Music
18 Aug 10

It's Not Easy Being Green

With two day-glo hits under his belt, you might have pegged Professor Green as a purveyor of dumbed-down hip-hop for the Skins generation. Beneath the shiny exterior, however, is an artist who has clawed his way up from the mean streets of working-class Britain.

If you only know Professor Green, aka Stephen Paul Manderson, from his hit singles ‘I Need You Tonight’, and ‘Just Be Good To Green’, you might be forgiven for thinking him a crayola drawn hip-hop/pop crossover with a nice line in nerd-boy delivery. But the debut album Alive Till I’m Dead testifies that Manderson is made of toughter stuff. A seasoned MC battler, he was raised in Hackney by his grandmother, and hauled himself out of modern day Dickensia by the laces of his trainers.

“I got away with a lot more than I probably would have with a parent closer to my age," he admits. "My grandmother’s not that old, my mum had me when she was 16, so my grandmother is 66, 40-years older than me. Some people’s parents are that old. She’s pretty clued up, my gran.”
What were his prospects as a kid?
“I loved music from an early age but I fell into it really late. I was a smart kid academically, but I wasn’t smart enough to stay in school, and instead of having a stern hand at home I had my grandmother, who sympathised with my situation. She did everything with the best of intentions and made the decisions that she felt were right by me, but had I had a sterner hand, things might have been different. I probably needed someone to drag me kicking and screaming to school, but she sympathised, and I got away with absolute murder. I got myself into stuff that I shouldn’t have been involved in.”
Including a short-lived spell as a lightweight drug dealer that, should he achieve X-Factor ubiquity, the red-tops will surely exploit to the max, although the Prof. himself comes clean on the track ‘Do For You’.
“The difference between me and a lot of people that do that... I never did anything soul destroying for one," he maintains. "Also, I’m not a thief, I’ve never stolen anything in my life. Education starts a long time before school, and I was fortunate enough to have been given morals and values. There’s a lot of people in them social circles, some bad, bad people.”
Indeed, just last year Manderson was involved in a nasty altercation in an East London nightclub and was stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle.
"Violence is more prevalent now, guns are a lot more commonplace," he testifies. "I don’t think it’s getting better. I don’t care what the figures say, I’m talking from the perspective of seeing it going on. For me it comes down again to knowing right from wrong. There’s generations of kids that have been having kids, and if your parents don’t have morals or values, what kind of start can you expect to have in life? It’s really easy to end up doing a lot of crazy stuff.
"A lot of people don’t realise it comes from fear and insecurity. When you don’t feel equal it’s really easy to revolt. What we might look upon as being a man is the completely wrong thing. Some people have too much pride, feeling disrespected if someone so much as looks at you the wrong way, and if you weren’t so defensive you wouldn’t need to act on that every time.”
Manderson began rapping at 18 and soon established himself as a formidable battler. His first public victory of note was at the Prince’s Trust Urban Music Festival in April ‘05. Since then he has won over 100 bouts, scooping the inaugural Jump Off MySpace prize in July 2008.
“I’m still learning," he says. "The performance is getting a hell of a lot better now. I had the best show I ever had in my life yesterday. I’ve got a full band and I’m much more comfortable on stage. But it can always be better.”
How does he stay calm in a high-pressure MC face-off?
“I always used to end up pacing, just getting the energy right and not letting my head be clouded by anything else. Being focused on what I was about to do, but not focusing too hard and letting it become a problem, because then it can increase panic. I was really ignorant when I battled, which is not really true of my character. Onstage I would just turn my back on people, I would never rise to what they were saying, so it was hard for the crowd to engage with them. But the whole time, even though it looked like I was really nonchalant and taking no notice at all, I was listening hard to what they were saying, concentrating and thinking about what I was gonna say next, throwing stuff back at them, how I was going to put stuff, what I was going to insult them about. I’m sure it’s very similar to boxing, ‘cos you have to think on your feet.”
In recent times Green has toured with The Streets and Lily Allen, and this year he scored two top five hit singles in the UK. ‘I Need You Tonight’ and ‘Just Be Good To Green’ both feature bold, catchy samples lifted from INXS’s 1988 hit and Beats International’s 1990 club classic respectively. The latter features a cameo from Ms. Allen.
“The two samples that are on the album were massive records," Manderson concedes. "For me, sampling’s always been a huge part of hip-hop, and only to have two samples on a record is quite rare, but I was really conscious of not wanting to dilute the project, I really want to make the majority of it original music, but the songs I sampled I love. It was a bit risky, but I think I’ve given it my own twist, especially with ‘I Need You Tonight’, I completely flipped the concept. I’m not as cool as Michael Hutchence, so I could never have come at it from the same angle. I think it’s good to be a little bit self-deprecating once in a while, it shows that you’re human. It would be boring if you didn’t have someone like Kanye, but I dunno, for me it’s not like we’re out here saving lives. There are nurses that work a damn sight harder than we do as musicians and don’t get the praise that we do. So I try to keep my feet on the ground and take stuff as it comes. Tread softly and carry a big stick.”