Acclaimed singer-songwriter Labi Siffre has shared a new song and announced a new album is on the way, 28 years after his last offering.
The artist created many memorable songs including It Must Be Love, Something So Strong and Crying Laughing Loving. His work has been covered and sampled by many artistsa over the decades.
He now returns with Far Away, a touching love song about loss and grief. It’ll be featured on his new album, the perfectly titled Unfinished Business.
The song featured in a documentary in 2022, but has only just been given an official release.
Siffre, who is now 80 years old, released a string of popular albums in the 1970’s before taking a break from music, he’s returned periodically to share more music, but his work is best known from when other artists cover or sample his tunes.
Among his well-known songs are It Must Be Love, which was a hit for Madness, while his 1975 song I Got The forms the basis of Eminem’s My Name Is. Kanye West and Jay-Z have also sampled his work.
Fatboy Slim has also sampled the artist, and Siffre’s 1972 tune Crying Laughing Loving recently featured in the film The Holdovers.
In 1987 Siffre returned to the music world with (Something Inside) So Strong, a song that reflected on apartheid in South Africa. It became a subtle anthem for inequality and injustice. He’s shared he began writing the song in 1984 after watching a documentary about white soldiers shooting black people indiscriminately in the streets in South Africa.
As a gay, Black man in the music industry in the 1970s, Siffre was a trailblazer.
Siffre met his partner Peter Lloyd in 1964 and they were together for 48 years until Lloyd’s death in 2013. From the mid 1990s Siffre and Lloyd were in a ‘thruple’ relationship with a third man Rudolph van Baardwijk. The three men lived together in a small village in Wales.
Siffre and Lloyd entered into a civil partnership in 2005 when the option of a legally recognised relationship became available in Britain. Following Lloyd’s death he married van Baardwijk, but he passed away in 2016. Siffre now lives in Spain, and is enjoying a recently resurgence of interest in his work.
