Where it's at

Raffishly dapper in trilby and bleached hair, Ben Hudson looks, in a good, good way, like a cross between Young Americans-era Bowie and the jaded anti-hero of a Dashiel Hammett novel.

“I took to wearing a hat after I realised that David Beckham was copying all of my haircuts,” says the young Londoner, shooting the breeze in a corner of Dublin’s Gresham Hotel. “The final straw was when he copied my spikey haircut – the Hoxton fin it was called at the time. I realised that haircuts were so over man. I’ve been a committed hat wearer ever since.”
Plying smoove glitch-hop with his band, The Library, Hudson vaults from your stereo in the style of a less geezerish Mike Skinner. The singer has coined his own term for the Mr. Hudson sound: “English R'n'B.”
“I used to be just another sensitive young man, banging my guitar in the back of a pub, while people talked over my songs,” reminisces Hudson, who fell into the London singer-songwriter circuit upon graduating from Oxford. “I figured out pretty quickly that, unless I got very lucky, I wasn’t going anywhere. And anyway, the singer-songwriter thing was boring me. What’s the point in doing something that’s been done a million times before?”
Retiring to his bedroom with a sampler and a beat-box, Hudson re-imagined both his music and himself. The result: a darkly mellow debut album, A Tale Of Two Cities, and oodles of industry buzz (Hudson recently accompanied Amy Winehouse on her Ireland and UK tour).
“Hip-hop has an almost spiritual dimension,” he avers. “There’s much more of an opportunity to bond with your audience than with rock music. When you’re free-styling over a groove, every performance is different. You can’t go through the motions.”
Raised in Birmingham, the 27-year-old is second generation Irish – his father emigrated from Hollywood, County Down in the ‘60s (“He doesn’t talk about that time very much,” he says when asked if his dad experienced any anti-Irish sentiment during the IRA bombing campaign of the early ‘70s). Not that he feels especially close to his Brummie roots.
“Growing up, I never had a really strong feeling of being from a specific place. There was a sense, almost, of coming from nowhere. I think that’s helped with my music. It makes it easier for me to assume identities. Because if you think about it, there’s really two of me: there’s Mr. Hudson, the guy who comes alive on stage, and then there’s Ben, who phones his parents to let them know he’s okay.”
A Tale Of Two Cities gets a live airing at Whelan's, Dublin on May 7.