Ben Drew’s remarkable journey from uncompromising rapper to soul singer, actor and filmmaker
There are singers with beautiful voices, rappers with formidable verbal power and actors capable of making an audience uneasy with a single look. Ben Drew, better known as Plan B, has managed to be all three.
His voice can sound as though it belongs somewhere between an angel and a gangster: a soaring, wounded soul vocal one moment, followed by a torrent of furious street poetry the next. Few British artists have moved so convincingly between those worlds, and fewer still have carried the same vision from the recording studio onto the cinema screen.
Drew was born in Forest Gate, east London, in 1983. His childhood was unsettled, his experience of formal education difficult, and he eventually attended a pupil referral unit after being excluded from mainstream school. He taught himself to play the guitar as a teenager before turning towards hip-hop, discovering that rap gave him a language in which anger, imagination and uncomfortable truths could exist together.
The name Plan B came from that change of direction. Singing romantic songs had been one possibility; hard-edged rap became the alternative. The supposed fallback soon became his unmistakable identity.
Words sharpened into weapons
His debut album, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, arrived in 2006. It was raw, confrontational and frequently disturbing. Drew did not approach rap as polite social commentary. He created characters, entered damaged minds and described violence and neglect in language intended to make comfortable listeners recoil.
It was easy to hear only the aggression. Beneath it, however, was an emerging dramatist. His songs were often miniature films populated by offenders, victims, abandoned children and adults whose lives had narrowed into cruelty or despair. Even at his most provocative, Drew was interested in the forces that shaped people before society condemned them.
That instinct would eventually lead him towards cinema. First, however, he performed one of the most audacious reinventions in modern British popular music.
The arrival of Strickland Banks
In 2010, Plan B appeared to become another man entirely.
The Defamation of Strickland Banks was a concept album built around a fictional soul singer who is convicted of a crime he says he did not commit. The baseball caps and brutal rhymes gave way to sharp suits, Motown arrangements and a falsetto voice that seemed to have drifted out of a lost record from the 1960s.
The transformation was extraordinary because it did not feel like a novelty. Drew could genuinely sing. On tracks including Stay Too Long, Prayin’, The Recluse and She Said, his voice rose with sweetness, pain and theatrical urgency. The album reached number one in Britain and turned Plan B from a respected rapper into a major popular star.
Yet the rapper had not disappeared. He was hiding behind Strickland Banks, waiting for the music to turn dark again.
Drew’s gift was the tension between those identities. He could croon like a broken-hearted soul singer and rap like a man delivering evidence from the witness box. The elegance and the menace belonged to the same artist.
From the recording studio to Harry Brown
Drew’s movement into film was not a fashionable indulgence by a successful musician. Storytelling had always been embedded in his songs, and acting offered another means of inhabiting the characters he had already begun to create.
After appearing in Adulthood in 2008, he took the role of Noel Winters in the 2009 crime drama Harry Brown. Michael Caine played the title character, an elderly former Royal Marine driven towards vigilante violence by the brutality surrounding his housing estate.
Drew’s performance was not large in terms of screen time, but it was unforgettable. During an interrogation scene opposite Caine and Emily Mortimer, Noel is volatile, frightened, abusive and strangely vulnerable. Drew resisted making him into a simple screen monster. Behind the threats and bravado was a young man whose personality appeared to have been assembled from neglect, drugs, fear and violence.
It was the kind of character Plan B’s music had been examining from the beginning.
Drew subsequently appeared in other British productions, including 4.3.2.1, Turnout and The Sweeney. In the latter, released in 2012, he played Detective Constable George Carter alongside Ray Winstone’s Jack Regan. By then, however, he was no longer content merely to stand in front of the camera.
Ill Manors: the rapper becomes a director
Drew made his feature-directing debut with Ill Manors in 2012, a bleak, interlocking drama set in east London. He wrote and directed the film, co-created its music and used songs as a form of narration connecting the lives of its characters.
Made through Film London’s Microwave programme on a budget of around £100,000, it was ambitious far beyond its financial scale. Riz Ahmed, Ed Skrein and Natalie Press were among a cast portraying people caught in cycles of crime, exploitation, addiction and abandonment.
The film was harsh and deliberately difficult to watch. It was also more compassionate than its surface violence initially suggested. Drew was not excusing brutality, but asking where it began. The film looked past newspaper labels such as “thug” and “feral youth” and towards the failures of families, institutions and society.
Its accompanying album, also titled Ill Manors, became another number-one record. The title track was written in the shadow of the 2011 riots and delivered a furious response to social exclusion, political contempt and the demonisation of working-class young people.
Film and music had effectively become one work. The rapper narrated, the actors embodied his stories and the director assembled them into a portrait of a city divided against itself. Film London describes it as Drew’s directorial debut and a crime thriller rooted in London’s streets.
Fame, exhaustion and withdrawal
Such an intense period of success carried a cost. Drew later spoke about the strain surrounding his workload, weight and drinking, as well as the alienation he experienced after Ill Manors. Rather than remaining permanently visible, he stepped back.
He returned to music in 2017 and released Heaven Before All Hell Breaks Loose the following year. The album reflected a man whose life and priorities had changed. It moved through soul, electronic music, rock and pop without attempting simply to recreate either Strickland Banks or the fury of Ill Manors.
Since then, Drew has maintained a markedly lower public profile. There has been no widely announced new Plan B studio album since 2018 and, as of September 2026, no confirmed new feature film directed by him has entered public release. Claims that he is currently directing a particular production should therefore be treated cautiously unless an official announcement emerges.
That silence does not erase his development as a filmmaker. It means only that his directing career has so far produced one completed feature rather than a continuous succession of films. Ill Manors remains the clearest expression of what Ben Drew can do behind the camera: write with rhythm, direct with anger and find human damage beneath intimidating surfaces.
More than one plan
Plan B has always resisted being reduced to a single profession. He is not simply a rapper who discovered that he could sing, nor a singer who occasionally acted, nor a celebrity who decided to try directing.
The connections run deeper than that. His rap records are written like dramas. His soul album tells the story of a fictional man. His acting explores the frightened humanity inside threatening characters. His film uses music to narrate lives that conventional society would prefer not to examine.
Ben Drew’s career has been irregular, confrontational and sometimes astonishing. He has moved from the margins of east London to number-one albums and major cinema screens without sanding away the anger that first gave his work its force.
The angel and the gangster were never separate personalities. They were two voices telling the same story: one singing for the people who had fallen through the cracks, the other demanding that Britain finally look down and see them.
