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:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“If, then, we would indeed restore mankind ... let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)