Playing Glastonbury almost made Joshua Idehen quit music – twice. The first time was in 2007, when the spoken-word artist’s slot followed a dancer who had successfully roused a crowd of 800. By the end of his first poem, only a handful of punters were left in the tent, even though it was pouring with rain outside. “People were like, ‘Nope, I’d rather get soaked than listen to you,’” he says. “That was a sucker punch.”
Nearly two decades later, on the Greenpeace stage this summer, the 45-year-old faced the opposite problem. Five thousand people turned up – another “earth-shattering” experience, only this time a dizzying high. “I did one Glastonbury and I was like, ‘I never want to experience that again,’” he says. “I did the other and thought, ‘It’s never going to feel like this again. This might be the end.’” He flashes a mischievous grin. “Then I was like, ‘Oh, look at how much money I can make!’”
It’s a Sunday afternoon and we’re sitting in the warm, dim light of the Social bar in London, joined by Idehen’s longtime Swedish producer and bandmate Ludvig Parment. In recent months Idehen has been delighting thousands at other festivals. And in a few hours, the pair will perform a show downstairs in collaboration with Love Music Hate Racism – a last-minute gig that sold out in a day.
Their energy is a stark contrast to the headlines from the previous day’s “unite the kingdom” rally, a march of more than 100,000 people that became a hotbed of racism and hate speech as far-right protesters waved the St George’s cross across the capital. When he performs later, Idehen will offer a modest antidote to the division: “Dance is my foolproof way out of depression,” he tells the crowd. “Rhythm is my weapon.”
Disarming positivity is Idehen’s thing. As a writer, the British-Nigerian has underground prestige, having contributed poems to critically acclaimed albums by jazz groups Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming. He also published his own collection of lyrics and poems, Songbook, last year. But through his own musical project, Idehen’s priority is cultivating joy.
He bellows self-help slogans (“Choose yourself!”) over Parment’s pulsating beats. He urges his audience to shake hands with strangers and “shimmy off” bad vibes. He dances ecstatically on stage as though alone in his kitchen. He’s refreshingly earnest in his pursuit of goodness – and his insistence that the rest of us chase it too. (“It’s almost like a sermon,” says one audience member.) Depending on how you look at it, Idehen either laughs off life’s seriousness, or feels its weight so deeply he’s propelled to remedy the world’s collective dismay with unapologetic, sunny-side-up hope.
“My joy is a whistle / Loud in its belief that something good is coming,” he affirms on It Always Was, a track from his forthcoming album I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got to Try. It’s a relentlessly optimistic record, full of motivational-poster lyricism spliced with jubilant soul samples and house beats. “I wrote the lyrics for the album at a time when I genuinely did not believe we would end up where we are now politically,” he says. “But it was still quite bleak. We had Israel-Palestine happening, Biden was basically being Keir Starmer – just a huge, utter disappointment. I was struggling with what my purpose was.”
As social tensions escalated at home and overseas, Idehen began to wonder if the tone of his lyrics might miss the mark. “It was a real turmoil for me,” he says, recalling his headspace at the start of the year. “I kind of felt like, ‘Is this not the time for something more political? Am I using my voice the right way?’” Then he came across a clip of children dancing in a burnt-out bus in Gaza. “If they have found joy in the midst of all that, who am I to be glum when I can actually celebrate being alive?”
Parment, who often provides the calm to Idehen’s effervescence, agrees. “We struggle like everyone else, but we have a sense of purpose with this,” he says. “I have a lot of existential dread, but you just have to find something worthwhile to do.”
Even so, it was Idehen’s most overtly political song that unexpectedly brought him so many new listeners. Released last year, Mum Does the Washing plays like a comedic glossary of political ideologies and contradictions. It starts with capitalism (“Your mum does the washing / You pay her a dollar / You get her to do your mate’s washing / Your mate pays you 50 dollars”) then escalates to hot-button subjects such as male feminism (“That one time I did the washing / I told everybody I did the washing / I blogged about it, bragged about it / Took a selfie, Insta story / Went on TV, won an Oscar”). At the end of each scenario, it’s a woman who ends up doing the labour.
Typically, Idehen writes poems to fit Parment’s beats, but the busy, techno-inflected hums that accompany this track were retrofitted. The verses began as a 2015 thread on X, then Twitter, written in response to Gamergate. “Twitter was a place of constant arguments,” he says. This thread, he decided, could help people accurately understand words like “fascism” in less than 140 characters. He kept adding new lines each year – sometimes going viral – and it became a full poem, one of the works shortlisted for this year’s Forward prizes for poetry. In 2024, he finally set it to music. “We were working on an EP, and there was a particular incident that happened in a certain country – it was violent and it made me upset,” he says, pointedly choosing his words as he navigates the Israel-Gaza conflict. He added a new line to the thread (“Zionism: You shoved your mum / Into the washing machine / And the spinning made her dizzy / And the dizziness made her vomit / And you point at the vomit and call it antisemitism”). “I looked at it and said: ‘Ludvig, why don’t we turn it into a song?’” By the end of the year, for the first time in his life, Idehen began to sell out gigs.
He wasn’t always this engaged. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, before moving back to the UK as a young adult, Idehen admits there were times when he was on the other side of the Twitter arguments, parroting misinformed “Black conservative talking points” into the void. “I used to be a sexist – I came from Nigeria, a really sexist society,” he says. “Even before I wrote Mum Does the Washing, I thought I was a decent person, but I didn’t understand transphobia and trans activism.” He credits the patience of friends who gently called him out with setting him straight. “That’s why I believe instances of kindness, joy and grace can make the difference. We’ve all done dickhead things, but we’re all capable of redemption.”
It’s a simple belief, but one that feels radical in a world where the news cycle so often leaves us feeling helpless. These days, Idehen lives in Stockholm with his four-year-old daughter. “She makes it very difficult for me to be nihilistic,” he says, when asked whether he, too, falls victim to doomscroll defeatism. “It’s bittersweetly ironic that my career is taking off at a point where sometimes I do feel like, shit, we might be at war. Why am I making music when it all feels a bit Mad Max?” Idehen pauses. “I circle back to my daughter and try to imagine what kind of world I want her to live in. She has to be part of a world that’s better than the one I have.”
