After the smash hit The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, UK singer and rapper Plan B assured Undercover he hasn’t turned his back on hip-hop.
Plan B’s first album Who Needs Actions When You’ve Got Words was hip-hop and during our chat with the singer and rapper, he admits that he was bitter about its relative lack of success.
“A lot of it is luck,” he says, “If people don’t get it, it doesn’t matter how good your album is. My first album is brilliant. I’ll sit here and say my first album is wicked, critically-acclaimed, but it was ignored. I still feel bitter about how ignored my first record was. It was a great album but it weren’t the right time for it. I had no luck. I was flogging a dead horse.”
It was certainly the right time for last year’s soul breakthrough The Defamation Of Strickland Banks.
He says that the creative turn was most specifically a way of challenging himself.
“Songwriting comes very easily to me and I felt that I was cheating myself by not doing something more challenging,” he admits, “Once I’d done the hip-hop record, it was such a personal record I just felt that I’m not going to try and do it again in album two because I’d already done it.”
“I wanted to tell a story about someone else,” he muses. “I had this idea for a concept album but I just didn’t have a story and through the soul songs I’d written, they gave me the story.”
He’s quick to refute the idea that he’s turned his back on his hip-hop roots.
“A lot of people think I’ve completely changed direction but the truth is I’d actually set out to make a hip-hop record that had elements of soul music in it,” he explains. “And I did. I wrote a hip-hop record and a soul record and the only reason it looks as though I’ve turned my back on hip-hop is because the hip-hop record hasn’t come out yet.”
The next album is a hip-hop version of the Strickland Banks events called The Ballad Of Belmarsh.
He confirms, “If you wanna know about the Strickland Banks story and how it ends, you’re going to have to buy The Ballad Of Belmarsh.”
Check out the rest of the interview below, where Plan B talks about how he got lucky with big sales, how The Ballad Of Belmarsh works, how to change people’s minds about hip-hop, making films, and switching up styles.
