Mon 12 Oct//Example + Kenny V + Beatbullyz + Alex M and Anil MC

[Plug]

Mon 12 Oct//Example + Kenny V + Beatbullyz + Alex M and Anil MC

 

Doors: 7:30 pm

Price: £7.00 adv

Age: 14+

http://www.myspace.com/leadingbyexample

http://www.myspace.com/beatbullyz

http://www.myspace.com/kennyvicious20

 

So you say to Example, ‘that sounds a bit like Wham, you know'. And he looks at you and says, ‘well, the sound I was going for was sort of Wham meets Five Star...' And that's where Example's head is these days.

 

 

As he says himself, he's still a rapper - "just one who happens to make huge, catchy choruses". Then he'll start listing his influences: Kanye, Madness, George Clinton, Daft Punk, The Rolling Stones, and suddenly his wildly eclectic, sometimes eccentric but defiantly tuneful second album begins to make a lot of sense.

 

In uncertain times it's so tempting to try to predict or shape the future that you forget how life's most exciting bits come when you're smacked right round the side of the head by fate and fortune's unexpected whims. Example wasn't very excited, to be fair, when his deal with Mike Skinner's Beats label went tits up at the end of 2007, with the label's funding being pulled just as Example's Carpenters-sampling single ‘So Many Roads' - and a profile he'd been carefully building over the previous two years - looked likely to propel him into the charts. Nor was he very excited when he boarded a plane to Australia, where his parents had moved after raising him in south west London, to sort his head out. And he wasn't very excited when (as mums do) Mrs Example made encouraging noises about her talented son. "I was like, ‘thanks mum, but all mums say that'," he recalls; as it turns out mum knew best and upon returning to the UK Example received a call from Ministry Of Sound. They'd heard what happened with The Beats, and wanted to know if he had any new tunes. This is when it started to get exciting because, as it happens, Example did have one or two new tracks. The biggest track on his first album, ‘Me & Mandy', was created right at the very end of the album sessions, just as Example's songwriting turned a major corner. While album one was in the shops he continued to write pop songs, as is the wont of creative types.

 

 

And that brings us to where we are now: those songs and some new ones bundled onto a new album, on a new label. Having previously worked with the likes of Herve, Don Diablo, Pascal Gabriel, Chase & Status and MJ Cole. This time Example has chosen the god like talents of Scotland's finest Calvin Harris and the mighty Metrophonic - the multi-person production team headed up by pop superproducer Brian Rawling - who more than knows a thing or two about global hitmaking having worked with the likes of superstars Britney and Kylie.

 

 

"I was concerned at the beginning," Example admits. "They're undoubtedly great engineers and mixers and musically talented, but I was like, ‘how are they going to work with me?' They've got a history of working with made to order acts where they've got songs ready to go with no edgy lyrics, everything's the same and uniform. But something clicked..." What clicked, Example says, is that Rawling has ‘common ears' - Pete Waterman used to call them ‘Woolworths ears' - finely tuned to the sound of the crowd. The rest, Example says, is just noise. "Take Britney for example," he declares. "If you look at the last three Britney albums they've all drawn on the big underground music of the time - dupstep, bassline, emo, whatever - and it's genius. I know producers, these underground producers, who've got Britney on loop, they're obsessed and mesmerized about how this music sounds like it does. But I don't really want my peers or other producers to go, ‘oh, Example's made a good album'. That's what I was bothered about with my last album, when I spent all my time trying to ‘pay dues' or whatever.

 

Example's widescreen look at life is a vision perhaps typical of a man who has immersed himself, since being a teenager, not only in street culture but also in film making, studying directing at Royal Holloway Uni at the start of the decade and combining his two passions on numerous occasions in the subsequent years. Notably Example took the opportunity, while shooting the ‘What We Made' video in Chernobyl, to make a short film focusing on the area's derelict local amenities. It was a bold, moving account and in 2009 Example's still all about the big ideas. This new album comes with all the 26-year-old's energy channeled into a desire to be on big stages, and to get on the biggest stage, he reasons, you need the biggest songs.

 

 

"There's no two ways around it," he declares. "It's not about being the best singer, or the best rapper*. It's about having the biggest songs. If you've got that sorted, it's job done." Fortunately there's no questioning the size of some of this fella's new tunes. ‘Inside Your Head' and ‘Watch The Sun Come Up' are both the work of a serious songwriting talent, and with the pressure off he's settling comfortably into love songs and relationship anthems - that new adopted genre of, as he puts it, ‘female-based chat'. "I used to have a thing - a mild insecurity - that I'd have to cover ten different subjects in an album," he admits. "And then you think, Marvin Gaye! Michael Jackson! Entire albums, just about women from different points of view." So while there's an accidental credit crunch anthem called ‘The Fearless' (it was completed on the day Lehmen Brothers went down, throwing a whole new light on its lyrics) most of this new material centres on love in its many, sometimes splendid, forms.

 

 

What strikes you most as you chat with Example about his new album is his unusually infectious enthusiasm - he is, he says, "obsessed with writing songs" - and the passion he has for taking them out on the road to the people who will, he hopes, share his excitement. "When I was at school you had to be into football, basketball or rap," he says. "And if you were into rap, you couldn't like both garage and hip-hop. It had to be one or the other. These days, it's weird not to like the whole lot - that's why my show's a mash-up, and that's why my album's got all these different flavours. On my first album I wanted to be a cool credible rapper. Then, when I was free, I realised I just wanted to make pop songs, be a ****ing popstar, have fun, be on sd play to big crowds."