APRIL APRIL <strong>2018</strong> <strong>2018</strong> | ISSUE | ISSUE #66 #66 | EXAMPLE 20 in Brighton and 20 in Cardiff. If I was lucky, I might have sold five in each city and they’d call me back and write me a cheque. from there I went on to songwriting and singing. We could talk in major depth about this stuff but we’d be here for hours [laughs] So it stated off there, being quite innocent and homemade, then I started going to open mic events, meeting new people. I started going to record shops and asking about how the PR and marketing worked, things such as ‘where do you get songs manufactured’? Back then that was how things were done, now you can just finish a song in your bedroom and stick it on Spotify or Soundcloud, we didn’t have anything like that then. I wanted to be a film director and then whilst I was working at a TV station as an editor, I got offered a record deal with Mike Skinner, from The Streets in 2006 and the rest is history. R: How did you first get into rapping? Was it something you just enjoyed doing? Were your family musical? It was a very musical house in terms of playing music; my mum and dad were always playing their vinyls really loud! Things such as The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and Motown, James Brown, stuff like that, but none of them played instruments. R: How did you come up with the name Example? It’s like E.G my initials. R: Ah, very clever! Yeah, endorsed by Wikipedia [laughs] R: You’ve had number 1 singles, five successful albums, what would you say makes you stand out as an artist? I don’t know! I guess that’s up for the public to decide isn’t it? I have been doing it for so long, you don’t really think about that any more. My first album wasn’t very successful, my fifth album wasn’t very successful, the second, third and forth ones did alright. I kind of just do me, a little bit quirky, a little bit rough around the edges… electronic pop, a bit of rapping, a bit of singing, I don’t know, it is what it is man, some people love it, some people hate it. My dad has a very good singing voice, even though he’s never really been ‘a singer’, I suppose the rapping thing started at school. I went to school in South London; there was a whole mix of cultures and kids from different ethnic backgrounds. I ended up rapping just to sort of fit it in the playground. I wasn’t very good at anything else like football, so I started rapping to get the approval of the cool kids. It went from being a hobby, because I love rhyming words, then writing my own raps. I use to learn Wu-Tang Clan and Snoop Dogg word for word, and R: I like that… non-conformist – good! Yeah! R: Festival season is coming up and this year your playing at the new RiZE festival not far from us… are you looking forward to it? Of course, yeah, its pretty much the old V stomping ground isn’t it? I played V for years, I think I have played V festival five times now and I think this is on the same site in Chelmsford, so I think we are pretty much expecting the same crowd. I am headlining the 24
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