The Plantashun Boyz was a very successful Nigerian hip hop band, which had three band members; Ahmedu Augustine Obiabo (popularly known as Blackface), Innocent Ujah Idibia (best known as 2face Idibia) and Chibuzor Orji (Best known as Faze).
The band decided to split up in 2004, sadly going separate ways to launch solo careers. 2Face is probably the only member of the band to have achieved the most awards e.g. The MTV Europe Music Award, Mobo, Kora, Hip-hop World Awards and others.
In a recent interview with Nigeriafilms, 2faceIdiabia opened up on the real behind their break up.
He said “In life, people come together and at times depart each other’s company. Even marriages break up. Yeah, in life, there are different decisions, different things happen. Basically for me and the rest of the group, we just went solo”.
“There wasn’t any quarrel or clash of egos as such. Just the fact that Nigeria was not too conducive for a group to survive for long like the long surviving Irish pop group U2.Let me just put it like that. We came together and at a point had to go our separate ways due to the normal conflicts between people. In life, people must disagree. Husband and wife must disagree. Like the African proverb says, even mouth and tongue do quarrel. For us as a group, due to our individual differences, we could have some clashes”.
“Maybe today, I oversleep and one would come and wake me and tell me ‘Hey why are you still sleeping? Don’t you know we have somewhere to go? Maybe, we were supposed to go somewhere and Faze would come late and there would be small quarrel or maybe we quarrel over which song to do and which one to drop”.
“It’s the normal squabble you will expect from when two or three people come together, as at that time, I don’t think we had a leader. All of us were independent”.
“All of us had an opinion and all of us respected each other’s opinion. Yeah it was a case of three captains in a ship but everybody still respected each other’s view. When it came to song writing, sometimes I would write a song and I would bring it for the group or maybe we would sit down together and we would write the song together or two of us can write together”.
“If one person writes a song and it sounds good to the rest of us, everybody would accept it. But most of the time we wrote together”.
“Normally, it starts with hearing the beat and all of us would start to flow according to the beat or we would just choose a topic and start writing on it, but later we go to the studio to do something on it”.
“Our first album as a group was ‘Body and Soul’ which did tremendously well in the market”.
“It was wonderful. It was a huge success. I still remember a line like: ‘Baby, don’t you know that I just can’t get you out of my mind”. Overall, I did three albums with the Plantation Boys”.
“I was the first person that went solo. I just woke up one day and told them straight off that I wanted to go out there and do my own thing. As to be expected they didn’t take it lightly but in the end everybody saw reason and we had to part. We were all talented bunch and we felt we could survive individually. All of a sudden I was on my own, a couple of labels were talking to me and I was also negotiating with a couple of labels.
“Eventually, Kenny’s Music emerged as the one prepared for what I had in mind, so I worked with Kenny’s Music”
“My first album with Kenny’s Music was Face to Face. It was a huge album. That was the album that produced ‘African Queen’. It was one of the most successful albums in the history of Nigerian music. I can say that the success impacted positively on me and on ‘Kenny’s Music’ as a business. We had a contract and they just fulfilled their contract” 2face said.
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The 'Plantashun Boyz' back in the days
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