Dr. Alban, ‘It’s My Life’: Whose life is it anyway

Dr. Alban
‘It’s My Life’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 2 on September 20, 1992

1.

Recently, I had one of those blood-chilling moments that happen in every parent’s life, when your little baby turns around and says the words you’ve been dreading since the moment they were born:

“Hey dad, there’s a university open day next month.”

We still have a few years before college, but things are now in motion, and her impending adulthood looms ever closer.

Luckily, she already has a reasonably clear idea of what she wants to do. Or, at least, she has narrowed it down to two or three options, all of which are in the arts.

(I won’t say what, exactly. If you want to learn her secrets, you’ll have to subscribe to her newsletter.)

When I talk to friends about this—and once they get over the initial shock of realising that my baby is approaching college age—they kind of furrow their brows a little. Not in disgust, but more in concern, like I’ve announced that she’s thinking of joining the circus or starting a TikTok prank channel.

They pause, and then say things like “I guess she can be a freelance creative”, or “yeah, maybe she can use that degree to get a job in marketing, maybe?” They’ve skipped past college and graduation in their heads. They’re thinking about employability and trying to not to picture another arts graduate on the dole.

These conversations give me flashbacks to when I was 17, and trying to decide what I was going to do. All I really wanted to do as a teenager was read books and try to write, which meant that the logical third-level choice would be English.

But can you get a job with that?

2. How Mr. Alban became Dr. Alban

Alban Uzoma Nwapa grew up in a high-achieving family.

His father was a local GP who managed to protect his family from the worst ravages of the Nigerian civil war. After the conflict ended, all 10 Nwapa children went on to achieve respectable careers, becoming doctors, bankers, and diplomats.

Nigeria was still reeling from the civil war in the 70s, so most of the Nwapa family trained abroad and then returned home. Middle child Alban followed this plan too, using a family contact in the Stockholm embassy to blag a Swedish student visa so he could study dentistry. The plan was to get his degree, gain some experience, then spend his life as a dentist in Nigeria.

But that’s easier said then done when you’re alone in a faraway country. Alban had to pay his own way through college, so he took whatever work he could find that didn’t interfere with his studies. One of those jobs was working as a cleaner in a cool Stockholm nightclub called Alphabet Street.

Here’s where the story gets a bit Disney.

One evening, Alban is cleaning as normal, helping Alphabet Street get ready for the night ahead. The club owner comes out of his office, raging, panicking. Tonight’s DJ has called off sick and there’s nobody around to replace him. Punters are already queueing outside the door. What is he going to do?

Alban is a big music fan, and he loves the sound at Alphabet Street. He puts his hand up and says, “I can try DJing if you like? I’ve never done it before, but how hard can it be?”

The club owner says, “alright kid. Show me what you got.”

Alban steps up to the decks, and he is terrible. He drops records, he can’t mix for shit, he’s jumping between BPMs like he’s having a nervous breakown. An iPod on shuffle would have done a better job. The audience boo him. But the club owner sees something in him, and Alban gets another chance.

He continued studying dentistry after that, eventually graduating and opening his own practice in Stockholm. But, by night, the artist now known as Dr. Alban is mixing reggae, dancehall and house, and even starts rapping for the now-adoring crowd.

Double lives can’t last forever. Eventually, you have to choose one.

3. A sad day for Swedish dentistry

My final decision about college was based on the most stupid fucking thing imaginable.

No lie, this is true. It all came down to one book: Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. I tried to read Nostromo when I was 17, and I hated it so much that I decided not to do English, just in case Conrad was on the curriculum.

I took Computer Science instead, and that will always be one of my great regrets. Why did I pick CS? I thought I would get a job out of it. But I was bad at it, and I left college just as the Web 1.0 crash happened, and I haven’t written a line of code since 9/11. I may as well have not gone to college at all.

Regret is often something nebulous, a matter of vague what-ifs. But sometimes regret is very clear: you say heads and it comes up tails, you go left when you should have turned right. The 50/50 decisions that either go your way or don’t.

At the end of the 80s, Dr. Alban faced one of those either/or decisions. Music or dentistry.

In the end, his decision was swayed by a person he had befriended in Stockholm: Denniz PoP, a fellow DJ with ambitions to become a producer. He offered to help Dr. Alban cut a single and even got Leila K. to drop a guest verse.

That single was called ‘Hello Africa’ and it whips ass:

‘Hello Africa’ was a big hit in Sweden, Austria and, crucially, Nigeria, which meant that Dr. Alban’s family got to see him in action. Now that he had a hit, they were a lot more receptive to his musical ambitions.

But they didn’t give up on their original plans. The Nwapa family still wanted everyone to come back to Nigeria and be part of their respectable middle-class family.

The back-and-forth arguments about his future inspired him to write some lyrics. After five hours in the recording studio, he had his next single:

Safe to say, this moment was the end of Dr. Alban’s dental career.

It was also the moment he decided to stay in Sweden, where he still lives today. There was another big hit (‘Sing Hallelujah’) and seven studio albums before he moved back into full-time DJing.

By the way, ‘It’s My Life’ was also a pivotal moment for Denniz PoP. As co-writer, he made a fortune from the record, which allowed him to open his own studio. He hired an ambitious young producer called Max Martin, and they got to work on their next project: Ace Of Base.

4. Choose your own adventure

Less romantic people might say that we need dentists more than pop stars. Some people would support shutting down every Humanities department and getting kids to learn a trade instead.

This recent tweet does a good job of explaining why that’s a problem:

We need poets and painters and art historians and philosophers and folklorists. We need pop stars. They keep the universe balanced. They make life worth living.

My advice to my kid has been this: study something that interests you, do it as well as you can, and trust in yourself to figure things out as you go along. Life is too unpredictable to make rigid plans. You never know when the club owner is going to turn around to you and say, “hey, can you DJ?”

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