Plan B - Strictland Business

In an upstairs room of a ramshackle old pub in East London, Ben Drew sits frantically rubbing his leg. Despite being kitted out in a thick woollen hat, pale denim jacket and jeans, it’s clear from the thickness of each icy breath that accompanies every word that even the hardiest of arctic explorers would do well to survive in this environment. Not even the army of heaters that his publicist has assembled on the floor seems capable of breaking through the impenetrable cold front.

While this uncomfortable environment would, you imagine, irk most musicians, for Drew - better known as the rapper Plan B - it presents little concern. After all, as someone who grew up only a handful of postcodes further east from here in Forest Gate, he’s experienced far worse. His debut album, ‘Who Needs Actions When You Got Words’, for example, ambitiously tackled the type of issues - from knife crime to underage sex - that Drew regularly encountered first hand. But despite earning him a Top-30 chart hit in 2006, the record’s coarse - and often angry - narrative, which was constructed around an acoustic guitar, proved too much for some, even managing to raise an eyebrow from British hip-hop’s most prominent exponent, Tim Westwood. Consequently, the then 23-year-old’s music career stalled somewhat, and he seemed to disappear almost as quickly as he had arrived armed with his self-styled mantra: “This is my time now, you get me? ****ing ****s.”

It speaks volumes, then, that we’re here today braving the elements to discuss Drew’s forthcoming second album, ‘The Defamation of Strictland Banks’. Like his debut, the 13-track LP continues to explore Drew’s interest in the craft of story telling, only this time it’s based around the fictional character of Strictland Banks, a sharp-suited British soul singer who loses everything when he ends up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s a vibrant, voluptuous-sounding record, which references Stax, Motown and, most poignantly, soul music. “It just started from my love of soul music,” says Drew, of the album’s origins.

Now 26, Drew says he’s been writing soul songs ever since he was introduced to Michael Jackson as a seven-year-old - it’s only now that he feels secure enough to actually sing them. “I was going to be a singer but I had a lack of confidence in everything - the way I dressed, the way I sung,” he admits. It was only when he performed his debut album with a backing band that Drew learned for the first time about the technical side to singing. “As soon as that happened everything just clicked, and I went from being just a songwriter behind the scenes to a singer-songwriter.”

This newfound confidence, Drew says, was aided by the fact that his new material was “just too good for me to ****ing put on a shelf and let rot and not show to the world”. He stops to stimulate some more blood flow through his cold body. “I’m all about that,” he continues. “You make something that’s just good then why hide it because it doesn’t fit into your profile or how people perceive you.”