Ibi Alfa Jnr opens up about a life that took him from boarding school at six years old to the front line of the techno scene, through years of crime, addiction and repeated spells in prison, and to a brush with death that led to the most honest record of his career.
Born in England to Nigerian parents and raised by foster parents in Chichester, Ibrahim was sent to boarding school at just six, with his mum paying for his care and his schooling. He was eventually asked to leave, and after losing contact with his mother for around 25 years, the foster parents who raised him both passed away when he was in his early 20s, leaving him very much on his own. He became a dad at 18, and soon after, with a tape of one track and a few pounds to his name, he walked into a Brighton record shop. That led to his first record being released, and the start of a career that has taken him to around 30 countries. But when the label side of the business collapsed and his family life fell apart, he moved to London and turned to commercial theft, shoplifting and drug dealing to survive. Heroin became his drug of choice. By his own count he was arrested around 60 times, spent time in Pentonville, Wormwood Scrubs and a Polish jail, and describes an entire decade of his life, roughly 30 to 40, as being completely in the grip of the criminal justice system. He also talks about the six weeks he spent locked in a cell for 23 hours a day with a volatile cellmate, and the day he was arrested at a Jobcentre appointment.
Now in his late 40s, Ibrahim has been out of prison for almost ten years and is, in his own words, pretty much teetotal. A few years ago, he suffered a pulmonary embolism followed by a heart attack, and was told to prepare for the worst. He made his latest album, Infinite Black Inside, believing he would never hear it released. Instead, it gathered attention across the world, and heโs now booked for Primavera Sound, launching his own label and putting together an art exhibition in Frankfurt to mark 30 years of making records. He reunites with Dodge after 34 years apart, reflects on the regrets and the lessons, and shares the story of a daughter who wrote to him every week while he was inside.
This is the eventful life of Ibi Alfa Jnr.
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