O.K. Give UKHH.com an introduction. Who are you?
I'm Plan B, 22 years old from Forest Gate, East London. I've been rapping for about 3 years, playing guitar since I was fourteen, writing songs since I was about 15.
Do you have a hard time trying to avoid being conveniently pigeon-holed?
No I don't because the way I'm writing songs I'm a different person in every song. So if I'm writing a love song like 'Young Girl' I can use that R&B influence. You know, when I said that I was writing songs from when I was 15 that was R&B love songs, which is the complete opposite of what I'm doing now. But that's one of the reasons that I'm called Plan B. Plan A was just me writing really good R&B love songs.
But as for coming out in the public eye wanted to come out like one fo the people that I've always looked up to which was Rage Against the Machine, Kurt Cobain, The Prodigy, you know. People that just have their own sound and style. So that's why I completely switched, I went the other way and that was the Plan B thing.
“...I put people in boxes all the time. Everyone judges everyone, you know?...”
So I thought 'I've got it covered now, yeah?' I thought I've got to be different so one way to be different since my life's boring is to pretend to be other people. That way I can talk about guns and violence without people calling me fake 'cause I'm just acting.
Not that I give a shit. I put people in boxes all the time. Everyone judges everyone, you know? But then this article comes out about me being a folk singer. I only done the gigs as me and the guitar because I hadn't finished production on the songs and I had to get out there. The label said "Nobody knows you. You've got to get out there" I was against it at first.
It sounds good!
Well this is it. I come round to it and everyone's liking it. And not just Hip Hop heads now because I play a guitar and play it live people who listen to indie music are allowed to like my music now. I want to be like The Prodigy. You can't say that they are dance music but they're not jungle either.
That's it. They created a genre for themselves, which is great if you can do that.
Corner a market, man. Corner your own market.
Good plan. Do you get compared to Eminem a lot?
Yeah. Yeah 'course. At the end of the day I aint gonna fuckin' lie. Before Eminem I thought that rappin'...I mean...I used to be a Jungle MC and I always found that there was no problem. There was always lots of white mc's around that you could look up to and make you feel like you could do it. But with Hip Hop there was never anyone who made me feel that I could do it. So I always thought of it as black music and I'm not allowed to do it. Then Eminem came out and he was just fuckin' brilliant. Every album we had lasted till the next one came out. Every month we had a new favourite song and people would be throwing lyrics at each other. If people say I'm the U.K. Eminem then that's a big up to me.
Do you think that you will come back to any of the characters in your songs and develop them?
Yeah. There's one where I started writing an album with my mate to help him get off skag. I always said if he was going to stop doing drugs he needed a replacement. But it had to be something that gave him a buzz, that...you know...is real. With drugs they give you a buzz that is gone the next day. Its fake. But with music its kinda like it opens your mind to possibilities of where you could be in the future if you stick to it. So we started writing this album about rehab, about stages of addiction and trying to get off it. He was telling me stories about all the people he had met in rehab and it was really fuckin' interesting man. Some really dark stories as well. He said he had a couple of lines in his head so I took his flow and wrote the whole song. I recorded it, he went home with a copy and I didn't see him again. He was back on skag.
A year later he's in a halfway house, finally clean. Since then the label has heard the song and said it has to go on the album. I said this is a particular song for a different album but they were begging me. In the end my mate says "Look man, I'm fucked! I'm not going to do nothing with it so just use it". So I put it on the album.
“...With music its kinda like it opens your mind to possibilities of where you could be in the future if you stick to it...”
What's good about it is he's one of the characters that i'm going to bring through the next album. His whole album is dedicated to himself which your not going to hear till the third
I started to write stories about other people because I didn't know what to write about. As I was doing this things started to happen in my own life. My best friend was pushed out of a tower block. My mum falls in love with a fuckin' crack head. Obviously that gave me stuff to write about. They're true stories.
Do you think humour is important in your songs? There is a dark edge to all your songs.
Have you heard of Necro? Necro is a guy that just talks about fuckin' dead people, killin' people and shit. And he does it in a humorous dark way where you laugh but its fuckin' sick man. What I took from that is that there's a lot of fucked up shit goes on in the world that I wanted to expose. So things like necrophilia and all that I wanted to use as metaphors you know. Real life is full of jokes. Everyone's having a laugh and then something tragic happens. For me that's real life. I have to put in humour to show that in fact the only thing we've got in a world full of so much horrible nasty shit is the ability to make each other laugh. Because we can't stop ourselves from getting cancer or catching aids.
Shit happens...
Yeah. That's what I mean. So its very important that I have this comedy side. I could just do what Radiohead do which is just depress the fuck out of you. But I love Radiohead. I had a phase with them when maybe I was too young to be listening to them. For me though I didn't want my music to be as depressing even though I was talking about depressing shit.
Tell me about the video you've just completed...
I told the director that I wanted it really dark and he showed me this little thing he'd done with still frame pictures. He got the animators from The Corpse Bride and the lighting guys as well. One thing he said to me was that because we were using normal objects moving like that gives it a kind of darkness anyway. When I started seeing it it reminded me of old school animation I used to see. My mum bought me a video called The Nutcracker with these Plasticine models. It really freaked me out and that was my idea of Hell. The video has got that kind of fuckin' weirdness to it.
It shows a kind of devotion to your work to go through that process.
Yeah. It took a week man. That was my life for a week. We were all going to bed having these still frame dreams where we weren't allowed to move until someone said 'shooting'. And every night was really uncomfortable. I was waking up knackered because I had been using up so much energy in my dreams. But when the video was over the dreams stopped.
And this is where we ran out of time. Hopefully I will bump into Plan B again one day. I certainly suggest you check him out ...
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Daryl Marsh
Related Links:
Plan B Interview
