[Iceman]

PLAN A was to have a happy childhood and grow up staying out of trouble.

Yet that proved to be just a pipedream for tormented East End lad Ben Drew, beaten by his stepdad and bullied at school.

And so he turned into PLAN B - the chart topping rapper-turned-singer who has taken the British music scene by storm this year.

But, as he confesses to Rated, not without the help of a career-saving therapist who stripped all his problems bare as he faced prison for brawling.

"I had to go to a very dark place to get to the root of my problems," says Ben. "A lot of those problems stem from my childhood, and therapy was a very unhappy time. I had to go on stage at my gigs and try to be the big man, when I felt like a very weak one."

Now the star believes his therapy has left him "a stronger man", able to make his incredible No 1 album of soul music, The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, which has gone double-platinum after just four months.

And he's even directing his first film, Ill Manors, about deprived children in London's East End. It draws on his own sad background and uses reformed school troublemakers as actors.

"If David Cameron was serious about fixing Broken Britain, he should come to people like me, who can talk to kids on their level," says Ben.

"But he couldn't be seen to support me - because on my first record I talk about sex with corpses, genital warts and stabbing people in the eye with a Biro."

IN TROUBLE: Plan B drew on his real-life experiences for movie Harry Brown
IN TROUBLE: Plan B drew on his real-life experiences for movie Harry Brown

Cue a rare smile as he recalls his debut album, Who Needs Action When You Got Words, which reached No 30 in 2006 and made Plan B a respected name in rap.

But its failure to break the Top Ten left him so bitter that he was constantly getting into fights.

"The music industry is like a girls' school," he says. "It's incredibly bitchy, and the men are bitchier than the women. I hate being around two-faced people, and I didn't know how to handle it. I lost my temper all the time."

At 26, his explosive anger can be traced back to when he was six and his father left home to be replaced by a harsh stepdad. Home in tough Forest Gate was a battleground for the little boy - as was school.

"I had no older brothers to protect me," he explains. "As a little white boy in a heavily multi-cultural school where black and Asian kids stuck together, I was on my own. I had to fight, to show I'm not a target you could push around.

"If I have a problem with you, I'll let you know. I'd rather be honest than bitch about someone behind their back. But I knew I couldn't carry on getting angry all the time."

In 2008, Ben got a suspended prison sentence for fighting in a bar. "I was *********g my career up," he admits. "So I took it upon myself, as an adult, to get help.

"I didn't ask my manager or anyone else. I looked up counselling in the Yellow Pages, saw Anger Management, and bang, I was in therapy for a year."

NEW PLAN: Ben Drew on stage
NEW PLAN: Ben Drew on stage

He credits his therapist Jo Bates for turning his life around. "She stripped away layer upon layer of the confidence I'd built up for myself, until I was a nervous wreck," he says.

"Those layers were an act. By the end, I stopped feeling angry and, when I built my layers of confidence back up, it was in the right way."

That new found confidence helped Plan B turn his back on his rap audience to make the soul music of The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, which tells the story of a fictitious singer's fall from fame.

"I tried to make another hip hop album at first, but the songs were s***," says the star. "When I started writing songs at 15, they were soul - so really this is my first love. My mum and my sister always pestered me to write these kind of songs.

"So the cynics who think I'm a sell-out for not making another rap record can throw my first one in the bin, because they don't know me."

For his next album, he aims to tackle reggae. "It'll be about a white guy who's convinced he's the reincarnation of a dead reggae star," says Ben .

"He writes amazing songs - but the world won't have any of it because he's white, so they think he's faking it."

But before that comes the making of Ill Manors. Plan B will star in it as well as directing, having acted as a gang leader opposite Michael Caine in Harry Brown, the hit Britflick.

Many of Ill Manors' cast are first-time actors from a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) in London for children expelled from secondary schools. Ben attended one after getting kicked out of his local comprehensive at 15 for insulting teachers.

"The guy in charge of the PRU - who also taught me - told me, 'You don't know how much you've helped these kids doing this,'" says Ben.

"That gave me a strong sense of purpose that I hadn't had from music or anything else I've ever done."

A passionate believer in how PRUs can help deprived children, Ben adds: "The kids in PRUs are from families who tell them they're worthless. More kids need to be taken from secondary schools into PRUs, because it gives them an escape.

"Then, even when the kids go home to their s*** life, five times a week they'd have a positive influence on them."

And maybe they could turn a Plan B back into Plan A.