By Prinscilla Bulu
Ghanaian musician Fancy Gadam has opened up about his humble beginnings and the long journey that shaped his rise to fame. The award-winning artist shared how his childhood in Tamale and his early love for dance gradually led him into music.
Growing up in a Muslim family in Tamale, Fancy Gadam said his parents wanted him to focus on school and learning Arabic. But as he describes it, he was a “stubborn boy” who preferred spending time on the streets. During his early years, he formed a dance group and became its leader, performing across the community before later discovering his passion for music.
According to him, breaking through in the northern region was not easy. “We have many dialects in the North, so cutting across the entire region was difficult,” he explained. Although he started his music journey in 2010, it took six years of hard work before he became widely recognized.
His first major breakthrough came from his song Kalipo, which many fans believed to be his debut track. “Kalipo brought me out,” he said, noting that he had already been releasing songs “small small” before it. Over the next few years, he dropped several songs including Pataye, Django Star, and Nation Champion.
However, he describes Naurungu as the biggest turning point in his early career. The song was the leading track on an album he launched at the Tamale Sports Stadium, an event that filled the venue to capacity. Fans from the Upper East, Upper West, Savannah, and Northeast regions all came out to support him, marking the moment the whole country began paying attention.
He recalled how Reggae legend Rockstone shared the stadium event on social media, drawing attention from Accra. “People wanted to know who this Fancy Gadam guy was, one man filling a whole stadium,” he said.
According to Fancy Gadam, this growing interest motivated him to move to Accra to expand his reach. But the move came with challenges. The dialect difference made it harder to penetrate the southern market, and many bloggers doubted he could attract the same crowd in the capital.
“Even though a lot of people doubted me, I still went ahead and booked the National Theatre for November 2016. This was just a few months after filling the Tamale Sports Stadium. When my team and I came to Accra, we started doing interviews and promoting the show everywhere because we wanted to prove that a northern artist could also pull a big crowd in the south”. He said.
He also highlighted the strong northern community in Accra, joking that “if all northerners were removed from Accra, the city would be empty.”
