Bad Manors: Plan B reveals all about the ghetto violence that inspired his music and movie career

Bad Manors: Plan B reveals all about the ghetto violence that inspired his music and movie career

The singer/rapper and now film director Ben Drew â€" aka Plan B â€" is late. Very, very late. But on a sunny spring day he has been doing back-to-back interviews to promote the release of Ill Manors, a gritty movie set in East London he wrote and directed.

It is a remarkable debut from a man whose passion for the subject is patently obvious as he talks at length with great enthusiam.

The film is a series of interlocking tales which cover drug dealing, guns and young lives manipulated into major crime.

Drew used his own knowledge of growing up in the deprived London area of Forest Gate to paint this bleak picture.

“When you are parentless or you don’t have a good parental role model in your life, you are exposed on the street,” says Ben, 28.

“Kids go into different postcodes and if other kids see you and know you are not from that area, then they will rob you and beat you. That’s how it works.

“If you have an older brother the n you are usually OK. But a lot of kids don’t have that, so they don’t have anyone looking after them.

"When an older person then says, ‘Look, I will protect you’, he’ll expect certain things from you in return. That usually means he’ll want you to traffic drugs around the local area.

“You will be making a bit of money, buy the trainers you want and, before you know it, you’re in a gang.

“And you can’t get out of it because you owe them. But the fact you know that person means you can walk through certain postcodes and people won’t touch you. A lot of it comes from kids being scared. It’s really simple.

“But nobody ever writes of that process and how kids are drawn into it. I felt a desire to talk about things that I saw and wanted to change.”

Ill Manors: It’s astonishing a film that’s so ambitious got made for so little, says our reviewer

Shooting started in 2010 with further filming last year just as London was engulfed in riots. Ben saw for himself how many chose not to take part, while for others it showed how little they had to loose.

“When the riots happened it wasn’t just middle England being outraged and Londoners rioting,” he says. “We need to understand the problem and why these people don’t give a f*** and think they don’t have a future.

“They feel that they are going to prison, and it’s just a matter of time. How do you change that? I think you can do it through film and through music.”

Ill Manors itself led to conflicts. The rapper wrote the screenplay himself and secured funding through the Microwave film project where movies are made for just £100,000.

They stumped up £50,000 and Drew had to find the rest.

But feeling flush after the success of his album The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, he decided to fund the remainder out of his own pocket, although Ben felt he needed to go over the £100,000 threshold to achieve what he wanted.

“We had a 19-day shoot,” he explains, “and I got all the major action. But looking at it I realised there was a massive hole here and I didn’t have an ending and I didn’t have any money. So I sold the distribution and spent last summer fixing the film.

“There were a lot of creative things I wanted to do but didn’t have the money. I love what Microwave do. I love that you can make something on such a small budget.

Shifty [the Eran Creevy 2009 film] was made like that. But any project made for that amount of money will suffer in some way. ”

Ben was brought up in Forest Gate by his single mum. His father Paul Ballance, who played in punk band The Warm Jets, walked out when he was five months old.

Growing up, he saw crime and drugs all around him but wasn’t tempted to get sucked into that life. Instead he put all his energies into his music. But at school trouble was never far away.

“I didn’t have an older brother looking after me in school,” Ben explains, “and the white kids were the minority, so you were a target. It’s not a racist thing, it’s just that if you ain’t got anyone backing you up, people try it on.

“I hated that first thing in the morning you would bump into someone on the stairs and they would say say sorry. You would say, ‘F*** you, meet me at lunchtime’, and slowly the whole school would know that we were going to fight.

“But by then you are not angry any more. Then the fear kicks in and you wonder how many of his mates will be there and w hether he would have a weapon. So instead of going through all that I would just hit him there and then on the stairs.

“Because I didn’t wait until lunchtime and sort it out off the school grounds, I’d keep getting caught by teachers and this would carry on happening.”

 

Drew was eventually expelled after a teacher tried to move a friend he was talking to in class.

“I lost it completely,” he admits. “I picked up a stool and threw it at him. I didn’t hit him. It went across the classroom over the heads of the other kids and smashed some glass.

“I knew I was expelled. I walked out of school, blew my last money on a packet of cigarettes and spent the afternoon smoking.

“My mum was crying. She filled me with so much belief in myself. I think she felt the music was a bit of a dream. My sister said not to put all my eggs in one basket.”

But Ben’s determination to succeed and his faith in his own abilities paid off and he saw moderate success with the debut Plan B
album Who Needs Actions When You Got Words in 2006.

But it was soul record The Defamation Of Strickland Banks four years later which went stratospheric, entering the charts at No 1.

Drew fully acknowledges that without the success of his music, his life may have gone in a very different direction.

“The only thing that would have pushed me into that would have been anger or bitterness,” he shrugs. “Anger that things hadn’t happened the way I wanted them in my life, and bitterness that other less talented people were getting opportunities that I felt I should have been getting.

“After the first record that’s how I felt. It wasn’t a commercial success and I was seeing other people do well. I would be playing at a festival and have a s****y little dressing room while someone else, who ain’t even around no more, gets the big old dressing room and is treated like royalty. That added to my anger and bitterness.

"I think if I’d never got signed to a deal, that anger and that bitterness would have hit me at some point. I reckon I would have turned that into something negative. Why not make money selling drugs then, being a gangster? Maybe, maybe.”

Daily Mirror film critic David Edwards gives his view on Plan B's new movie Ill Manors

In 2009, Ben Drew â€" better known as rapper Plan B â€" was given £100,000 and told to go away and make a movie.

What he’s come up with is a bleak multi-layered crime drama clearly trying to replicate the violence and moral uncertainties of Mean Streets.

And while it doesn’t quite land us in Scorsese-land, it’s astonishing a film that’s so ambitious got made for so little.

With the Olympic Park forming a backdrop to much of the action, we’re introduced to the ne’er-do-wells of East London, including a conflicted drug dealer (Riz Ahmed), a sex slave who’s just become a mum (Nathalie Press) and a crack-addled hooker (Anouska Mond).

Despite too many characters â€" and too many rap numbers â€" you’re left relishing Drew’s next project.

Rating: 3/5