Example says his “first album seemed like a miracle”.
The ‘Kickstarts’ hitmaker – real name Elliot Gleave – didn’t ever expect to have this much success in the music industry when he started out a rapper with his 2007 debut ‘What We Made’ and almost retired after his wife Erin McNaught gave birth to his seven-year-old son Evander – the big brother to his four-year-old son Ennio – but has since regained his stride to get back into the recording studio.
The 40-year-old rapper told the Metro’s Sixty Seconds featurette: “Including my mixtapes and my compilations, it’s my 14th LP. I first started in this industry, my first album seemed like a miracle. I never saw a way I could be a musician. There weren’t any white rappers being signed or rap/hip-hop in the UK like there is now. I was a white kid from Fulham with long hair and a very wonky hip-hop album that flopped. But Ministry of Sound signed me in 2009, which is when I started making dance music and my track ‘Kickstarts’ changed my life. The amount of money I was getting and fans I had, I was on TV and radio. After ‘Changed The Way You Kiss Me’, my ambition went through the roof, so I felt unstoppable. And then my fifth album, ‘Live Life Living’ flopped and I was thinking about giving up music. I’d met my wife, Erin, and she was pregnant with Evander. But ‘All Night’ turned everything around again in 2019. It had 40 million streams.”
Example shared that he knew his good pal, Ed Sheeran was going to be a huge star and told him to not “forget” him when it hits the big time.
He said: “I speak to Ed on email once a week because he doesn’t have a phone. The first time I watched him when he supported me in 2009 at the Waterfront in Norwich, I gave him a bottle of whisky and wrote a note saying, ‘Don’t forget me when you’re playing stadiums.’”