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Artist News
Plan B not retiring Strickland Banks just yet
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 25 August 2010
Earlier this month Plan B said that he would be retiring the Strickland Banks character and the soul sound of his current album, ‘The Defamation Of Strickland Banks’, quite soon. Now, it seems, he’s had a change of heart. Well, sort of.
In an interview with The Daily Star earlier this month, Plan B said: “[Strickland Banks] is a soul singer who’s found success very quickly and it’s gone to his head. I’m just telling a story, a scene from my career and it won’t be around for ever. He’s completely disconnected, a fictional creation, fictional people, no relation to my life. Now the music is so successful it’s getting harder. I’m like a film director. On the album cover it says ‘Plan B presents… The Defamation Of Strickland Banks’. It’s me portraying this character Strickland Banks for this one project, this one album”.
However, in a new interview with tabloid this week, he said: “I want to do Strickland Banks’s Greatest Hits – the songs that made him famous. ‘Make Me Your Religion’, which I played at the iTunes Festival in London, is for that. There’s a handful of other songs that I wrote after the album [which] came out in a similar vein. They don’t tell Strickland’s story, but they sound like his songs”.
This doesn’t mean that Strickland Banks is here to stay forever, though. Plan B went on to reveal that the new tracks are for an expanded edition of the ‘Strickland Banks’ album, due for release later this year. The crafty bugger. He explained: “I’ll repack them with ‘Defamation’ but I don’t think I’ll do a whole new separate album about Strickland again. I want to keep moving on”.
I still think he’ll struggle to leave that soul sound behind completely.