Labi Siffre: The black, gay musician who helped make Eminem famous

What do these songs have in common? Madness’s “It Must Be Love”. Eminem’s “My Name Is”. Kanye West’s “I Wonder”. Kenny Rogers’s “Something Inside So Strong”. Primal Scream’s “Kill All Hippies”. The answer? Labi Siffre, a black, gay activist, and one of the most talented singer-songwriters you’ve probably never heard of.

Born Claudius Afolabi Siffre in Hammersmith, London, in 1945, the 74-year-old has been covered and sampled more often – and more successfully – than just about anyone. He wrote two of the most profound love songs ever committed to vinyl – “It Must Be Love” and the lesser known “Bless the Telephone” – and when he turned from folk to funk, his riffs would become a staple sample for hip-hop stars such as Jay-Z and Kanye West. But mainstream fame always eluded him. Perhaps because he spent 10 years in self-imposed retirement, sick and tired of the “nastiness” of the music business. Or perhaps because he was openly gay at a time when to be so – especially as a black man – was considered indecorous. Whatever the reason, 50 years since the release of his self-titled debut album, it’s time Labi Siffre got his due.

Siffre’s first LP, which blended folk with acoustic soul, was a modest success in the UK. He followed it up a year later with The Singer and the Song, a similarly unassuming record whose undoubted highlight – the one-minute, 41-seconds-long “Bless The Telephone” – is a quiet beauty. Wonderfully fitting for a lockdown, too. “Strange how a phone call can change your day,” sings Siffre in his soft, crisp tenor over finger-picked guitars. “Take you away/ Away from the feeling of being alone. Bless the telephone.” It was later covered – because it wouldn’t be a Siffre song unless a famous singer got their hands on it – by Kelis on her 2014 album Food.

But it was 1972’s Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying that gradually cemented Siffre’s place in musical history. It took a while, though. In 1981, after covering the song at gigs for fun, the British band Madness decided to record their version of that album’s “It Must Be Love”. What was already an earnest, syncopated joy was given the ska-punk treatment, and climbed the charts in both the UK and the US. The following year, it featured on their No 1 compilation album Complete Madness, and it’s since become ubiquitous. No wedding DJ set has been without it in four decades. The album’s title track was covered, too, first by Olivia Newton John and then by Rod Stewart. And 25 years after it was written, the contemplative refrain of “My Song” was lifted wholesale by Kanye West and placed at the start of “I Wonder”, the fourth track on his double-platinum album Graduation.

Hip-hop fans will be familiar with that song, but everyone and their grandma will know the most eminent Siffre sample – even if they don’t know it’s him. In 1999, an unknown rapper called Marshall Mathers III – going by the stage name Eminem – was writing what he hoped would be his breakthrough single. His producer Dr Dre heard Labi Siffre’s “I Got The”, a dapper funk number that features on his 1975 album Remember My Song, and had a brainwave. He wanted to take the bass and drum lick that kicks in two minutes in and use it as the musical lynchpin for a song. “Dre put on the Labi Siffre record,” Eminem would later recall, “and I was just like ‘Hi! My name is!’ That beat was talking to me. I was like, ‘Yo, this is it, this is my shot.’”

But there was a snag. The original lyrics for “My Name Is” were frequently misogynistic and homophobic. “I denied sample rights till that lazy writing was removed,” recalled Siffre – who was with his partner Peter Lloyd from 1964 until Lloyd’s death in 2013 – in a recent interview. “Dissing the victims of bigotry – women as ‘bitches’, homosexuals as ‘faggots’ – is lazy writing. Diss the bigots not their victims.” So they removed the most egregious lyrics, and Siffre cleared the sample. The song turned Eminem into a superstar, winning him a Grammy, and is now generally considered one of the best hip-hop songs of all time. The bigotry crept back into Eminem’s music – but at least Siffre kept it at bay for a moment.

Siffre’s sexuality and race intersected in the form of another of his most famous songs. He had been retired for nearly a decade – “I can do without the nastiness of the music business,” he said, “That was why I stopped” – when he saw footage of white police officers shooting black protestors during South Africa’s apartheid regime. It jolted him back into action. “(Something Inside) So Strong”, an R&B-inflected soul ballad, was written with the intention that someone else would sing it – but failing to find anyone suitable, and realising how close he felt to it, Siffre decided to sing it himself. The song became his highest-charting release, reaching No 4 in the UK – but it was (you guessed it) made more famous by Kenny Rogers on his 1989 album of the same name. There’s something special about Siffre’s version, though. The accompanying video was unabashedly political, clearly evoking Nelson Mandela’s prison cell, and the lyrics were similarly defiant: “The higher you build your barriers/ The taller I become/ The farther you take my rights away/ The faster I will run”.

But that song wasn’t just about apartheid. “As soon as I’d written the first two lines,” he told the BBC in 2014, “I realised, with a shock, that I was writing about my life as a homosexual.” Siffre knew he was gay from the age of four. He was brought up Catholic and went to a monastery school where he was taught by monks. By the age of 11, he and his brother Kole had started skipping church on Sundays – “We went, with the collection money, to a coffee bar instead” – but the attitudes of Catholicism, and of society at large, had an impact. It meant being put through “the societal abuse of being told that I was, as a black man and a homosexual, a ‘wicked, evil, disgusting pervert’”. He spent many years “waiting for the society I lived in to grow a backbone. It’s too late to wipe away what some people would call ‘bitterness’, [but] I would call ‘justifiable hurt.’ A wound that won’t ever heal.”

Despite his prodigious talent, Siffre was never fully embraced, as his own artist, by either the music industry or the world at large. But his songs are still there. In an interview in 2012, Siffre was asked whether he agreed that “real music” was dying out. “The term ‘real music’ is as meaningless as ‘real men’ or ‘real Americans’,” he said. “There will always be artists producing insightful work, work of vulnerability, politically engaged work, emotionally revealing work, pioneering work, works of courageous exploration, profound work. Those artists, though they are many, will always be a minority.” And Labi Siffre is undoubtedly one of them.