Imagine...Labi Siffre - This Is My Song

 

An absorbing and illuminating look into the life and career of a songwriter whose work has flared across several decades yet who remains an enigma. Luke McMahon’s film sees Alan Yentob talk with Labi Siffre at his present home in Spain as the singer reflects on his two passions- “music and love”. Being a black, gay singer whose work shifted across several musical genres means Siffre was always something of an outlier and never quite made it to superstardom, not that this seems to bother him. Delightfully candid and outspoken he talks of realising at the age of fourteen that he wanted to be “an artist philosopher” and soon got the chance to make albums of clarity, honesty and tunefulness. We see clips from his Seventies career and the music is timeless; it could have been recorded yesterday while his voice is expressive and direct.

His material is probably better known thanks to other artist’s interpretations of it. Madness took `It Must Be Love` to chart success (he’s in the video) while over the past few decades artists like Eminem and Kanye West have built huge songs on Siffre samples. Siffre’s own commercial high water mark was probably in the mid Eighties when he returned after a ten year hiatus with `Something Inside So Strong`, a song of defiance against the odds for which he won an Ivor Novello Award. Initially seen as an anti - Apartheid anthem it’s lived on as a rallying call for many causes most recently in connection with the Grenfell Tower disaster. These hiatuses in Siffre’s career seem to come  partly from a reluctance to play the game as he might have- he talks strongly about refusing to compromise either with his music or his personal life being honest about his sexuality at a time when others were not. Instead, as he puts it in the film, he decided to be “more me.” 

The documentary -and indeed the man himself- seems to have no barriers and talks openly about all sorts of things and there’ s a lovely tale of the time he and his partner first met.  His believe in the power and importance of love surges through his songs as a result. Their long term relationship lasted 48 years and for the last third of that included a third partner (“we were three husbands”) but then both of them died within a period he can recall with decimal accuracy. He also discusses his early musical influences that steered him into music at a surprisingly young age.

His songs seem simple yet they reach into the heart of the matter with raw conviction and during the film he performs some of them. His voice is even richer now as he re-interprets the familiar `It Must Be Love` in a superb, bluesier version. The most astonishing performance though is of a song called `Far Away` which is from a proposed new album and deals with the death of his partners. Its one of the most moving things I’ve seen for a long time and I hope it gets released because there are so many people who will identify with the sentiments.

Yet he is tough too whether as a child physically stopping his father attacking his mother, or coming up with a perfect way to describe his personal life and even now realising his true worth as an artist. Referring to his best known song he talks too of his steak of resistance and when asked how he feels about the respect his back catalogue now receives from many quarters he replies that if he’d known he this good he wouldn’t have thought of giving up so many times during his career. I hope that new album does get released because there still seems to be a lot of spirit left in Labi Siffre yet.

Imagine…Labi Siffre- This Is My Song is on BBC iPlayer now