Joshua Idehen is one of London’s most influential poets, musicians and campaigners for protecting the live music scene in this sprawling city. He has played his part in the fabulous ‘Benin City’, a band that created the popular single Faithless that turned out to be one of my favorite tracks for about two years, no joke. Idehen has also contributed in a whole host of great collaborations in the recent past, most recently with Purple City Soufflé’s prized beatmaker Jabru. The man is a wordsmith and every thing he touches is well worth throwing an ear at.
A few days ago I was delighted to receive a submission from Idehen himself plugging his new single Sense To You. This new one is with his other project HUGH, which is a mash up of Idehen, Andy Highmore and Martin Kolarides – I like what I’m hearing. Featuring Bonjay in accompaniment, Sense To You is an intense old school synth heavy groover that packs a punch without getting over dramatic.
Idehen is a huge supporter of sustaining the diminishing London live music scene. With advancing technologies in music and the ‘need’ to build heaps of apartments around the city, many of the most famous music venues have shut their doors in recent years and that number is still rising rapidly. Idehen’s old haunt Passing Clouds in Dalston, where his musicial projects stemmed from has sadly fallen foul to gentrification too. I featured his powerfully written protest track All Smoke, No Fire on Sniffer last year – the track documents and lists all of the venues that have disappeared. Thankfully the iconic Fabric survived it’s scare looking back on the video. It’s important to have people who are vocal in the quest to keep the London music scene burning. It is a great city and music is a huge binding pull factor that needs to be preserved. Fairplay Mr Idehen.
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