- Music
- 23 Aug 12
He's already made the transition from underground hip hopper to blue-eyed soul boy du jour. Now Plan B has written and directe Ill Manors, a damning indictment of cameron's broken Britain, and is also about to star alongside Ray Winstone in a reboot of classic 70's cop caper The Sweeney ("Get dressed, you're nicked!") A wellied-up Stuart Clark meets him and his crew in a north Yorkshire forest.
“Who do I rate at the moment? I really like Plan B since he’s gone all Motown-y. It’s pop but with the sort of attitude we had in The Jam. He’s going to sell a shit-load of records.”
Paul Weller was at the peak of his prophesising powers in March 2010 when he told us that The Artist Also Known As Benjamin Paul Ballance-Drew was about to leave hip hop obscurity behind and join the likes of Amy, Leona and Coldplay in the CD aisle at Tesco.
Taking its cue from Berry Gordy but also displaying a hard-nosed lyrical edge that reminded Weller of his young straight outta Woking self, The Defamation Of Strickland Banks has sold well over a million copies – 50,000 of them are in Irish homes – and made Plan B almost as omnipresent in the British tabloids as his near London neighbour, Adele.
“I reminded Paul Weller of The Jam?” says the 28-year-old almost falling off the white leather sofa we’re sitting on. “Fucking hell! To have the bloke who wrote ‘Down In The Tube Station’ and ‘That’s Entertainment’ bigging you up… The Jam and The Specials and The Clash are the level you aspire to, but getting there’s another matter!”
How far Plan B’s come in a short space of time is underlined by the venue for tonight’s sell-out gig. Gone are the sweaty grime dives of old to be replaced by Denby Forest, a Wicklow-sized swathe of greenery equidistant from Leeds and Middlesbrough.
There’s many an eee by gum! chuckle to be had as we spy signs en route for places like Hutton-Le-Hole, Roseberry Topping, Newbiggin Cliffs, Cowbar Nab and Warthill’s lovely Breezy Knees Gardens that belong in Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch.
A goodly proportion of the 5,000-strong crowd have brought fold-up chairs from which to gaze at their hero while the queue for the bar is so orderly I wonder for a moment if I’ve stumbled into another Eucharistic conference. Mr.B’s Denby set is split into two distinct halves – … Strickland Banks tunes, which are greeted with orgasmic shrieks of delight and the altogether more vote-splitting songs that soundtrack the Plan B written/directed/bottle washed Ill Manors movie. For those who’ve only had Euro 2012 on their minds these past few weeks, it’s a bold – and often very violent – attempt by Drew to lift the lid off David Cameron’s broken Britain.
“Welcome to London, 2012,” reads the film blurb. “Home of the Olympic Games. Behind the veil of newly-injected prosperity lies a community that’s impossible to enter and even harder to escape.”
Populated by “drug dealers, pimps and innocents all swept into the cycle of violence and deception”, it received a comically bad review from The Daily Mail – “horribly ill-advised; the quality never rises above the worst ever episode of EastEnders” – but is actually the best bit of independent UK cinema I’ve seen since 2010’s Aidan Gillen-starring Treacle Jr.
That his record company would have much preferred another bouncy, blue-eyed soul record is of little concern to Drew who tends to think art first, money second.
“Will the new record sell as well as the last one? I doubt it,” he acknowledges. “I’m very proud of Strickland Banks’ success – it’s made making Ill Manors a whole lot easier. I doubt the BBC would’ve stumped up the money it did, if I was only known within the hip hop community. I like being No.1 in the charts, but I’m not a slave to it. I’ll always do what I want to do regardless of the commercial consequences.”
Alex Turner – who reminds me in many ways of Drew – reckons the most important thing he’s learned as a musician is how to say “no!”
“I know where he’s coming from, but there’s something to be said for compromise ‘cos you don’t always know everything,” Plan B reflects. “Being so stubborn over my first record, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, meant that a lot of doors were slammed in my face. I was like, ‘Okay, maybe if I’d listened to this person at that point, we’d have sold a few more copies’.
“You build relationships with people where you think, ‘This guy’s not trying to whore me out; he really believes in what I’m doing and wants it to be as big as it can, but not at the expense of my/its integrity’. I’m lucky in having a handful of them at the label who I can talk to and know where they’re coming from. It makes it a lot easier to take stuff on board and maybe go out of my comfort zone sometimes.”
Despite his newfound pop stardom, Plan B had to assemble Ill Manors for less than Pat Kenny’s annual take-home pay.
“The spine of the film was shot in September 2010 for a hundred grand,” he reveals. “Then I sold the distribution and in the summer of 2011 shot the back stories; the music video segments; the stuff with the phone; and the stuff in the pub, the cellar and the whorehouse.”
How big a transition was it to go from making videos – Drew has always been very hands-on with his promos – to marshalling a film crew full of big and often wildly conflicting egos?
“Even with my first videos, I’d watch a tape back on set and go, ‘That ain’t right!’ Your instinct tells you if it doesn’t seem realistic or isn’t how you envisioned it when you wrote the treatment. I’ve always been very outspoken – you know, ‘The lyric says this, why are we doing this? It doesn’t correspond’. I also watched what the directors do, which is leave the technical stuff to the camera and lighting people and just say, ‘You could have performed that better’ or ‘You’re not angry enough here’. I’m thinking, ‘Well, that ain’t fucking hard!’”
The Daily Mail would doubtless disagree, but Ill Manors has a very distinctive visual style, which is neither pop video nor your standard British gangster flick.
“A lot of it’s inspired by how kids entertain themselves these days – you know, like watching YouTube and playing computer games all fucking day. They watch them on their phones too, so I wanted to bridge the gap between that and film.”
Without giving too much away, the film features a brilliant turn from punk poet – and big Hot Press chum – John Cooper Clarke. How did he come onto Plan B’s radar?
“When I heard ‘Chicken Town’ on The Sopranos. I couldn’t believe that a British rapper – ‘cos that’s essentially what he is – had gotten on to a programme like that. So I Wikipedia-d John and couldn’t believe this guy I’d never heard of had been around since punk in the ‘70s.
“It’s the lyricism I love,” Ben continues warming to the theme. “He uses normal, everyday words in such an articulate way. It’s not necessarily correct English, but it’s the way that people talk, the slang of the times.”
Has he checked out such gems as ‘Psycle Sluts’, ‘(I Married) A Monster From Outer Space’ and – best of all! – ‘Kung Fu International’ yet?
“I haven’t, he’s still a new artist for me. There’s loads of stuff people have told me I have to hear, which is great because you tend to know everything about modern artists. There are no surprises.”
SPOILER ALERT!!! Not wanting to miss out entirely on the acting action, the singer makes a Hitchcockian cameo at the end of Ill Manors as a taxi-driver.
“Originally I was going to be in the background of every story, but I thought, ‘That’s just going to annoy the fuck out of the audience!’ So I settled for being a cabbie!”
Whilst never gratuitous, the violence in Ill Manors is graphic to the point where a normally unflinching colleague of mine had to duck out of the press screening for a few minutes. As one enforced trip to casualty followed another, I was reminded of the controversy Tricky caused a few years ago when he told yours truly, “I’m not saying knife crime’s right or anything stupid like that, but if I was a kid in England I’d definitely carry a weapon ‘cos it’s so fucking hardcore out there. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a gang or not, if you’re living on an estate you’re a target. I’d be listening to the news and thinking, ‘I don’t wanna get stabbed, so the best thing is for me to carry a knife’. Half the kids are into violence and are fuelling the fire, and the other half are just defending themselves.”
Plan B’s thoughts on the matter?
“My own uncle – he’s a fucking grown man with a family – recently got into some shit where he’s living in Sheffield. He got the fuck smashed out of him by a group of lads from the estate he’s living on for no reason. Just knocked him off his bike. He’s telling me he’s carrying a knife now and I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You pull a knife out and stab somebody you’re going to prison’. He says, ‘I pick my kids up at night from their after-school activities. I can’t have anything happening to them, so I’m carrying a knife. I’d fucking kill the cunts and do the prison time’. That’s how hard some of these environments are.”
It’s a horrible thought, but were Ben to suddenly turn into British Home Secretary Theresa May – as very distinct from the soft porn model who starred in The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ video, Teresa May – what would he do to improve the state of the nation?
“First thing I’d tackle is irresponsible immigration,” he says switching into ministerial mode. “We let different nationalities into this country, and then create a ghetto by putting them all into the one little town. Anyone in Britain who’s racist is missing the point. They’re falling into the trap that the government’s setting. It’s not, like, the Polish community’s fault that they’ve all been stuck in the same place and no-one’s monitoring them. English people suddenly find themselves in the minority and can’t afford to move out, which is what breeds the racism and the hatred. Their gripe should be with the government, not the people who come to Britain looking for a better life for their families.
“The winners in all of this are the BNP and English Defence League cunts who feed off the ineptitude of our mainstream politicians. By far the best recruiter for the far-right at the moment is the Conservative/Liberal coalition.”
Ill Manors is not the only film benefiting this year from Drew’s talents, with Ray Winstone playing Det. Insp. Jack Regan to his Det. Sgt. George Carter in an update of geezertastic ‘70s cop series The Sweeney.
Judging by its “act like a criminal to catch a criminal” tagline, the moral boundaries won’t be so much blurred as eradicated.
“Ray’s fantastic,” he says bromantically. “We struck up a really good relationship, and I’m proud to say he’s one of my mates. That aside, I learned so fucking much from him about acting.”
The two friends will be appearing together again in The Devil’s Dandruff, a film about former gangland coke dealer Jason Cook, which starts shooting next month in London and also stars Gary Oldman and Vinny Jones.
“The one after that’s a rom-com with Jennifer Aniston in it,” he lies.
Also helping Plan B come to terms with being a thespian was – cue lousy, “My name is…” impersonations – Michael Caine who was in 2009’s Harry Brown with him.
“He’s an early example of people from my environment making it in the film world. To have been around since the ‘50s and still mean something to a brat like me is quite something. The only time we ever spoke was when we were working out how to do a scene. We didn’t get to know each other on a personal level, but to be honest that’s the way I wanted it. He’s my idol and I didn’t want to taint the experience.”
Someone who Plan B does go for regular pints with is Michael Stafford, aka Ireland’s very own hip hop/soul interloper Maverick Sabre.
“Me and Mav go way back,” he smiles. “He was 15 and won a MySpace competition to spend time in the studio with me. He was singing out of key and didn’t know about song structure, but had proper raw talent. Key found and song structure learned, I said, ‘Now you’ve got to go off and do it yourself because otherwise you’re always going to be known as ‘Plan B’s prodigy’ or ‘the next Plan B’, which will hinder you’. He and I are both comfortable talking about it now because he’s proved himself in his own right.”
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That he most certainly has! While currently sporting a pair of the stonewashed denims beloved of early ‘70s suedeheads – this is a man who knows his pop culture – Drew will soon change into the razor-sharp suit that’s become synonymous with … Strickland Banks. Denby Forest wowed, there’s the small matter of heading to Manchester for a Stone Roses support.
“I’m too tired at the moment for it to register,” he yawns. “My mate’s got a studio two hours from here, so after last night’s gig I went there and worked until 9am this morning.”
Obviously the muse was upon him.
“Uh, no, I had to induce it! They’re mastering on Monday, and the only way I can finish it is to pull another all-nighter in the studio and then head to Heaton Park. Some of the songs aren’t even completely written yet…”
All of which is of only minor concern compared to the news that, in what appears to be a Drake Vs. Chris Brown-style diss, Van Morrison has named his new album Born To Sing: No Plan B. Ben’s not going to let him get away with that, surely?
“Bring it fucking on!” he deadpans. “I doubt Van Morrison has a clue who I am, but there was a time I’d have been up for a row. Now I think the best way of retaliating is being more successful than anyone who’s dissing you. I’m not making art if I’m arguing with you or criticising somebody else. No fucker’s going to cost me a song!”
The Ill Manors soundtrack album is out on July 20 with The Sweeney hitting screens in September.