Fazer initially wrote his debut solo single ‘Killer’ for Chris Brown.
The 25-year-old rapper – who shot to fame in pop group N-Dubz alongside ex-girlfriend Tulisa Contostavlos and her cousin Dappy Contostavlos – was penning the track for the ‘Beautiful People’ hitmaker but he liked it so much he wanted to keep it for himself.
He said: "I’m gonna be brutally honest with you, I wrote the record for another artist – it was Chris Brown I was writing for at the time. And when I started putting the vocals and stuff down, I thought, ‘You know what, my vocals sound great on this record.’ I wanted a record that was literally gonna shut the place down when I go out and perform it, and it’s been doing exactly that man."
Fazer – whose real name is Richard Rawson – insists there was no pressure on him to make his first solo single a particular style because his career with N-Dubz, who have been described as both a pop and hip-hop group, left people unaware of exactly what to expect.
When asked what the response was like when he released ‘Killer’, he added to AltSounds: "Phenomenal man! It’s funny though cos I know for a fact that no matter what I released, I would’ve got the same response.
"Coming out of the back of N-Dubz, there weren’t really any expectations for what I was going to do – I could’ve done anything, I could’ve done the maddest hip-hop record and people would’ve been like, ‘It’s not what I expected Fazer to do, I thought he would’ve done something more commercial.’
"But with ‘Killer’, they’re like, ‘I wouldn’t expect Fazer to do something like this, I was expecting something more like hip-hop.’ I could’ve released any record and people would have expected me to do something different. But that’s put myself in a good position in a sense, because people won’t know what to expect from Fazer next."