Example

Example

Example, or Elliot Gleave to his mates, is now an unavoidable presence on the charts with his new punchy electro take on his previous sound. He’s a rapper, a singer, a writer and a very very nice man even though he’s now an extraordinarily busy one.

‘Watch The Sun Come Up’, ‘Won’t Go Quietly’ and the irrepressible ‘Kickstart’ are all over the radio. Example is all over the festivals, including the upcoming Relentless NASS weekend. We have a chat when I’m hungover and he’s surrounded by his neighbour’s boisterous children. It’s a shock we managed to chat, but chat we did.

“I’ve just finished 33 gigs in a row, I’ve had 4 days off in 35 days, sometimes we play 2 gigs in a day, a headline slot then gone to do a Uni ball and I’ve been averaging 4 hours sleep a night,” he says, but sounding remarkably chipper.

So you’ve become half man – half machine….

Pretty much all machine at the moment. I don’t even know what day it is, I did an interview the other day and had to ask what the date was.

And now you have a new album that needs all your time and attention.

It came out on my 28^th birthday.

Is this bad timing or good timing?

I don’t really care, I hate birthdays and Christmas and all that. I’m not really a celebratory person I just like getting on with my life. I’m not the Grinch, I just can’t stand not hearing from anybody and then all of a sudden everyone wants to be friends again and love each other.

You seem very calm and prepared for the intense amount of pressure which comes with a release.

You know what, my first album was such an anti-climax, it ended up doing decent sales and all that, like 30,000 over two years but I learnt a lot from that experience and right now I’m thinking, I have put out the best album possible and whatever happens happens. If it sells 100,000, then great, if it sells a million, amazing, y’know?  I got the album to sound how I wanted it to sound – if everyone loves it and goes mad – great, if people slate it, whatever the fuck, I love it.

You’re on the way to sell a million, just looking at some of the You Tube plays.. tracks have a million hits, 3 million hits on ‘Won’t Go Quietly’.

Yeah, 3.8million I think. It’s quite a lot innit? Ten million in total over all the videos. It’s kinda weird to think how many people round the world have seen your videos.

It’s all good though, you got a nice haircut these days as well that you can show off.

(laughs) I think you can’t really predict it these days though, some bands sell millions of singles and not many albums and some sell not many singles and shitloads of albums, so I think Florence and the Machine is the perfect example – had a load of hype, came out and didn’t really have any big hit singles for like a year, then You’ve Got The Love comes out, she wins at the BRITS and she goes from selling 300K to a million in a month.

You a single or album man?

I’m an album man. The label are like, oh it looks like we may not get number one cos Tinie and Dizzee are out and its going to be tough, and I’m like, who gives a fuck. They’re like, ‘don’t you want a number one single?’  Why? It’s nice to say you’ve got a number one single but it’s better to aim to have a number one album and headline festivals. I put all my work into the album, recorded 30 songs in the last few years, we picked the best 14, there’s nine producers on there, a lot of people are coming back to me and saying every song could be a single, which I think is a really nice compliment…

How do you choose 9 producers?

The way it works… well, I was listening to Jay-Z’s Black album, which is one of my favourites ever, and he set out to have 13 songs produced by 13 people and I think he ended up with 10 producers. I love that album and why it works, I think, is because every song sounds like a single even though every song has a different style of production.

So why it’s worked for me, why it doesn’t sound disjointed, is that I’ve got all these different flavours, I’ve been studying lots of different types of music my whole life – I’m not just a fan of rap or dance or rock – so I think when I put my hand to doing a song with MJ Cole, er, I used to be a garage kid so I understand that world, likewise with Calvin Harris or Chase & Status, it’s because I listen to such a wide variety of music but do my own take on it, you don’t think oh, Example doesn’t pull off this song. The fact that people are coming to me, people that I respect and not just these producers, but other people are coming to me going, I love your new song, I’m playing it all the time, or can I remix this… so I think we’ve kind of pulled it off.

What about the fans who only know your new work? How do they react to older stuff?

What I think it is – people can spot a fake and if you’re like, oh I’ve changed my sound to sell more records and people come to your gig and you can’t pull it off. A perfect example is a guy came to our show in Middlesbrough the other week, we played to 25,000 at an outdoor festival, and by the end of the set we had everybody bouncing. And a guy wrote on Twitter to me after and said, ‘I loved your first album and hated all your new singles, he’s sold out’. But he said, ‘I saw you live and changed my whole opinion, you live and breathe these songs’. I think that’s the best compliment you can have.  The guy saw the other side of these songs.

With your new songs, people do label it as a summer anthem – is that too one dimensional?

It works on different levels, the music is catchy, you can have it on in the background and it’s melodic and it makes sense, but when you listen to the lyrics, it means a lot to people. It’s come from a really raw place, nothing on the album is fake, it comes from personal experiences. When you do that and you can translate it into words and melody, which I think is quite hard to do, then it resonates so much more. ‘Kickstart’ is a bit solemn and melancholic but once that beat starts you can’t help but bounce. If people want to call it a summer anthem, then that’s fine, but people write to me on Facebook or whatever and say this song is helping them through their break up or I keep falling in love with my ex-girlfriend every time I hear Kickstart.

‘Won’t Go Quietly’ strikes me as a very grown up album.

I started writing my first album at 20 and my new one at 26 and a lot of things happened in between that, especially in terms of relationships. Which is why this new album is very relationship heavy. I split up one girl, it was very passionate but turbulent relationship and the relationship I’m in now, for nearly three years, has made me much happier.

Going on tour, getting famous, whatever, has it’s effect on you and the other half. Songs on the album, like ‘Two Lives’ and ‘Kickstart’, both of those are from real experience. ‘Won’t Go Quietly’ (the track) is all about my ex-girlfriend. I will continue to make it personal, but when you write and you’re happy and safe, the best doesn’t come out. The best stuff comes from a break up or going through a bad patch.

Won’t Go Quietly is OUT NOW on Data Records

http://www.trythisforexample.com/

http://www.myspace.com/leadingbyexample

Interview by Taylor Glasby