Who’s Jack magazine, August 2010: The Year In Review

August 2010 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Who’s Jack magazine, June 2010: Deck Shoes

June 2010 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Who’s Jack magazine, May 2010: On The Front Line…Again

May 2010 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Steve Mason – Lost and Found

This profile originally appeared on Gigwise on April 27th 2010.

Sitting in the sundrenched beer garden of an east London pub, Steve Mason is talking about a recent broadsheet interview he gave which he believes “missed a bit of a trick” by proclaiming his new album to be about depression. “This isn’t an album about depression at all, it’s not about depression or anything,” he says, before highlighting that only the album’s title track ‘Boys Outside’ mentions the disorder – and even that song is “about saying goodbye to depression”.

Mason’s frustration is perhaps understandable. While it is true that the Scotsman has suffered from depression for “about 15 years”, ‘Boys Outside’ is far from an irksome deference to the disorder. In places, for example, like on the opener ‘Understand My Heart’ or ‘I Let Her In’, Mason recalls romantic failure as a hypnotic mixture of acoustic guitar and subtle synthesisers unravel themselves softly in the background. And as one has come to expect from the singer who found fame in the mid-90s as the outspoken frontman of the critically acclaimed The Beta Band, there are also songs about how nothing is sacred anymore, and the meagreness of politics. It’s no surprise then that ‘Boys Outside’ has already been greeted with the kind of positive reception Mason once came to expect.

“It’s amazing, it’s already exceeded my expectations I have to say,” Mason says of the kind response so far. “I’m doing sort of Beta Band levels of press – we used to do a lot back then – so it’s great. I mean, I’m very happy with it, I know it’s a good record – but I suppose every record I’ve ever put out I always thought it was amazing at the time.”

Before we met, I had been warned by people who have interviewed Mason in the past to expect one of two receptions: he could be either welcoming or, to quote one journalist who spoke to him over a decade ago, “very rude”. This is, after all, the same singer who while promoting The Beta Band’s self-titled debut album in 1999 famously described it as a “crock of shit” – an erroneous statement which seemed to pre-empt the band’s eventual demise five years later.

Only it’s not. Today, as he sips on a coca cola drink, Mason, now 37, is far from the confrontational character that once greeted interviewers. His sentences, like when he’s discussing the recent TV leadership debates – “I watched little odds and ends of it yeah, just because I was hoping that Gordon Brown might smack one of them in the mouth at one point but he never did” – are frequently punctuated by a warm smile. He’s also visibly relaxed, and appears finally, after a six-year period of releasing albums under different pseudonyms, including most recently as the electro act Black Affair, to be at ease in his own skin, which is perhaps why he’s chosen to release his new album under his own name.

“I think it’s just a case of getting a bit older and feeling probably more comfortable with myself, and less like I want to hide from everything all the time,” he says, frankly. “Being able to kind of stand up and say, ‘Yeah I made this,’ rather than hiding behind all these different names.”

In fact, Mason says he began writing ‘Boys Outside’ with the intention of releasing it as the follow-up to Black Affair’s debut album ‘Pleasure Pressure Point’, but “then I just lost heart in it – in the synths, the drums and stuff like that – and I hadn’t really picked up an acoustic guitar for a long time”. When he did, he says he wrote a song “pretty much straight away” and continued to write tracks acoustically at his cottage near St Andrews, in Fife, before contacting Richard X, who had already agreed to work with him on Black Affair’s second record. Despite the producer’s pop-dance background as the mastermind behind chart hits for the Sugababes and Liberty X, Mason says Richard X “loved” his new direction, so much so that he bankrolled everything until they secured a publishing deal with Domino. He also admits that he felt the same way about handing over the reigns to someone else after producing all of the albums by his post-Beta Band guises.

He smiles, for example, when I mention a YouTube video of the pair in the studio, which shows Richard X telling the singer to “just do it” as he hesitates over a guitar part. “Yeah, which I really liked,” he says of the producer’s assertiveness, “because no one’s really done that to me before.”

It’s testament to what the pair have produced that Mason, having recently relocated to London, says he’s now excited about “being kicked into this whole promotion thing” again.

“I feel very differently about it than I used to feel. I used to think of it as…” he pauses, allowing the sound of two drinkers kicking a football nearby to intensify, before continuing, “as something I didn’t really want to do. You wanted to see the articles in the paper or magazine – or whatever it was – but you didn’t necessarily want to go and have to speak to the journalist about it.”

Mason believes that the journalists he’s met in recent weeks have been different – probably, he thinks, because of the Internet – to those he’s experienced in the past. In the days of The Beta Band, he says, they “were all fucking major cokeheads that felt like they were part of the band and that kind of thing”, whereas now they “seem to go to a lot more effort”. His only gripe seems to be with the NME. “Read stuff like the NME now and it’s like The Sun,” he says. “It’s written for people with no brains, but people have those brains.”

While extensive sessions of hypnotherapy over the last two years have helped erase many of Mason’s demons, it’s encouraging to see that he’s not lost all of his forthright sincerity. For instance, he’s still clearly frustrated by the country’s political system. Album track ‘Yesterday’, he explains, is “about gathering a group of people together and marching on the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall with petrol bombs and levelling it to the fucking ground, and rebuilding the political system from the ground up”.

Does he think the upcoming election will make any difference? “No it’s fucking farce,” he replies, sharply. “No absolutely not, of course not.” He stops. “The government and the banks hate the people of this country, they hate the general public, they have no interest in them whatsoever, and that’s a very dangerous situation.”

As we part, I wonder whether Mason ever feels as if there’s any unfinished business with his previous outfits, notably The Beta Band. “No, I’ve never felt that at all.” A grin suddenly smothers his face. “It’s a good way of putting it though, I’ve never heard anyone manage to bring up The Beta Band with the unfinished business thing – that’s a good one.”

So this genuinely feels like a new start, I say.

“Yeah, it definitely feels right, it feels like a lot of different things have come together, and I’m very lucky that I’ve still got a lot of support out there,” he responds, sincerely. “There’s always been a willingness for me to make a really, really good record, which is really nice. I really appreciate it, and now I’ve actually managed to do that people are like, ‘Ah thank fuck for that, he’s actually done something that we all really, really like.’” And with that, another smile emerges.

Plan B – Strictland Business

This profile originally appeared on Gigwise on March 22nd 2010.

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? Fucking cunts.”

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 fucking 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.”

When I interviewed Drew shortly after the release of his first record, he displayed a similar level of courage towards overcoming stereotypes. He had then, after all, taken it upon himself to try his hand at mastering a music genre that’s still, in many people’s eyes, performed most successfully by black artists. Yet in 2006, as the lyrics on his debut album highlighted, Drew’s bravado often manifested itself through his own anger. Talking to him today, however, he’s noticeably both physically and mentally more relaxed – the result of a year attending anger management classes.

“I was an angry guy wasn’t I?” he admits, when I ask him if he thinks he’s changed. “You could hear it.” After a lifetime spent solving “problems with my fists” on his estate, Drew admits he found it “very hard” when suddenly confronted by the music business. He needed help. “There’s a lot of people that don’t want to go to counselling because they think it’s mad, they think it’s admitting that you’re kind of mentally ill,” he says. “And it’s not that at all – it just means that you’re emotionally ill and you learn how to control your emotions and how they affect your life.” He says his anger stemmed from his belief that “everybody’s got something that’s been broken inside of them because their parents put it there” and describes his 12 months receiving therapy as “the most unhappiest year”. But he would advise anyone with similar issues to get help. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fix those things and I’ve come out the other side.” He smiles. “Music is my therapy.”

As well as music, Drew’s also been helped by his passion for film – something which he first took an interest in as a child and decided to explore more seriously following the release of his first album. His credits so far include an appearance in BAFTA-award winning actor Noel Clarke’s directorial debut Adulthood in 2008 and, more recently, alongside Sir Michael Caine in Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown. The latter film, Drew says, “made people take me more seriously” and encouraged him to write his first full-length feature.

Entitled Ill Manors (“Spelt Manors as in where you’re from,” he points out), the film, which is due to go into production later this year, follows “six short stories that all mix into each other, but come to a head at the end”. It is, he says more plainly, “the hip-hop musical version of [Paul Haggis’s 2005 film] Crash”.

Drew says he’s also hoping to shoot a featurette about his present alter ego, Strictland Banks. But first, he’s focusing on the album, which he poignantly describes as a “film for the blind”. “For me, I guess, that’s my aspiration in life,” he adds. “When people see the name Plan B or see my face it represents the way in which I express myself, which is an amalgamation of music and films.” There’s also, of course, the task of singing in public. I wonder if he’s worried whether his new direction might alienate his hip-hop fans. “I’m aware that there are fans out there that might feel alienated by this but I feel like I cater for them; I feel like I have catered for them, they just don’t know it yet,” he replies enigmatically, adding that a hip-hop album, which “explains all the gaps” in Strictland’s story, will be released later this year on his own label, Pet Cemetery.

I had intended to ask Drew whether he was now a rapper or singer, yet, as another cold breath emerges from his mouth, its clear that he already sees himself as so much more. He, instead, draws a parallel to culture’s desire to evolve, as it always has done. Another icy breath emerges. “And I guess that’s with me: I change with the times but it’s not anybody else’s time, it’s my time, you know what I mean?”

Who’s Jack magazine, March 2010: The Bow-Tie

March 2010 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Who’s Jack magazine, February 2010: Quite coat-ent

February 2010 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Who’s Jack magazine, January 2010: Simon says…

January 2010 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Who’s Jack magazine, December 2009: Stocking Fillers

December 2009 column for Who’s Jack magazine…

Who’s Jack magazine, November 2009: Winter Warmth

November 2009 column for Who’s Jack magazine…