EXAMPLE - event info

“I’d get interviewed on the radio and they’d say, ‘wanna bust a freestyle?’. And I’d be thinking, ‘well, no, not really…’”

Elliot Gleave has made a pop record. He hasn’t made a pop record in the way it’s fashionable these days for people to say they’ve made a pop record, then you put it on and it sounds like Lou Reed thumping a Roland 303 with a wet cucumber. This is an actual pop record. The raps are still razorwire sharp, of course – they’re warm and funny and perceptive snatches of life and “female-based chat” from a 26-year-old music brain that’s already won thousands of fans with its laddish, shoutalong charm, while his recent, frenetic club track ‘Hooligans’ tells us that the blokey spirit he made his name with is still there. But, it’s pop. One of the songs, ‘Next 7 Hours’, simply sounds like everything in the Top 20 all at once. There’s a massive ballad which namechecks Gary Barlow. Another song, the Calvin Harris-produced ‘Time Machine’, sounds a bit like Wham.

So you say to Example, ‘that sounds a bit like Wham, you know’. And he looks at you and says, ‘well, the sound I was going for was sort of Wham meets Five Star…’ And that’s where Example’s head is these days. As he says himself, he’s still a rapper – “just one who happens to make huge, catchy choruses”. Then he’ll start listing his influences: Kanye, Madness, George Clinton, Daft Punk, The Rolling Stones, and suddenly his wildly eclectic, sometimes eccentric but defiantly tuneful second album begins to make a lot of sense.