It's Not Easy Being Green
With two day-glo hits under his belt, you might have pegged Professor Green as a purveyor of dumbed-down hip-hop for the Skins generation. Beneath the shiny exterior, however, is an artist who has clawed his way up from the mean streets of working-class Britain.
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 18 Aug 2010
If you only know Professor Green, aka Stephen Paul Manderson, from his hit singles ‘I Need You Tonight’, and ‘Just Be Good To Green’, you might be forgiven for thinking him a crayola drawn hip-hop/pop crossover with a nice line in nerd-boy delivery. But the debut album Alive Till I’m Dead testifies that Manderson is made of toughter stuff. A seasoned MC battler, he was raised in Hackney by his grandmother, and hauled himself out of modern day Dickensia by the laces of his trainers.
“I got away with a lot more than I probably would have with a parent closer to my age," he admits. "My grandmother’s not that old, my mum had me when she was 16, so my grandmother is 66, 40-years older than me. Some people’s parents are that old. She’s pretty clued up, my gran.”
What were his prospects as a kid?
“I loved music from an early age but I fell into it really late. I was a smart kid academically, but I wasn’t smart enough to stay in school, and instead of having a stern hand at home I had my grandmother, who sympathised with my situation. She did everything with the best of intentions and made the decisions that she felt were right by me, but had I had a sterner hand, things might have been different. I probably needed someone to drag me kicking and screaming to school, but she sympathised, and I got away with absolute murder. I got myself into stuff that I shouldn’t have been involved in.”
Including a short-lived spell as a lightweight drug dealer that, should he achieve X-Factor ubiquity, the red-tops will surely exploit to the max, although the Prof. himself comes clean on the track ‘Do For You’.
“The difference between me and a lot of people that do that... I never did anything soul destroying for one," he maintains. "Also, I’m not a thief, I’ve never stolen anything in my life. Education starts a long time before school, and I was fortunate enough to have been given morals and values. There’s a lot of people in them social circles, some bad, bad people.”
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