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Monday 03 October 1:51 p.m.
2011 has been an amazing year for Example. Two years ago he was support on a Calvin Harris show at the Scala. Since then he’s had three of his own fully sold-out tours and he’s played a string of huge dates with Lily Allen and Faithless and, this summer, he was the second headline act on Glastonbury’s John Peel Stage.
Playing In The Shadows marks the moment where Example grows up. "I had to be careful when I spoke to my girlfriend about this stuff in case she thought it meant we were in a tough place” he says. “But tough places give me inspiration. She gets unhappy about me going away for a month. She wants to know when we’re getting married, but I’m worried that being comfortable and having a family will mean I can’t write songs that touch people anymore.”
The album’s title can be taken in various ways. You can play in the shadows pretending to be someone you’re not. You can play in the shadows of your own personality. You can play in the shadows of a great club or night at a festival. There are good and bad times to hide, good and bad ways to get what you want. Example, like a lot of us, is a bit jealous of those lucky people who know exactly what they wanted to be when they’re 18 and just went for it. 
He never had that. As a kid he listened to Nirvana, Motown and Michael Jackson. At school in west London it was all Wu Tang Clan, Jay-Z and Slick Rick. At university he would MC at garage raves, make countless mix tapes and host pirate radio stations, but music still came second to film making. There was a year spent working on movie sets in Australia – “to avoid the grind of London” – and time spent doing voice-overs and producing promos at Paramount Comedy. But it wasn’t until he was 21 that Example really took music seriously. The first album was all hip-hop as that was all he knew. It sold 10,000 copies.
Every song on ‘Playing In The Shadows’ is personal; every word is rooted in a real emotion. It’s a startlingly revealing record. “It’s more grown-up, more epic,” he says. “It all began with ‘Kickstarts’ – that was sad and happy, an anthem. Watching 60,000 people singing that back to me at a festival was my Eureka moment. It made me realise what I should do. I draw from intensely personal experiences then tweak those feelings to make them open to everyone.”