Finn Doherty has received around 100 responses to posters he put up in Finsbury Park [Gianmarco Rizzo]

“LEAVE me a voicemail if you’re bored of this city.”

This is the call of Finn Doherty, a 23-year-old musician. Last month, the “serious pop” performer pasted up posters emblazoned with the first line of his latest single, KMU, and the title of his upcoming EP, If You’re Bored of This City, around Finsbury Park where he grew up.

The poster encourages passers-by to call a phone number, which leads you to a voicemail where you can leave a message for Mr Doherty to hear. The Tribune saw one of his posters outside Finsbury Park Tube station and decided to call Mr Doherty and leave him a message.

“I can’t believe you managed to find out who I am,” he said, as the posters don’t have his name on them.

Mr Doherty says he’s sick of trying to promote his music on TikTok, and wanted to do something that felt more authentic to him.

“It was a massive experiment, and I just wanted to see how people responded to it, and whether that form of engagement works,” he said.

One of the posters

“I got about 100 responses, so, it was super-effective having five posters around Finsbury Park, so what if we did 50 and put them all over north London?

“One voicemail was this guy, who I imagine was pulled up on the side of the street in a van, and he said, ‘I’m so bored, I’m just so bored. I hate it here. The people are horrible.’”

Mr Doherty says that while he wrote KMU, the song the posters promote, in November, it feels more relevant now than ever.

He said: “I did a show recently and I was like, ‘Yeah, this song is about the cost of living crisis,’ which was a stupid joke, but it is the situation.

“Being a young person in London right now, you can’t really afford to go out. You’re just working to live here unless you live with your parents.

“No one’s going out, and even if you are, finding a good night out is really hard. My friends and I have just struggled to find a cool scene to go and get involved – where is the cool stuff happening? It feels like it’s lacking right now in a cultural and artistic sense. There’s nothing going on that’s really exciting us or is super-accessible because everything is so expensive.”

The musician says he is unsure about exactly what he will do with all of his voicemails, but it’s likely they’ll be used in a collage and released closer to the time of his EP drop.