Plan B

The Defamation Of Strickland Banks

Biography 2010

You never forget your first love. For Ben Drew, there was a brief flirtation with the He-Man cartoon character around the age of six, but the plastic figurines were forgotten a year later when he heard Michael Jackson. Ben loved the videos, loved the voice, loved the dancing and the artful blend of soul, funk and pop. “He was my first idol,” he smiles. “I was obsessed with Michael Jackson.”

Later, there was Ian Wright and Arsenal FC. There was jungle music and hip hop, The Prodigy and punk, and wanting to be a rebel like Johnny Rotten. There was trying to fit in at school and never quite succeeding, then learning to put on a hard front to protect himself: “Growing up in London, you’ve got to be pretty tough, you’ve got to let people know that they can’t fuck with you.

But a part of Ben always stayed faithful to the soul he’d first heard. He loved listening to classic Motown tunes on the radio, or singing along to cheesy R&B acts like Boyz II Men. “I just found I could sing that stuff naturally, so when I first started writing songs seriously, and teaching myself how to play guitar, it was soul song after soul song. Just pure love songs. I was 14, I’d never been in love, but I had a good understanding of what love might be. And almost every song had the word ‘love’ in its title!

Ben wanted to be heard, but no one wanted to listen to a white boy from Forest Gate singing silly love songs. He began to rap, but that didn’t fit either: “I went down that whole route of just rapping about myself, saying my name and talking about how great I was – all that bravado rap. But it was shit. No one cares where Forest Gate is and all that. I don’t sell crack, I’m not a pimp – who’s going to be interested?”

Then Eminem came along, and taught him it was OK to be himself, to rap in the voice of a white boy from London’s East End. “He was brilliant, he changed the whole game. He didn’t just influence white rappers, he influenced everyone. He showed that hip hop that didn’t have to be about the rings and the money and the hos.”

Rapping and singing in his own accent, playing his guitar, Ben began to tell stories about the world he’d grown up in. Some songs were written from personal experience (‘Mama Loves A Crackhead’), but most involved characters he’d invented (like ‘Kidz’, inspired by the murder of south London schoolboy Damilola Taylor).

“Kidz was the first song that I wrote that was charac