A Conversation with Plan B (Ben Drew) – HuffPost 10.10.12
Mike Ragogna: Hi there, Mister Ben Drew, also known to the world as Plan B.
Ben Drew: Hey, Mike, how are you doing?
MR: I am okay, how are you sir?
BD: I’m good.
MR: I just saw a trailer for your movie Ill Manors; let’s just launch right into some of the territory that movie covers. You’re covering a lot of ground with this one.
BD: Yeah, I mean, I was just looking at how kids kind of entertain themselves in this day and age. The internet, the iPhones and stuff, they spend all day watching music videos, and coming from hip-hop, I’m making hip-hop in a way that I can tell stories and convey my message in that way. I found out that I could do that in song, so for me, it’d be a musical progression into telling my stories by making a film. I wanted to bring UK hip-hop to the world by giving it the most appropriate place for it to live, and I think with the way I make it doesn’t just work on radio. That’s my thing. When I’m telling stories from hip-hop, it’s not best tailored for radio. It’s better to have a visual representation for it, and with this film, it allowed me to focus on different social problems going around in the UK by achieving a different character to convey each one.
MR: Who are some of those characters?
BD: We have a story about a crack-addicted prostitute, we have a story about jogging, we have a story about a girl that’s being sex-trafficked from Eastern Europe, and obviously we have a complex one to do with crime in the inner city of London, which I think anyone knowing that you have rich parts and poor parts can kind of relate to. We’ve even got a story about a thirteen year-old kid who wants to be part of the local gang, and gets taken in by them. It’s showing the pitfalls of someone of that age not really understanding what they’re getting into and I use the vehicle of hip hop music to delve deeper into the backstories and deeper into what the characters are seeing and thinking, and the real message behind each story. And obviously because it’s a feature film these stories come to a head at the end and resolve.
MR: Like a Robert Altman movie without endless talking and self-analyzing. [laughs]
BD: Well, yeah, I would say this is like the hip-hop musical version of Crash. I tread carefully when I say “musical” because it’s not the kind of film where the actors and the characters break into song and dance, it’s not like that. But it’s my voice narrating what’s going on. When you have a film and the characters start breaking into song, you can’t take it seriously anymore. The issues we talk about in this film are really serious and dark and I wanted to make sure that the importance and the seriousness is kind of kept intact.
MR: I interviewed when you released The Defamation of Strickland Banks, which could’ve used its own movie. This is where you come from, your creative process. How you approach your music is very visual.
BD: Yeah, I always wanted to make a film from …Strickland Banks and I think it would’ve helped the cause in America with a movie for it. At the time, I’d had my first record out and it hadn’t done massively well commercially, so …Strickland Banks kind of broke down all those rules and those borders and boundaries I’d had before. The success of it over here and getting all the awards…the BRIT awards gave me a lot of power. The ball was already kind of rolling on Ill Manners, trying to get it made. I was actually ready to shoot it before…Strickland Banks was completed and came out. I guess I just decided that I wasn’t going to wait for someone to back me as a film director. I was just going to try and do it myself. That’s why I ended up putting the money up myself. We made it on a really small budget and that was extremely difficult, but I learned so much. I think looking forward, I’m in a great position now, if I want to do another concept album. I think there’s going to be a market there for me. I’m going to have that respect and that support, not just from the next film company I work with, but also for more recording. I think that in terms of a concept, the Ill Manners film soundtrack has been successful. We really have to wait and see what happens when it comes out on DVD and it becomes a word-of-mouth film. The success of the album has already done an unusually lot of good during the October release date over here. I really hope that America and Canada and other English-speaking countries like Australia can kind of get to grips with this and enjoy the UK hip-hop the way I’ve always wanted it to be enjoyed.
MR: How did you approach writing the songs for this project? Did they come as descriptions of the scenes?
BD: I did write quite a few songs that we scrapped before the film, but the thing is budgets would change and locations would change and even characters would change. The film used to be nine stories and we reduced it to six, so I had to lose whole stories and whole characters, and that meant that in the finished film, there are some characters that didn’t exist before. Some characters are an amalgamation of two other characters. Characters would change sex, and the origin of where they came from in the world would change. It felt like a false economy to be writing the music first. So instead, we got the film in the can and I just looked at where it was baggy, where it felt slow and where it could be sped up and I used the music to do that. That’s where I decided I would write the songs. To be honest, the way I came about making this film, my initial preparations for it and where it ended up were completely different things. I think through doing the final assembly of the film and seeing what it was lacking, I decided to push the release date back by a year. I sold the distribution of the film to get a bit more money so I could go and shoot extra stuff and so some of the songs that exist in the film didn’t exist when we first started filming because I had that time to sit with the film and look at it and realize what was missing from it. There’s a whole scene held in a cellar over this young child being in his mother’s womb. His mother’s a heroin addict, she got pregnant and you see her shoot up, and you just go through the decades. This kid grows up and you see how he becomes a junkie as an adult. That whole musical segment, I think, is about three minutes to three and a half minutes long, and that did not exist in the original script. That scene didn’t even exist until maybe a year later. I was just dreaming stuff up as I was going along.
MR: “Drug Dealer,” of course, being one of the tracks on the album…
BD: …that’s actually the song I was just talking about.
MR: Right, and it features Takura. How did you choose the guests on the project?
BD: I always heard “Drug Dealer” as a reggae funk and when I tried to sing it, I just felt like somebody else could do it better than I could. Takura was someone I’d toured with with Strickland Banks. He just happened to turn up at the studio that day with another artist he was working with and I said, “Yo, can I borrow you for five minutes?” and I threw him in there and that was it.
MR: I saw the trailer. Was it tempting to act in the movie as well?
BD: No, I wrote and directed it, but it would’ve been difficult if I was in it as well, man. No way. I needed to prove to the world that I could direct. I didn’t want to create a film so that I could be the lead role. I didn’t want that. I guess as a writer and as a director, I have too much intensity to do that. I just feel if no one is directing me, then I’m going to be appallingly bad. I feel like the processes you have to go through, you have to really trust the script and trust the director you’re working with. I just feel that there’s so much on my mind in terms of being the writer and the director and, in some ways, a producer. It would have just been too far a stretch if I’d acted in it as well.
MR: “Deepest Shame,” that starts off the album, can you go into that song’s storyline?
BD: “Deepest Shame” was based on a true story. There was a prostitute who was staying at my friend Doug’s house. He had a problem with drugs where, basically, he was addicted to either crack or heroin, and she stole one of my friend’s phones and when they saw her again sixth months later, she was really apologetic about stealing the phone and said she’d pay them back. They knew that they weren’t going to get the money unless she had it on her at that point. She didn’t have it, but she said, “Follow me and I’ll get you the money” and she walked into this fried chicken shop and right out the back to one of the workers and solicited herself to the man. She came out with ten pounds, which is about ten dollars and they said, “Well this isn’t enough,” so she said, “Okay, follow me,” and she proceeded to take them to different fast food restaurants down the high street and come out and give them money for the phone. I was like, “Yo, why didn’t you just walk home? She’s got problems,” and he was like, “Yeah, but she did take my phone. She offered to pay the money back and I knew she was a prostitute. So I know how she makes her money and I was going to get it back if I followed her.” And I was like, “Yeah, but what the hell was she doing in between?” “You know, turning tricks?” I had a laugh, because there’s a kind of sick thing about it, and this is why I say Ed and Aaron, the two kind of main characters in the film, reacted with two sides of me. Aaron represents the heart and Ed represents the head. I understand why my friends did what they did. I see the logic in it, but me being me and having the heart I have, I would have just let her go. We were sixteen at the time. None of us had any money, so I understood why they did it, but obviously, when I see that story in the film, it was just too complicated to go into the truth. It was easier to watch that she steals a drug dealer’s phone. I think it’s different in America, but over here, you basically buy a number and you can fill up the credits on that number. It’s not the actual physical phone, it’s the chip inside. Even drug dealers over here use it. If you went online or you registered the chip, then police can tap your phone and listen to the phone calls, whereas if it’s an unregistered chip, they can’t. Many dealers will have the same number for years. What’s great about the number is that all these addicts have that number memorized in their head like their name. They can go to any payphone and just call that number. If you lose that number, you lose thousands and thousands of pounds. So that’s why in the film, it becomes a really serious scene. She’s stolen this guy’s business line, and he kind of forces her in and out of these chicken shops to get his money back. Each time, he’s hauling her out for the minimum. That’s why it’s so dark.
MR: Right. What advice do you have advice for new artists?
Plan B: Like musicians rather than actors? If you’re listening to the music on the radio now and you’re kind of constructing the way you make music to fit in with what’s on the radio now, I think you’re just setting yourself up to lose. If you want to be a musician and you want to be an artist, it’s got to be a personal thing. It’s got to be because you love it. You love expressing yourself and you use that music as a therapy in your life in order to get over certain struggles that you have, certain things that kind of eat at yourself. I’ve always used it for that. I’ll write a song that I’m very invested in and other artists, when I listen to their songs, I feel some kind of emotion, or I know something. If you’re only getting into music because you want that red carpet opportunity when you can soak in all the praise and the adulation and f**k around in the VIP area and drink Cristal with a bunch of bitches around you, I just think you’re in it for the wrong reasons. It’s got to be a personal thing. We’ve got to find a way of expressing ourselves, which is unique to you. It’s great to have influences but make sure those influences stand for what you stand for, in terms of you. Every day, I meet talented young kids, but when I ask them how they see their direction, they always drop names, the artists that are kind of cold and doing things right now and I just think, “What the point?” It just seems like you very rarely come across young artists that know about real music. All they seem to know about is the conveyor belt bullsh**t. I can’t see how they’re going to have longevity if that’s the life they’re being influenced by.
MR: Okay, we’ll end the show there, but I want to thank you so much, Plan B, for sharing all that information about the movie. I really wish you well with it.
Plan B: Thank you very much, man. Thank you. I hope you get to see it soon.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne