Very sad news over the weekend as old school London gangster-turned-actor Dave Courtney was found dead at his home aged 64, with further updates today confirming the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Naturally, a whole bunch of stories about Courtney have been doing the rounds ever since, and the most surprising has to be that he was once embroiled in a feud with Jay-Z over the rapper’s classic Blueprint album cover from 2001:

Turns out Jay-Z’s iconic album cover was inspired by a photograph of Courtney doing a speech at Oxford Union:

Who knew? Not many people, because for some reason Jay-Z never gave Dave Courtney credit, which I guess suggests it was more of a ‘ripping off’ than anything else. The photo was actually featured in a book called The Firm, by photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg, which documents the lives of gangsters in South London, and is probably where Jay-Z caught wind of it.

Speaking on YouTube channel Gangster Tales in 2022, Courtney explained: “In this book, there is a photograph of me – an aerial photograph that was taken from the balcony of me addressing the Oxford Union.

“He actually looked at it like, ‘wow there is a convicted felon teaching future parliament. He is the lecturer in the Oxford Union, teaching the next Lord Mayor, Prime Minister, Chief of Police’.

“He thought that was really funny. So what he did was he did the exact same picture and put his head on it. He put it on the cover of Blueprint, his album which is a f**king good album.”

“My photograph became really famous on the cover of Jay-Z’s album. I don’t think it is the last you’ll hear of that, I think it is gonna raise its head again. Right now he is running around in show business, saying he has done it all down to himself.”

“He actually started off with me on front front of his f**king cover to be honest. It hasn’t gone un-noticed by a lot of people.”

Well, despite being ‘the most feared man in Britain’, it doesn’t sound like Dave Courtney actually did anything about it so that’s probably a decent ego boost for Jay-Z, who fancied himself as a bit of a gangster and all. Although it also sounds like Courtney took it as a massive compliment and enjoyed the album too, so fair play to them both.

Never forget:

For the time the internet got mad at Jay-Z for confessing he doesn’t help out his family members with money, click HERE.