Soul Survivor

Here’s the news: Plan B’s The Defamation Of Strickland Banks is one of the finest albums of the year so far, a combination of 21st Century soul and gritty Brit hip-hop. It’s also quite the U-turn for its creator. Ben Drew, still in his early 20s, first emerged from Forest Gate in North-East London four years ago with his debut Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, a record that might have been described as a meaner Streets, foul mouthed and unflinching in its depiction of urban disaffection. Some leveled accusations of gratuitous violence, its author argued a Scorsesean morality.

Now, with his second album, Drew has unveiled his secret weapon: a sweet soul tenor that contrasts beautifully with the subject matter of his songs. The epiphany, Drew says when we catch up with him for the first of two conversations conducted over the course of a week that sees his single ‘She Said’ vie for the top slot with Lady GaGa, was this: “Basically I heard the Pilooski re-edit of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ version of ‘Beggin’. It’s nostalgic but modern, and that’s how I wanted the record to sound. The only reason I didn’t come out as a soul singer in the public eye before the rap happened was because I hadn’t been vocally trained and I wasn’t very confident. I used to get really bad stagefright and throw up before going on stage, and when I became Plan B and started rapping, going, ‘Listen up, you fucking cunts’, I was getting a reaction, people were taking notice, and I just felt a lot more confident, so on the first record I limited the singing to the choruses.
“And then as I matured and done gig after gig, I just got used to it and the nerves turned to focus. I found my key and relaxed and got a lot more confident and thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m doing what I want to do.’ I never do anything that doesn’t feel right. There’s certain things you have to compromise on in the business side, but this is an uncompromising soul record. The way I make the music, what I write the songs about, that is never fucked with or interfered with, ever.”
The result of that uncompromising stance is a set of powerful songs like ‘Stay Too Long’, ‘The Recluse’, ‘Darkest Place’ and ‘Welcome To Hell’: street legal tales redeemed by great gospel choruses.
“Do you know what mate, I think maybe where I went wrong on the first record a little bit was that I always accompanied dark subjects with dark music,” Drew admits. “And I just worked it out accidentally, I said, ‘Look, it’s okay for this music to be uplifting because it’s soul’. ‘Welcome To Hell’ is about a warden and a bunch of inmates really happy to see this particular person going through this kind of hell. There’s that juxtaposition between the subject and how it sounds.”
Strickland Banks is a thematic collection of tunes (with an accompanying sequence of videos) that charts the rise and fall of a young soul rebel without a cause. Musically, the album follows a through-line from Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye through Gil Scott Heron to Northern soul and rap. At times it sounds like nothing so much as a soul Quadrophenia. Drew has big plans, both as a songwriter and filmmaker, and has already established himself as a character actor in movies like Adulthood and Harry Brown.
“Whether I’m acting or directing a film, or doing hip hop or soul, any kind of music, I think I’m a storyteller first and foremost,” he maintains, “everything else is secondary to that. I want to make genre albums. I think The Who done that, they used to do films of their stuff, I think they achieved it with films like McVicar and Quadrophenia, and I guess I’m doing the modern version.
“It’s strange,” he continues, “it seems such a struggle to get this far, to make sure all the videos are on point and the story’s getting told. Soon as you say ‘concept album/film’ to the record company, they shit themselves: ‘Does it have to be a concept album?’ ‘Yeah it does, you cunt! I’m an artist, you’ve let me go off and do this record on my own, you’ve had no input, I’ve had no real help from you apart from little bits of money, and now that the record’s done, what, you want me to change what it’s about? Fuck you!’
“And I loved every moment of making this record, enjoyed picking out the suits I was gonna wear and talking about the treatments for the video and what cast members we were goinna cast in what roles. It’s nice that people are buying the record, it’s nice that it’s number two, but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that I’m happy doing what I wanna do. It’s not a competition. If you like my shit, then good, if you don’t, then I don’t care. I don’t care if I go number 1 or number 100. I’m doing it for the art. People like Take That and the Spice Girls gave me the confidence to be in music, ‘cos I thought, ‘If you cunts can do it, I can do it, I’m much better that that shit’.”
Film and television narratives, Drew says, are a big influence on how he structures his song-stories.
“A song on the first record called ‘Dead And Buried’ was inspired by a programme on Channel 4,” he points out. “It was about a guy whose sister was going out with this guy and he ended up raping her, so the brother goes and shoots the boyfriend, and he gets done for attempted murder. And while he’s in prison there’s a lot of people trying to fuck with him, so he has to kill more people in prison to survive. And he finds out his sister got back together with the boyfriend who raped her, and his actions were in vain, pointless. So I wrote ‘Dead And Buried’ because of this three or four-part drama Buried.
“I’m very heavily influenced by things I watch, especially stuff like The Wire, the depths of so many different characters, and how one thing has a domino effect on another. I love that shit. The film I’m making is six stories mixed into each other, it’s like a hip hop version of Crash, and it’s called Ill Manors. I’m gonna shoot that in September hopefully, on a small budget, and I’ll direct it myself. And there’s an adult cartoon I want to do, pretty dark, hip hop based again.”
Sounds like Ben Drew has a book in him, no?
“Yeah, but not an autobiography, I’m not into that shit. It’ll be fiction, funny and dark, like Chuck Palahniuk. The last book I read, which I fuckin’ loved, was Kill Your Friends by John Niven, ‘cos I’d just been through the mill with the record industry, having what I thought was a great album on a major label. I got through to the kids I wrote it for, but in terms of success I felt like I failed, so I remember reading that book and loving every minute of it and just finding it so funny ‘cos the guy is such a cunt. He epitomises the worst in the music industry. I don’t know if anyone as nasty as him exists, but if you was to get twenty people in the music industry and turn them into one man, he represents that. And it just made me look at my situation and laugh at it and not take it so seriously.”