Nigerian music star, D’Banj, has made a name for himself with the song “Oliver Twist”. He spoke to CASPAR LLEWELLYN SMITH of the UK Guardian about his career thus far. We publish excerpts of that discussion here.



Bouncing towards me on his alligator-skin trainers, Dapo Daniel Oyebanjo opts for a one-armed hip-hop hug. Not only does he look the part – the shoes are by designer Philipp Plein, his T-shirt’s Calvin Klein and around his neck hangs a dazzling chain created by Jacob “The Jeweller” Arabo, purveyor of “bling blings” to the hip-hop elite – but he smells it, too: an almost suffocating cloud of lavender scent hangs in the air.

D’Banj, as he shortens his name, is the biggest name in entertainment in Nigeria and has the potential to become the first-ever artist from Africa to compete on equal terms with any acts in the Western pop firmament.

It’s the brash, moneyed, sexy version of the continent – home to seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world – that he represents. Today he is in the UK promoting his Top 10 hit “Oliver Twist”, a ribald account of the famous women he fancies, from Nicki Minaj and Rihanna to the Ghanaian actress Nadia Buhari.

It quickly becomes apparent that the 32-year-old is difficult to stop once he’s on a roll.

“I’m so excited – not just for me, but for the whole of Africa,” he says. “Two years ago I said it’s time for me to take my music global because I’ve won all the awards back home.”

With his mentor, producer Don Jazzy, he created the biggest record label in Nigeria, but “now I want to win a Brit award, a Grammy”.

“Yes, we have MTV, yes, we sell millions of records and have endorsement deals, but we’ve never felt as if we’re part of the same music industry as the rest of the world – the Kanye Wests, the Adeles and Tinie Tempahs,” he continues.

“I see what I’m doing now as the bridge that we’ve been looking for from Africa to the mainstream world. I want others to see the potential in my country, other than our oil and natural resources. That’s what’s making me move. I feel like a new artist.”

Just before our meeting, the ebullient Bankulli, his manager, shows me footage on YouTube demonstrating how to do the “Oliver Twist”.

Over the past three or four years, there’s been a growing appetite for what are styled “Afro beats” in the UK. Listen to DJ Abrantee’s show on Choice FM on Saturday nights or DJ Edu on Radio 1 Extra with his “Destination Africa” programme on Sundays and you’ll hear the likes of Sarkodie and Efya (Ghana) or P-Square, WizKid and D’Banj (Nigeria).

Rickie Davies runs a website promoting Afro beats in the UK, and she describes “a real shift in perceptions among audiences in the UK”.

Abrantee told me recently of the deeper impact of this burgeoning scene. “When I was growing up in London,” he said, “you never let on that your family came from Africa – it was too embarrassing. Everyone pretended they came from the Caribbean. But suddenly black kids from Ghana or Nigeria are saying it’s cool to come from there.”

“It’s very humbling, my success here,” D’Banj says. “Coming from Africa – Nigeria – doing music for a decade there … it’s a different world.”

The story of the Nigerian pop scene as it exists today – with its videos showing fast cars and faster women – doesn’t date back much further than a decade and reflects the booming economy in the country. GDP has more than doubled since 2005 and the growing middle class has an appetite for the affluent lifestyle that figures such as Ice Prince or D’Banj embody.

The latter tells me that “it used just to be footballers who got endorsement deals, but now entertainment is attracting a lot of media and investors, too”.

Ice Prince is contemplating offers from a drinks company and a telecoms outfit at the moment. Acts such as his can earn up to £20 000 for a live show – and without that income, rampant piracy would mean the music industry in the country would barely exist.

Instead, in the absence of global players such as Sony and Universal, four or five labels – including Ice Prince’s Chocolate City, Storm Records, Kennis Music and Eme Music, and D’Banj and Don Jazzy’s Mo’Hits – have competed for success.

“There’s been mad growth in the music industry here,” Ice Prince says, while acknowledging the problems with publishing and the collection of royalties. Nonetheless, “If you go to a club or a party in Lagos, 80 percent of the music that you’ll hear is Nigerian, which never used to be the case.”

Factor in the advent of MTV and other cable channels across Africa, – including Channel O, BET (Black Entertainment Television) and the French network, Trace – plus the new power of Twitter and social media, and little wonder that when an artist such as Ice Prince plays a show in Malawi, he’s greeted by crowds numbering in their thousands.

He shows me footage of a recent gig on his Mac PowerBook. “This is new. They might not understand our patois, but the fans there know us from TV, and we’re famous right across the continent.”

Born in Zaria in northern Nigeria to a military officer and a businesswoman, D’Banj grew up just north of Lagos, becoming interested in music following the death of his 17-year-old brother Femi in an air crash in 1994.

“I arranged all his possessions on his bed after they were brought home and just picked up his harmonica. I’d play it to remember him.”

Later, at university, he realised what his new skills with the instrument could bring him. “I’d go to the female hostel after lectures, and even if there was no electricity I could play there.”

He remembers learning Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” after Titanic came out – “and that got me a lot of girls!”

Plans to continue his studies as a mechanical engineer in London were derailed when he arrived in the UK in 2001 and met Don Jazzy.

The 18-year-old – born Michael Collins Ajereh – had also come from Lagos and was trying to make it as a songwriter and producer, working with acts such as Big Brovaz (they contributed to the soundtrack of “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed”).

D’Banj started hanging around the studio, making ends meet with work as a security guard. “It was OK, because I did nights,” he says, “so I could listen to music on my headphones.”

Don Jazzy told D’Banj he thought he was a star in the making and, sensing that the music scene in Nigeria was “blossoming”, the pair returned to Lagos in 2004. That same year came the single “Tongolo”, the video paid for by D’Banj’s mum who’d hitherto been suspicious of his new-found calling, and then his first album, his first endorsement (with an energy drink called Power Fist) and “the rest is history”.

With “Mr Endowed”, he went for “fist-pumping dance music” – a risk at home in Nigeria, but it paid off in spades, and through the help of a mutual friend (jeweller Chris Aire), Snoop Dogg was brought in on a remix of the track.

The impossibly infectious “Oliver Twist” was a calculated attempt to crack the market in the UK.

“I thought we could do with a sort of funky house sound. I thought: ‘It’s not like the music is that different from the music we listen to here.’”

Listen to “Oliver Twist”, or Ice Prince’s “Superstar”, or P-Square’s “Chop My Money” and the productions are not so dissimilar from any Western pop hit.

But as Ice Prince told me, there’s definitely an indigenous feel, too: “There’s a lot of American and UK influence, but the present Nigerian sound is really influenced by highlife and juju music. We made it a bit funky, a bit more modern.”

Prior to the likes of 2face Idibia and the brothers in P-Square and D’Banj, the biggest name in Nigerian music remained the late Fela Kuti, and Don Jazzy cites the influence of his “Afro beat” sound, too. It’s a source of some irritation that what he calls his “Afro pop” is termed “Afro beats” in the UK, when “what we do now sounds totally different”.

With D’Banj, Jazzy built Mo’Hits records, also signing the likes of Wande Coal. But earlier this year, the pair split, following D’Banj’s decision to sign to Kanye West’s label and relocate on a more or less permanent basis to the UK and US.

In D’Banj’s telling of it, he and his entourage were in the first-class lounge at Dubai airport in November 2010 after playing a gig when a stewardess approached with a name card that said “Mr Kanye West”.

“I said: ‘I’m not Kanye West, I’m D’Banj!’ But I said to Bankulli: ‘That means Kanye West is coming, let’s get rolling … Eyes open!’ Then we saw him, checking in, wearing a hoodie.

“I said: ‘If I get five minutes, I will take it. I’m an African man! I will not waste it!’ And he came and five minutes became 30 minutes and he held my plane for me, because I would have missed it. In fact, the first thing he said was: ‘I like your dress sense …’.”

There are those voices who think that now he’s tasted success in the UK, he’ll turn his back on Nigeria, but he’s adamant.

“I can’t wait for the world to see what we have in Africa. I tell Kanye and everyone, I’ve got rappers back home who can really rap … but I don’t want to change my Nigerian identity, I don’t want to change my style.”

The final question I put to him – and it’s the sort of question that a lot of his peers in the UK and US would shirk – is whether his Afro beats hold a mirror up to society in the same way that Fela Kuti’s did.

D’Banj argues that today’s stars are simply reaping the rewards of battles Fela won, that “things are better”.

At the last Nigerian elections, D’Banj was courted by presidential candidate Goodluck Jonathan and filmed a video in support that was subsequently credited with ensuring his success.

“We’re enjoying democracy now,” D’Banj insists, “and the economy is on the up and up. There’s also been so much negative coverage of Nigeria,” he continues, “but I like to think that the message I preach through leading the lifestyle that I do is: anyone can make it.”