Example interview: 'I needed to forget the rulebook to make something new'

Singer, rapper and producer opens up about the early EDM scene, taking time out to spend with his family, and how the president of Columbia Records UK helped him work through a creative slump

Prime Example: ‘The songs we’re looking at now are easily the biggest I’ve written’

Everyone told Example – real name Elliot Gleave – he could have a break if he wanted one, but he was on a roll – “so why stop?” he asks.

The English singer, rapper and producer is something of a hit machine, achieving a top 10 with his second album Won’t Go Quietly back in 2010; two No 1 singles with the chart-topping follow-up Playing In The Shadows; and a cluster of other top 40 tracks.

“EDM was just blowing up,” he says of his breakthrough around 2010. “‘Change the Way You Kissed Me’ arrived about a year before EDM got big, we went to America with it which I think was a little bit early, then the end of 2012 it got massive. Calvin [Harris] wasn’t even getting played a lot on the radio at this stage.

“We had a couple more hits, and then it was like… I’m saying this with hindsight now... at the time it felt easy, because I never tried to write hits – I just went in the studio and had fun. Obviously I was going through some dark stuff, there was a breakup, I was partying too much…”

Gleave, 35, hasn’t released an album since 2014, but has since returned with his comeback single “The Answer”, which has already racked up almost a million plays on Spotify.

“I got married and had kids,” he says with a shrug at his time away from the industry. “Won’t Go Quietly was like the breakthrough album, then it was basically four albums in four years. It was an amazing run.

“I’d always want to make a rock album,” he adds of his last, more rock-leaning record: 2014’s Live Life Living, produced by Grammy Award-winners Fraser T Smith and Stuart Price.

“I grew up in a south London school where everyone would do these rap battles in the playground, but I was an indie kid at heart. So I made that album. That’s where it plateaued a bit. I reckon if I’d made three more ‘Changed the Way You Kissed Me’s I’d be even bigger now.”

While Live Life Living still produced a top 10 hit (“One More Day”), Gleave describes that project as a “bit of a mess” – there were too many people involved in the album, he says, and “my vision for the album wasn’t realised”.

“Everyone thinks I left Ministry of Sound to sign to Epic for a load of money,” he says with a laugh. “I think the story in the papers was like ‘signs deal worth millions of dollars’. Any deal’s worth millions of dollars if you sell loads of records. But at that time and with how everything was handled… it was a mess and hard to keep up with, and with my OCD I couldn’t cope with it.

“After that fifth album I kind of lost faith in everything I was doing. Half of it was produced by Stuart Price, who is amazing. And the other half was by Frazer T Smith, who is also amazing. They’re world-class producers, but maybe didn’t make as much sense together.”

Around that same time, however, he’d met the woman of his dreams – model, actress and TV personality Erin McNaught – got married, started a family… “there was nothing to be upset about,” he says.

“I’d bought a couple of properties, was about to start on my love of cars, because my dad always said if you’re gonna buy stupid cars, get houses first. Houses and art. So on the surface I had everything. But I’d lost control of the creative process, and didn’t know how to capture that magic anymore.

“It was eating me up,” he continues. “I think before, when I was single, and partying too much, all those lyrics came from that place, so you had these honest, darker themes with uplifting music. Then I hit this thing where I felt like I was happy, and I couldn’t write about that. I was listening back to some of the demos I made in 2014, 2016… and they’re a mess. It sounds like I don’t know who I am.”

He doesn’t regret any of it, he adds, and if anything, it sounds as though he’s enjoyed his time away because he’s had a chance to observe the industry from the outside, and witness how things have changed.

Young grime fans have been busy discovering him on streaming services (often ones they’ve persuaded their parents to pay for, Gleave notes admiringly) via artists like Distortion, who collaborated with Lethal Bizzle.

“I’d say to these kids, what genre do you listen to, and they go, ‘genre?’” he recounts, beaming. “I love that. When I was school, the playground was split up with jungle kids, garage kids, metal… Nowadays they just listen to music.”

With this access to new music, new technology, comes a younger generation of artists achieving overnight success with a track they produced from their bedroom.

“But then you go and headline Brixton, and you’re shocking, so no one’s gonna come back,” Gleave notes. “Everyone said to me J Hus was wicked at his first show, but that’s rare, usually it takes 600 gigs or something to hone that craft.”

He’d done around 600 gigs when a young Ed Sheeran joined him on a small tour of 500-capacity venues around the UK – a meeting that produced their viral freestyle “The Nando’s Skank”.

“He [Sheeran] was like, ‘yeah I’ve done a thousand’,” Gleave says laughing. “Because he’d been touring since he was 14, doing open mics and pubs and everything.”

Gleave seems geared up about the work that’s happening with Columbia UK. He’d been a long-time admirer of its president, Ferdy Unger-Hamilton (“if you think about who he’s signed over the years…”).

“I had a load of respect for him,” he says. “And he kind of broke it down for me, which was amazing, he said ‘just get me that one song’.

“I guess I needed to be told to forget the rulebook, and the songs we’re looking at now are easily the biggest I’ve written. I’d never made pure pop – I made edgy club songs with a big pop hook. But that was 10 years ago.

“I used to be obsessed with the idea that every track should be autobiographical, and there are elements of that that go into songs, even when I’m writing for other people. Then my second son was born, and in that first two or three weeks of having a new kid you’re in this kind of dream state, it’s like being on acid.”

At the moment, there’s no official date for an album – although Gleave says he recorded plenty of new material during that creative rush.

“If they turn round to me and wanna do an album, the songs are there,” he says.

‘The Answer’, the brand new single from Example, is out now via Columbia Records