Siffre found the music industry stifling. And from the moment Peter and I met, I never took for granted.” It is head and shoulders above everything else. “The most important thing in your life is what happens at home,” says Siffre. Yet often they express romantic contentment in such a simple and relatable way – shared jumpers, waiting for telephone calls – that just having a black, gay singer perform them must have felt like a political statement. “It occurred to me that I couldn’t do that any more,” he says. By his third album – Crying Laughing Loving Lying – Siffre’s lyrics were no longer written as if for the opposite sex. Siffre wrote his first song aged 18 and, a year later in 1964, met Peter John Carver Lloyd they remained together for 48 years, entering a civil partnership in 2005, until Lloyd’s death in 2013.Īfter playing jazz guitar for several years, Siffre brought his self-titled debut album out in 1970. Both of these things were under way before he was 20. By 11 he knew he had to “find someone and make them love me for the rest of our lives” by 13 he had resolved, thanks to one of his four brothers’ impressive record collection, to become a musician. He says he had already worked out his life plans at an early age. A rattlesnake is a rattlesnake, and you’re stupid to wander around in sandals and no socks in a rattlesnake-infested area.”īorn in 1945 to a Nigerian father and mixed-race mother who refused to “pass” as white, Claudius Afolabi Siffre was raised in west London. But you don’t blame a rattlesnake for biting you. “I went in believing that the music business would be run by – who else? – musicians. “I was remarkably naive,” says Siffre when I ask what the music industry was like in the late 60s. Photograph: David Redfern/Getty Imagesīespectacled and looking remarkably youthful for a 76-year-old – Siffre could easily be mistaken for an academic rather than a musician – his words are chosen carefully, and his answers extend occasionally into emphatic monologues. So I was thrilled to be granted an audience at his home and studio in north-east Spain, via Zoom, so I could get the full story. Being wary of the press, Siffre tends to avoid interviews. In the decade since I discovered Siffre’s 70s catalogue, I’ve read stories about how being an openly gay, black folk singer held him back, and how he was dropped for refusing to stay in the closet. Some of his songs don’t even have their lyrics available to view online. Rod Stewart and Kelis are among those who have recorded his music. The inordinately catchy riff used on Eminem’s My Name Is was his. And it’s not like he’s had no cultural impact since: Madness did the definitive cover of his song It Must Be Love, while artists including Kanye West, Jay-Z and Primal Scream have sampled his music. It’s not like his career went under the radar – Siffre scored three Top 40 hits, with Crying Laughing Loving Lying reaching No 11. Why is that? During the first half of the 1970s, Siffre released six solo albums, operating effortlessly across folk, soul, reggae and funk, while poetically addressing the political (his songs have tackled war veterans, homelessness and religion) and the personal (if there is a more perfect articulation of domestic bliss than his 75-second song Till Forever, I have yet to hear it).
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