Features Track By Track: Benin City - Fires In The Park

In her DIY review, Coral Williamson declares Benin City’s first work ‘Fires In The Park’ to be a ‘stunning debut.’ Frenetic and dynamic from start to finish, stunning is an understatement. The debut’s wild fusion of brass sections and cocksure, wit-defined lyricisms from Joshua Idehen set the London group’s first work apart from any foreseeable peers.

Audio Doughnuts release ‘Fires In The Park’ on 1st July, where the ‘madman and his madness go toe to toe’ in the most spectacular of circumstances. Featuring choice cuts ‘Faithless’ and the attitude-heavy ‘My Love’, there are so many scattered ideas compressed into one finite debut, that we deemed it necessary to get word from the band about the making of their debut, and the meanings and lunacy that helped it come into fruition.



People Will Say
This is about struggling with doubt; trying to punch through when the doom and gloom cloud seems real. Self-motivation can be a bitch to muster sometimes, especially when the returns aren’t obvious/present/non-applicable. This is me learning to appreciate the process more than the end result, I guess.

Faithless
I’m a writer, first and foremost, and storytelling is my first love. Big fan of songs with narratives -Jolie Lights A Fire, Hey Joe, Sufjan Steven stuff - I wanted to bring some of that into the album. We’d finished workshopping the track and I found myself watching an old documentary on Sugar Ray Leonard. First line popped in ‘a man and his madness go toe to toe’ and the rest followed.

Wha Gwan
Pretty simple: loss of a friendship. Like Henry (Audio Doughnuts’ label boss) said once ‘music is a passion Industry, and you are going to lose friends whichever way you go, up or down.’ Time has a funny way of making the cause of every argument seem insignificant compared to the damage caused after…I had a moment of reflection.

Pencils
I was reminiscing over my ultra ultra ultra poor days. Jesus, I just remembered the bed bugs! We had a bed bug problem. The flat was a bastard, the flatmates even more so and there were cold wet socks everywhere and it stank to high heaven. And every night for a week I remember me and another fellow from Spain discussing over premium government juice how we were going to write the best script ever ‘tomorrow.’ In case you did not know: it is possible to plan forever without doing anything.

Winning Streak
In a way, this is a continuation of ‘Pencils…’, I had a lot of fun in that flat. Even though I was always broke and hungry and pretty much a dirt bowl. It was bare jokes for most of the time. Tom Leaper, saxophone genius and general devil, is a big fan of making things in awkward time signatures, and this was one of his ideas, for a while this was a bit of a Satan’s beard to write to.

So You Say Reprise & Winning Streak Reprise
A lot of Benin City’s songs were made with the intention that they would be performed live, and something we love doing in Benin City is add extensions to tracks. Unfortunately wedidn’t feel like all of them worked as well on an album, but we wanted to keep them, hence reprises!

Baby
My neighbours in Hackney were junkies. They would argue after midnight on the balcony. From what I could tell, she was not his first/true love, because she kept reminding him that ‘she didn’t want you, isn’t that why you’re here.’ I was playing Tekken when I overheard him say repeatedly ‘what do you want me to do, then.’ Boom, story time.

This Is London Part 2
Another one of Tom’s tracks, surprise, surprise it’s a bit of a Satan’s beard. I had a bit of a problem writing to this one, so I got Deanna Rodgers, who is an excellent spoken word artist in her own right, to help out. She heard it and felt like it reminded her of London. She wrote her piece first, so responding to it was a piece of pish.

My Love
I’m a bit obsessed with the concept of love, ever since an ex said she wasn’t sure if she loved me, ‘or just in love with love,’ which is exactly the kind of wanky thing you expect from two creative writing students. But somewhere in there was a point and I wrote this piece to explore all the sides of love. Plus, I love me a good list-poem.

D.A.M
Theo Buckingham is a bit of a genius (‘People Will Say’ is his initial idea) and this was a lot of fun to get into. Admittedly the story took its sweet fucking time coming to me. Then I watched the speech from the film The Network and the gears got spinning, about repression and falsity. Theo Bard, a folk singer songwriter has this wicked song about a middle class dude who is living an successful yet empty life. The chorus goes ‘he has to do something, but he doesn’t know what to do.’ I’m responding to that.

Only The Beginning
The last song we worked on. I felt I definitely needed another singer on this, and I had met Sarah Williams White on tour a few months before. In a nutshell: we didn’t expect to get that far, finishing an album. This was our way of looking back. Also, it was a proper bull in china to sing right. Madness.

So You Say
Following on the theme of ‘Baby’, I sort of imagined the junkies had broken up, gone separate ways. The guy had cleaned himself up and now works in advertising and one day shopping he spots his first love in aisle 17. Tries to win her back. She don’t trust him, innit.

Benin City’s debut album ‘Fires In The Park’ is out 1st July.