Review: Plan B, Bedgebury Pinetum, Goudhurst, Friday, June 22

by Chris Price

Plan B is going through a difficult phase.

After being propelled to superstardom with his triple-platinum second album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, he has rejected the opportunity to make a lucrative soul-based follow up.

A man of artistic integrity, his next record will instead be the gritty soundtrack to his movie iLL Manors but the material on the album, due for release next month, does not sit well with the majority of the audience who turn up to see him at Bedgebury Pinetum.

This crowd is largely the Strickland crew - a mainly middle-aged congregation of picnic carrying, deckchair wielding soul-lovers who bought the record because of how sophisiticated its smooth love songs made them feel with a glass of Remy Martin at their dinner parties.

And Plan B - who is credited by his real name Ben Drew as director of iLL Manors - gives them exactly what they want as he performs material entirely from his 2010 album in the first half of the show, save for one cover of Paulo Nutini's Coming Up Easy.

Opening with Writing's On The Walll, the suited up Plan B cruises through Free, Welcome to Hell before wowing the crowd with Praying, ending the song with heavy rock, reggae and dubstep versions of the chorus.

Album opener Love Goes Down has the female half of the crowd melting, before the younger audience finally get an excuse to jump around with Recluse.

"For those of you who don't like moshpits, What You Gonna Do?" he playfully asked the crowd after his Paulo Nutini cover, before launching into the song.

"For most of you here, it's the moment you have all been waiting for. It's karaoke time," he said as he clicked his fingers to the opening beats of She Said, which gets the expected huge reception.

This was the start of the difficult second half of the concert for the rapper, who invited his beatboxer friend Faith SFX on stage to perform a 10 minute set, while the Strickland Banks sign came down and he made a costume change.

The crowd were impressed as Faith SFX raced through Prodigy's Breathe, Blur's Song 2, Tinie Tempah's Pass Out and White Stripes' Seven Nation Army purely with the power of his voice and forgave the urban deviation when Plan B returned to the stage singing Stand By Me.

Yet dubstep remixes of this and Seal's Kiss from a Rose drew frowns from some parts of the crowd, even though they showed off how well Plan B can sing.

The rapper actually seemed more comfortable in this more aggressive iLL Manors phase of the concert, bouncing around the stage through Lost My Way, Playing with Fire and asking the crowd "how many of you went to see the film?" as he rifled through several tracks which appear on it.

The heavy rock live version of Pieces, a Chase and Status song he features on, keeps the "moshpit crew" happy before he deviates to first album Who Needs Actions When You Got Words for the one and only time with Charmaine.

"That's ill but not as ill as this" he shouts as the menacing strings of iLL Manors provoke even what's left of the Strickland crew to jump about. The single's pure anger comes across brilliantly live and ends the set on a high. He returns shouting "we've saved the best til last" for an encore of Stay Too Long, which is met with hysteria from all corners.

The task of appealing to his Stickland fans and staying true to himself might be a near impossible one but for the soul-loving punters who had stuck around, Plan B might just have made a few urban music converts.