Early Life
Drew was born and brought up in London. His mother worked for a local authority and his father, Paul Ballance, played in a punk band, the Warm Jets, in the 1970s. Drew was five months old when his father walked out and six years old when he "disappeared completely". Growing up, he felt outcast from much of society:
We weren't working class but we weren't middle class, we were in the void in-between. I've always felt like a social outcast. —Plan B, The Telegraph (15 June 2006)From 11, Drew attended Anglo European School in Ingatestone, Essex, was later transferred to Tom Hood Schoolwhich is now Buxton all through learning community, a specialist Science College in Leytonstone, before being expelled and sent to Tunmarsh Pupil Referral Unit in Newham, for children unable to attend mainstream school. He finally left school with three GCSEs. He taught himself how to play guitar at 14, first playing Blur and Oasis with friends, then going on to write his own R&B love songs. At 18, feeling uncomfortable with R&B, he turned towards rap and hip hop music and wrote "Kidz", inspired by the murder of Damilola Taylor
The whole reason for calling myself Plan B was that I was doing this sweet-boy Justin Timberlake shit, but I never felt comfortable… When I started rapping, it was easier for me to feel comfortable. —Plan B, USA Today (15 March 2007)Read more about this topic: Plan B (musician)
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)