The success of his concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks was crowned by a defining performance at this year’s Brit Awards, but Plan B, aka the 27-year-old soul singer and rapper Ben Drew, has yet to settle in comfortably at the top table of pop. Faced with a massive crowd at the 23,000-capacity O2 arena, he put on a show that was big on bluster but lacking in both largesse and finesse.
The production hung, for the most part, on songs from the album. The stage looked vaguely like a courtroom and Plan B’s biggest hit, She Said, was played out with actors, singers and dancers in the role of judge, jury and the obsessive femme fatale on whose evidence Strickland is sent to prison for a sexual offence that he did not commit. When it came to the dramatic centrepiece of the album, Prayin’, in which Strickland recounts how he killed another of the prison inmates in self-defence, the accompanying dance routine pitted a trio of policemen with riot shields against a pair of felons.
While there was no lack of ambition in the staging, there was an emotional vacuum at the heart of the performance itself. Strickland/Drew/B, or whoever he really is, played the dual role of victim and villain with a strangely unsympathetic touch. He wore the soul singer’s uniform of suit and tie, but looked more East End bovver boy than suave loverman. And while songs such as the opening salvo of Writing’s on the Wall and Free were steeped in the classic soul and Motown conventions, his voice was not altogether convincing in this most demanding of genres, especially when he slipped into a rather brittle falsetto.
A version of Paolo Nutini’s Coming up Easy, dedicated to all the weed smokers, was murdered just as brutally as any of Strickland’s prison inmates. And while there was plenty to look at during the continuing courtroom drama of What You Gonna Do, the performance felt like the elaborate charade that it was.
Switching to rap mode, he delivered Charmaine, the tale of a sexual encounter with an underage girl, with a more convincing flourish. And during a long stretch of encores, including No More Eating and Pieces, he ramped up the spoken aggression, which seemed to be where his true métier lay.
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Plan B plays Evolution Weekender, Spillers Wharf, Newcastle, May 29; Wireless Festival, Hyde Park, July 1