Plan B moves out of the darkness and into the spotlight

After winning Best Male Artist 2011 at the Brits, Ben Drew went AWOL. 'I haven't been able to reach him or his team in five days,' sighed his publicist last week. Perhaps the Jack Daniels, Grey Goose vodka, mixers, and half a case of Red Bull in his dressing room had something to do with it. 'I like chain-smoking and drinking JD till I'm fucked,' the man himself tells me, and to be fair, he has a lot to celebrate. Not only has he transformed himself, in an extraordinary act of career metamorphosis, from marginal East London rapper to smooth, best-selling soul star but he easily upstaged everyone else at the Brits.

His performance began as an all-singing, all-dancing courtroom drama, complete with jiving jurors and a bobbing judge, then turned into a prison breakout live on stage, with breakdancing riot police, choreographed brawling in the stalls, and ended with a stunt policeman, on fire, skidding across the stage. In dubious taste, perhaps, but you couldn't fault its originality. Only there was one small catch: he was not the first artist that evening whose backing singers were dressed as riot police. 'I couldn't believe it when I came in and saw Take That's police,' he says, incredulous. 'I just saw their shields and said, "What the fuck is this?"  ' Still, Plan felt he came out on top. 'Theirs was the PG version They were just trying to copy me.' We can assume he did not attend Take That's record label's £400,000 after-party at The Savoy.

Success has not mellowed Ben Drew. He's a dramatic soul. As we sit down for our interview in a warehouse studio near his home in Hackney, Mozart's Requiem is blaring out of the speakers: 'Dies irae! Dies illa!' It's his choice of music - 'I don't know anything about classical, I just like it, I like Mozart, I like Beethoven' - and he doesn't want it turned down. Indeed, it makes the perfect backing for our interview. My tape comes out sounding like a hit record as Plan B mellifluously, rhythmically curses over the Mozart - 17 effs in 40 minutes - as he talks me through some vivid, seminal moments in his angry young life. His earliest memory, from when he was a toddler, is appropriately Cain-and-Abel. 'Fighting in a sandpit, for a twig. It was MY fucking stick!'

H e grew up on an estate in Forest Gate, East London (soon to be immortalised in Ill Manors, the autobiographical film he has just directed, starring Riz Ahmed and Natalie Press). Was it a happy childhood? He pauses, exhales cigarette smoke. 'It was and it wasn't. It's hard being a kid. Your world is so small and you take everything so personally.' His mother brought him and three siblings up singlehandedly; his father, Paul Ballance, a sometime musician who fronted 1970s rock band the Warm Jets and later became an evangelical Christian, walked out when Ben was small. He has never let him back in. When his second album debuted at number one, his father sent him a text message. Ben deleted it. As he has said, 'He wasn't in my life and it was his decision. Now he's not in my life and it's my decision. Finally I got what I wanted. Closure.'
It's a matter of record that he was excluded from school, aged 15, for throwing chairs, ripping posters off the walls, calling a teacher a 'fucking slag' and other such offences, but he's never before talked about his first job. 'I knew I couldn't have a nine-to-five taking my time and energy. We only have one life. So I went on the dole and started dealing weed.' When I look surprised, he exclaims piously: 'It was only weed, right, not crack! It gave me enough money to keep me going, so I could' Follow his dream? Fulfil his musical talent? 'so I could go out to clubs and take drugs and go partying.' Right. Well at least he's honest.

He always sang. 'It just comes so naturally to me.' At school he was more Cyrano de Bergerac than Casanova. Mates would say to him, 'Ah, there's this girl I'm in love with, can you write me a song for her?' A natural at romantic ballads, he worked hard to become a lyrically dextrous rapper, which was his 'Plan B'. 'Hip-hop was the challenge and I was testing myself with that craft, to be the best in this country, in the world, up there with the greats.' With those expectations, he was heading for a fall, and despite some five-star reviews, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words (2006) only reached No 30 in the charts. A critique of street kids' bad behaviour, delivered in their own language, it throbbed with moral indignation. 'It was about the reality of stabbing, the reality of prison. It didn't make those things funny like Eminem does.' He got fan mail from boys in prison, which made him feel that 'it was all worthwhile', although generally, he thought his album was misunderstood and undervalued, while big money rap with bad values was rewarded. 'I was nominated for three MOBOs and I didn't win one,' he says, still miffed. 'And I got angry about that, because I was the one who was trying to say something deep, who was doing something that meant something'

By 2007 his rage was getting out of control. One night he threatened a stranger for an innocuous comment, then kicked over a bin and swore at the police. He was sent to court and given a suspended sentence, coming close to ruining his chances of ever selling his music in America. He took control, looked up 'anger management' in the Yellow Pages and saw a therapist once a week for a year. He also gave up illegal drugs. This man's demons are strong, but his will is stronger. 'Drugs inspired me, they unlocked a lot of ideas in my brain, but once they'd done that there was no use for them any more. I'm so deep anyway I don't need weed, it would drive me crazy. There's no place for drugs in my life. If you're in a dream state you can't achieve anything. My journey with drugs was over. I smoked my first spliff when I was 12; I smoked heroin at Glastonbury when I was 16. I lost three of my mates to heroin, they've been on it 10 years now, the whole time I've been doing my career. Heroin changes you, it's like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It changes you into an ugly person and it's all you think about. You become like that fucking Frodo at the end. Broken.'

Ben has pushed his career three times as hard as other people, growing and changing all the time. Developing the persona of stricken soul star Strickland Banks, he ditched his hoodies and started dressing smartly, discovering the joy of accessories: 'Tie pins and cufflinks and even bow-ties. Yeah, I can see why girls like shopping so much now.' He knows how to iron a handkerchief so that it will peep, just-so, out of a top pocket. 'Well, I was raised by women, I'm very domesticated.'

At 25, he directed his first feature film. 'Suddenly I needed to motivate all these people. I never saw myself as a leader like that but when it's something you're passionate about, you find those skills.' Was he feared or loved by his cast and crew? 'I used to turn the fear on them a bit. Not fear of me, more, "You could embarrass yourself here, or you could do something amazing'' ' His inspirations are Quentin Tarantino, Shane Meadows, and Ken Loach. 'Actually Loach's stuff isn't really my thing, he's too mundane and realistic, but what I like is when the script goes out of the window and you keep the camera rolling. That's when the magic happens' It was what he did himself when he had a cameo in the 2009 film Harry Brown, in which Michael Caine took up arms against today's feral youth: his bitter, spat-out monologue was almost entirely ad-libbed.

He has been judging films at BAFTA, he has duetted with Elton John, he is 'close' to buying his own place in Hackney and he gets people like me asking his opinions about politics. Which, for the record, are thus: 'Politicians only care about the bigger picture - the economy, Europe. On smaller policies they pretend to care. If they want to change anything they should be less orthodox in their thinking.' He thinks 'The best way to teach sex education in schools would be to show Larry Clark's Kids - it would cause an outcry, but sex and drugs are explicit things and they should be taught in an explicit way. Kids scared me into having protected sex, cos it's about a group of kids all having sex with each other and one of them's got AIDS. It made me really scared when I was with a girl to always wear a condom.'

He doesn't have a girlfriend at the moment and isn't keen to commit. 'With a boy there's no reason to feel you're ever going to stop talking to them, you know? It's simple, it's not complicated; if I meet a guy, we get on, we spend time with each other, we become friends. I can trust that person with certain secrets. With women I know there's always the danger that you're going to want to move on and then you've told this girl all this shit about you, and she uses that against you, so unless I meet a girl that I feel I'm going to spend the rest of my life with, there's only so much of myself I'm going to give to her.'