Professor Green goes pro

Professor Green is looking at my feet and tutting.

He’s not happy with my white Lonsdale sneakers. Green is a seasoned trainer-spotter, and even Alfie, his Staffordshire bull terrier who’s been skittering around the rapper’s Bermondsey flat, stops sniffing my leg to shoot me an unimpressed look.

It is September 2011, and I’ve just had a sneak preview of Green’s second album, At Your Inconvenience, and its rousing hit-in-waiting ‘Read All About It’. The song is a blistering depiction of absent fathers, angry sons and familial betrayal, all set to a sublimely hooky chorus sung by Emeli Sandé. After the sample-heavy chirpy pop of his first album’s big hits ‘Just Be Good To Green’ (which featured his friend Lily Allen) and ‘I Need You Tonight’, it’s refreshing to hear how Professor Green has stepped up a gear.

Now, it seems, he wants to give me a makeover. ‘Pro’, born Stephen Manderson in Hackney 28 years ago, leads me past the under-used treadmill (draped with drying shirts) and into a back room. One entire wall is taken up with cubbyholes filled with box-fresh Pumas. He asks me to take my pick. I think for a moment about journalistic ethics, but help myself to a pair of pale blue Classics. (Green can afford to be generous. At Your Inconvenience has now sold almost 300,000 copies.) The Brits-nominated star has Puma freebies coming out of his ears as ‘social ambassador’ for the brand. ‘They wanted someone to champion it who wasn’t sporty, which fits me down to the ground. I’m definitely not athletic,’ he smiles, revealing the row of perfect pearly gnashers in which he invested after the success of his 2010 debut album Alive Till I’m Dead.

What he feels less suited to are the big advertising photo shoots: ‘I’m not a poser and photographers are always like, “Can we see the scar?”?’ This still-vivid injury on his neck is the legacy of a bottling in the Shoreditch club Cargo in 2009. Green lost so much blood he was only four minutes from death. Irony number one: he’d recently had the word ‘Lucky’ tattooed there. Irony number two: the unprovoked attack came at a time when it seemed he had finally moved out of the shadier side of London life.

Stephen Manderson’s parents were teenagers when they had him; after they split he was raised by his grandmother and great-grandmother. They did their best — Green recently had the latter’s name tattooed on his left arm — but he admits he was a handful. Roaming the streets of Hackney, running with the wrong crowd on his estate, he first tried cannabis at nine and by 17 was selling skunk. A bright pupil despite his serial truancy, he was duly christened Professor Green in honour of his preferred drug. But a love of hip-hop and a way with a rhyme proved his passport out. He was signed to The Beats, the label run by Mike Skinner (aka The Streets). It closed in late 2007 but in July 2008, he won a Myspace rap battle for unsigned artists. However, that year also brought a crashing low. His father, who had begun a new life in Essex with a new partner and her children, killed himself.

He says he doesn’t have a relationship with his father’s widow, although ‘I was supportive of her and her kids through [the period] when he passed away’. He was sickened by what he claims was the family’s behaviour at the time. ‘I went down to the hospital and none of them would walk in to ID the body. And a woman who he used to work with was gonna do it. And I was like, “Are you f***ing serious?” And I know it’s not easy — it was the first time I’d seen him in six years, and he was cold as a f***ing fish, on the table. But I walked in and I did it. So it infuriated me.’

When I catch up with Green again in mid-February, it’s all change. For lunch he’ll have the steak and veg, no carbs. He’s still on the fags, but he’s on a diet imposed by a personal trainer. He is tall (6ft 3in), charming, thoughtful and possessed of a politeness that he’d be the first to admit is at odds with his tearaway youth. And he’s increasingly sophisticated. He roars up to our rendezvous at The Cow on Westbourne Park Road in his new Mercedes E350. No, it’s not another freebie, nor has he bought it. ‘There’s no point in buying cars, you lose the VAT straight away,’ he frowns. ‘It’s a mug’s game.’ He’s leasing it instead, paying £22,000 over two years: ‘I give it back at the end of that and it’s lost more than 22 grand in value, so it’s the best way to do it.’

Today he’s in beige chinos and a crew-neck sweatshirt by Japanese label Edwin, ‘my favourite denim brand’. Three days previously he’d scrubbed up nicely for the Brit Awards in a bespoke suit by Givenchy, accessorised with a white-gold chain from Shamballa Jewels, a Danish brand with whom he’s embarked on yet another nascent partnership. ‘I’ve bought Givenchy’s clothes for ages. It’s cool because Riccardo Tisci, the designer, is very particular. The only other two urban artists that he dresses are Kanye [West] and Jay-Z. And he’s actually done the album artwork for [West/Jay-Z collaboration] Watch The Throne. That’s not bad company, is it?’

Green has been moving on in other ways. He hasn’t been home much — two days after our meeting he is off on tour to Australia, then America — but in any case the pop star is no longer living in Bermondsey. He’s ‘living East again,’ he says, refusing to mention where. ‘Where I am now is out the way. And it’s gated. I was getting so much shit in Bermondsey. That’s why I don’t want anyone knowing where I am.’

He’s not referring to his family, even though the emotion and ire that crackled from the number one hit ‘Read All About It’ brought his personal trauma front and centre in the public eye. ‘Read All About It’ was his vitriolic rebuttal of his father’s widow’s claim — made in the newspapers — that Green had tried to ‘cash in’ on his father’s death. Was there any fall-out from his revisiting the subject in the single’s lyrics? ‘Nope, haven’t heard a word. She must know what a c*** she is.’ The satisfaction, he acknowledges, runs deep. ‘Massively. I had a number one single with the song that’s closest to me. The most personal song I’ve ever written was my biggest song to date. That means a lot, man.’

There has also been some turmoil in his love life. Last year he was living with Candy McCulloch, a former Hollyoaks star and daughter of Echo & The Bunnymen frontman Ian. They’d met on the set of the video for his 2010 single ‘Monster’. That said, he couldn’t recall the encounter: ‘I was so up to my eyeballs in Valium that I didn’t remember,’ he says, slightly mortified. He met her again two weeks later at Bestival, and ‘luckily my chat was good enough’ to make up for his drug-induced amnesia. ‘I was in a naughty place. Yeah.’ He was taking the tranquilliser because he’s always had ‘proper’ problems sleeping. ‘And I just got a bit carried away.’ So was he partying too much? ‘No no no no,’ he says. ‘I don’t do coke. It makes me feel shit and I don’t need help with my confidence. It normally just turns people into c***s. I’ve had amazing nights on it,’ he admits. ‘But I’ve also had some of the worst experiences in my life on that drug. I’ve always been quite a stressy person. I’ve always had a lot going on, whether I’ve been selling drugs or making music, or both. I just always had trouble sleeping. But with the workload it became more of a problem.’ Hence the Valium? ‘Hence the Valium,’ he nods. ‘And the Zolpidem, Zopiclone, Xanax…’