Plan B – ‘She Said’
I love it when a Plan B comes together.*
Once upon a time, Plan B was a startling proposition, a sweary UK rapper with a penetrating stare, dragging an acoustic guitar behind him. That’s right, an acoustic guitar. Here’s this tough kid with tough rhymes and street-hardened scowl standing on stage with an instrument more commonly associated with weedy singer-songwriters and their endless tales of slightly-disappointing love.
No matter how many photoshoots he did with fake blood running down his hands, no matter how much brutal reality he hammered into his songs, there was always a faint air of suspicion, as if everyone was too afraid to admit that a rapper with a guitar is just a grumpy Jack Johnson.
(Here’s the video. It’s judgemental.)
That’s clearly not the case, but the Plan B of old was like a shot of very strong medicine when you really only needed a cough sweet. Now, he’s a reborn soul man: still as tough as old boots – he put the willies up James Corden when he appeared on Jonathan Ross recently – still telling what the Kinks would call “tales of drunkenness and cruelty”, only he’s started dressing sharp, in a suit, he’s singing falsetto, and he’s brought what looks and sounds like Amy Winehouse’s backing band along for the ride.
That’s right, Amy Winehouse. Amy flipping Winehouse. The sound of 2006. As far as good pop ideas go, the Amy Winehouse card is more creased, battered and tatty than any left in the deck, including ‘Let’s Hook Up With Akon’ and ‘Shall We Auto-Tune The Chorus?’. And the trouble with the Amy Winehouse card is that everyone always leaves out the primary ingredient: the soul.
Not the soul MUSIC, you understand, anyone can put on a mohair suit and pretend to be a Temptation, the SOUL. The bit of the song which aches. Plan B, for all that he is late to the party, for all that he can’t quite hit all the notes his poor strained throat is aiming at, has remembered to bring the pain.
It was there in ‘Stay Too Long’, the last single, where you just KNEW his wild night out would end in trouble, and it’s here now. She loves him, he’s leaving, the law are involved. Once again, you just KNOW this isn’t going to end well for either of them, and yet there’s nothing anyone can do to change what is about to happen.
There’s no shame-faced raking over the hard-won lessons of the past here, that would be a step away from the pain, a frame to put around it. They’re caught up in the moment, and as listeners, so are we. Good luck, everyone!
Download: 29th March
www.time4planb.co.uk
BBC Music page
(Fraser McAlpine)
* You may not get this right now, but at some point during the forthcoming A Team movie, you’ll suddenly go “OH!” and settle back down in your seat, slightly disappointed.
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