A Strangely Candid Interview With Professor Green

Meeting Professor Green for the first time, the dust was settling on an ill-fated venture on Mike Skinner's The Beats imprint. But it was a move that had given him enough shine to be courted by major labels, which was exciting because for all the back-slapping already being done it could have gone either way. In the interim he's been kinda busy becoming one of UK music's biggest stars and I've been learning that asking "whut made u chooze ur stage name lmao?" wasn't the height of journalism. So, when the opportunity came up for a fleeting chat with Pro as he started his 2013 promo, I thought it'd be a LOL to come and surprise him. Instead, what I got was an unusually candid chat about the notion of "selling out", the disparity of his fame now against his upbringing and, umm, dairy.

Noisey: One of the very first times I saw you, I got concussion after doing about five hundred shots. But you’re, like, Mr Clean Life now, right?

Professor Green: Ha! Yeah, yeah…green tea and all that.

GREEN tea…geddit?! Anyway, what happened?

Do you really believe that I’m that clean living? I’m joking. I mean, there’s certainly a balance now as opposed to it all being one sided. I’ve cut milk out; I’m allergic to dairy. I’m totally lactose intolerant.

That lactose free life. It’s a game changer.

Life is good, I feel awake.

Enough about cheese. I remember my first interview with you was when you were on the cusp of being huge. It was exciting…

Yup, it was the point of whether it was going to happen or not. Now I’m here with the challenge of maintaining.

So what’s the plan?

Just carrying on doing what I want. I know that sounds selfish and creatively it is but that’s what got me where I am. I didn’t plan on it all, I had “I Need You Tonight” and “Just Be Good To Green”, all down a year before I signed. So it wasn’t a case of me getting picked up and changing my sound. It’s always been a mixture of the really hard stuff, the softer stuff and funny stuff. When I started seriously making music I was never doing it to keep any and everyone happy, it just so happened that people liked it. If I’m doing what makes me happy as an artist and that keeps me successful then I’m good.

Right now you’re massive…it’s pretty hard for me to fathom. But are you ever tempted to revert back to type and put out a SUPER grimy and gritty mixtape?

Well there’s always going to be grimy and gritty bits, but if I’m not in that mood, then it wont happen.

Do you ever feel like you’re neglecting your original audience?

No. The lyrics still come from the same place and the same person…me. I’m still the same guy who gets down and does the emotional stuff and then there’s the side that does the cheeky stuff ‘cos I was a battle rapper. If I’m not challenging the listener and myself then I’m not doing it for the right reasons.

OK. Does that mean you might do something like a Brazilian funk or a gabba track or something?

I don’t know! The albums have always been quite eclectic, this is the first one to, umm, I don’t know how to describe it I was gonna say a lot of the album sounds that same but that’s not true at all ‘cos it’s all so different. The instrumentation, not what’s played and used, is what’s similar but that just comes from me starting the songs from scratch. I really wanted to learn how to play an instrument ‘cos I didn’t want to make myself look like a fucking idiot humming out shit. But I’m more comfortable with that now, I have more confidence in the process. So whoever I work with I don’t feel shy about singing now, ‘cos anyone with some foresight can work out what I mean. I feel like I’ve developed a lot.

So you’re comfortable? Like, you’re zen?

I’m in my thirties, if I wasn’t comfortable by now I’d be fucked, so with the last few days when the Twitter bubble popped, I’m kinda going to take a little step back from it.

I know I get unusually upset if a stranger sends me nasty shit on Twitter for no reason. How do you deal with it on such a large scale?

Fuck all, that’s how you deal with it. It gets to you, you’ll be reading things, nine times out of ten it’ll be brilliant and then one bad one comes along.

Does the former mess with you as well, all the ego stroking?

No, because there’s a part of me that still doesn’t believe it, that it’s a big hoax. There’ll always be an unwillingness to believe that, y’know, you’ve done something good for yourself but there’s still the part of me that’s reluctant to accept it.

You don’t take the ego bait?

It’s funny though, innit? The thing with social media is it’s like sending a text that can get misunderstood. But instead of one-on-one there are thousands of people watching, nobody should have access to that many people at one time…it’s discouraging! You just end up being like, “fuck, the majority of people are arseholes!”

That’s a shame. I mean, you yourself risk having to condense your views…

Yeah and then you end up trying to explain them, you know what, that’s something I’m not doing anymore as well; fuck explaining myself to other people. I’d rather just say stuff in interviews, which is harder but not impossible for stuff to get misinterpreted.

Awkward! I’m going to be doing this one, like, verbatim.

Ha! It gets written out and again there’s no tone to it. It can even depend on what mood the reader is in, if they’re angry it will anger them.

So why bother at all?

With Twitter it’s like a habit that I’m going to have to wean myself off.

Are you going to go Twitter cold turkey?!

Not completely but I’m still gonna use it. Before I literally would’ve tweeted if I fed my dog. It’s like “who the fuck is interested?”

But people are. Even when you post something really mundane (sorry) you get a jillion responses. It’s insane.

There’s no way of changing that now, there are more mediums where people can voice their opinions and thoughts than there ever has been before. People can complain about it, but fuck it I’m comfy. I’m just going to do a little less to infuriate them, it’s the gossip mags and all these weird celebrity magazines that write the worst shit.

Yeah. There are a lot of middle-aged men waiting outside, I thought they were my adoring fans but apparently they’re paparazzi. I wanted to ask you about this whole spat you had recently with that showbiz journalist. I mean, to what degree do you have to court the press?

I don’t. If I spent all my time worrying about every little thing that was written, or every picture that came out, I wouldn’t have time to do anything. But there was something very real, which caused my response. We had a conversation away from the public forum and I felt really bad about the way I spoke to her. I had a point, but I was just slandering her, which was juvenile. It was me reverting back to the kid I was. That’s still part of me; I still live with that and that’s something I have to control everyday. I grew up self-defensive because of how I grew up and where I grew up.

Umm. You seem a lot more wise to it all now, compared to when we first met. Is that kind of media training or…

I just had to have a word with myself, like, “How do you want to live? Do you want to leave this stuff behind? Do you want this to distract you from what you’re doing?” But now they can write whatever they want and I can just make the effort to not fuel it. How much time should I spend on things that are out of my control?

If I were you I’d definitely have gone off the rails about three years ago…

I just don’t talk about everything. I mean, I’m with someone who’s also in the public eye, everywhere in all the gossip mags but it’s all speculative. So no one knows a fucking thing about our relationship, we do Instagram pictures ‘cos we’re a couple and couples do that. But what do people really know?

Point taken. I guess you have to put your foot down…

Yeah, people ask questions and some I answer really politely or some I’m like…

“FUCK YOU! I HATE YOU!”

Ha! Or “it’s our business”.

Is there anything I could ask that’d make you kick off? Like, turn the table over levels of kicking off?

For the most part I just try and walk away from it. When I was growing up I always concerned myself with idiots who tried to concern themselves with me, it got me into all kinds of madness.

There must be flashes of temptation to go back to that way of life, surely?

I’m still around the same people, good people with good hearts. What the fuck is being hood anyway? I’ve got a better perspective now. You’ve got to understand that so many things that I used to hold on to would imprison me. They were a hindrance; they weren’t things that were helping me. And I’m still growing up. If you’re not willing to contradict yourself then you’re not willing to grow as a person. I remember at school when being bad was cool, I mean how cool is it now for those people?

Yeah, that’s depressing…

I’m now in a position where I can encourage people to do better for themselves. So why wouldn’t I? Like, don’t be dumb, being dumb isn’t cool. I mean even I’m guilty of it. That culture is because of people not being taught proper values, morals and decency. The only way you’re going to solve it is by getting to the root of it all. Like me, I didn’t choose where I was born into, I didn’t choose the wealth of that family or that attitude of the people that brought me up. My grandmother taught me well, I still did wrong but I knew what wrong I was doing.

How do you feel about this continued linking of “urban” or hip-hop music, whatever, with that kind of lifestyle? Like, the two can’t be separated?

There’s no other type of music that has this type of stigma attached to it because all other music is about music. That’s how it should be.

And what about people, who may be from that same kind of upbringing, saying “he’s done well, but he’s a sell out.”

Sell out? It’s like, I’m cool, I don’t want to counter it because the people calling me a sell out never got me where I am. I hold on to the people that done me good and are still my close friends. I’ve always had a good heart and the only times things have gone wrong for me are when I’ve forgotten that.

Yeah…

I’m not cut out for being a badman and there are far too many people willing to do things that I couldn’t even comprehend. I don’t want to be surrounded with that kind of negativity. I’ve seen it in people older than me, who’ve realised all the money and the chains mean fuck all when they come out of prison. They can never buy that time back. That culture, when you’re like “I want that” the process isn’t “I want to work hard”, it’s “I want it now, I want it quick”, you have all this entitlement. Entitlement issues are the same at both ends of the spectrum, with the wealthy and with the not.

It’s indicative of our generation, we’re kind of institutionalised to be self-entitled.

It’s so hard to escape that, when you’re not lucky and you don’t have those people around you to help you escape it all. And when you’re not lucky to meet the right person who helps you change your way of seeing things…

What is the solution?

That’s the problem. It’s in the medicine of this country. It’s not preventative. We don’t take preventative measures, we never took preventative measures to stop society ending up the way it has.

Like putting an Elastoplast on a big ol’ wound.

Exactly, it’s not going to help. People who don’t have a great quality of life in respect of how bad poverty is elsewhere, make this place look like fucking heaven. But you deal with what’s relative, so unless you come from Africa and then you live here you don’t understand. We deal with our problems.

That’s your only perspective; I remember my nan would say that there’s someone starving somewhere if I didn’t finish my food and it was like I’m not there so, truthfully, how can I understand? How do I compare? It’s relativity.

[PR enters frantically saying we have no time left]

Anyway. That got really deep. Tell me a joke?

Guy walks into his house with a duck under his arm, sees his wife and says, “here’s the pig I’ve been fucking”, the wife says “that’s not a pig, it’s a duck”. Then the man says “I wasn't talking to you”.

Oh, COME ON!

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