief, and community intersect. Zahedi reflects on the kind of shared presence he aims to create in his work, particularly in his support group sessions at Tate. “The audience is part of the current. I don’t see them as viewers—I see them as sharing the space, like at an open mic where everyone is tuned in and potentially has something to say.” It’s a communal experience, where the audience is invited not only to observe, but to engage and contribute to the atmosphere being created. This spirit of openness and collective energy is a direct extension of DOOM’s own ethos—a refusal to conform to traditional performance structures, a rejection of the idea that artists exist solely to perform for others.
In a world obsessed with visibility, DOOM’s mask was a rejection of the superficiality of fame, a way of maintaining mystery while still speaking to the world. As Zahedi says, “In a culture obsessed with constant visibility and credit, his mask was a way of saying: not everything has to be seen to be real. It protected mystery, inner life.” The mask, for both Zahedi and daggs, symbolises survival in a world that demands constant exposure, a form of resistance to the pressures of modern life. Zahedi continues, “The mask isn’t hiding—it’s survival. It’s how you carry what’s too raw or too layered to express directly.”
This upcoming event, then, is more than a tribute to MF DOOM; it’s an invitation to step into a space where the fragmented, often contradictory nature of memory, grief, and art can exist in dialogue with each other. There’s no clean conclusion to be found here, no resolution that will wrap everything up neatly. Instead, it’s about opening a tonal doorway, a space where everyone can bring their own rhythms and memories to the table.
Zahedi sums it up: “If someone walks away holding a fragment—a line, a texture, a feeling—that lingers with them, that’s more than enough.” For all the intellectual and emotional depth of the event, it’s about feeling—about stepping into DOOM’s world and creating something new, something that lingers in the air long after the final note.
Event tickets page: HERE
