Grammy and three-time MOBO award winner, Fuse ODG has credited kids at a summer youth club he started for helping create one of his biggest hits as he launches a new educational app for children.
Fuse, whose real name is Nana Richard Abiona has had anthems with Wyclef John, Damien Marley, Ed Sheeran and has even had former Prime Minister David Cameron dancing to his viral track, Azonto. Now, he has revealed that the song which garnered millions of plays was “made by the young people in the music workshops” he started as a teenager.
The youth scheme, Escape Youth Project operated over the summer holidays in 2007 working with children aged 11 to 15 in Mitcham, Southwest London, with around 70 young people participating in music, dance and drama workshops. Nana said: “My songs Azonto and Antenna were made by the young people who were in the music workshops. It all started through the youth project.
“I went to Ghana and that's when I saw people doing Azonto [dance] and I thought this is sick. I need to make a song about this.
“I came back to London and at the time we were running the youth project and I said to the kids, ‘today we’re actually going to make Afrobeats’ and a lot of them didn't know what it was but I was like, ‘I’m going to teach you guys and we’re going to make Azonto music.’
“These young people are so talented they just caught it straight away and they started with the chords and they actually built the framework to the song that [people] actually know now, the framework was built during the music workshop.”
Nana says he took that framework and headed to a studio where he built on it and then took it to a producer who created the final song.
He said: “I was like, ‘wait, I know that it's all fun and jokes but this sounds crazy. This might be going somewhere.’
“I was in the studio the whole night because I also wanted to play it for them - the final product of what I’d done in the studio. I played it to them and everyone was going crazy. Then I linked up with a producer that I connected with in Ghana and I showed him it and he finalised it to the song that you know today.”
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PA)Nana says he believes that his success is a result of “pouring his heart into community.”
The father-of-one said: “This is all just from us coming together as a community and that’s why I’m always interested in building for the community because I feel like it's just from me pouring my heart into the community - I got given back the blessings of the work."
Now, the Ghanaian-British star who has a new album on the way and also has a line of "Black Barbie dolls" after failing to find any Black dolls for his niece, says he's on a mission to help educate children and build future leaders with a history and finance app called School of New Africa (SONA), alongside co-founder Andre Hackett.
Nana says that while growing up in London, kids would laugh whenever Africa was mentioned in class which made him also want to change the perception of the continent through his app.
SONA is an educational gaming platform designed to teach African history and languages while promoting financial literacy through an innovative in-game rewards system.
He said: “I’ve got the same feeling with SONA we’re going to build some leaders through the SONA app.
“With the youth project we built some amazing producers and photographers and some entrepreneurs. Through the SONA app we’re going to build some confident leaders and instill self love in the next generation."
Nana also added that “things have gone backwards” due to youth clubs being shut down and that kids need to have a place they can feel “at home”.
He said: “They’ve shut down a lot of the community centres so at this stage we have to take it into our hands to educate our kids and that's why the app is a super important tool to allow parents to teach their children.
“Right now every single child is on their phone, the app is a way for children to learn some life skills, learn about their history, learn financial literacy and build their confidence in themselves in order to tackle the external world.”
When asked about Black History being confined to one month and it not being taught in schools, Nana said:
“At some point as a community we have to stand up for ourselves and be the solution to our problems. We can't expect the government to solve our problems. I stopped complaining and decided to start doing, we know its not right but we have to do something about this. We now have Black history everyday through SONA.”
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