From a Notting Hill record player to an anti-apartheid anthem

Labi Siffre was ten or eleven when Frank Sinatra's “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” stopped him in his tracks. He played the record continuously for two or three weeks, and he knew, he later said, that music would matter to him. It is a small scene, but it explains the emotional weight in his own writing.

Born in Hammersmith in 1945 to a Yoruba Nigerian father and a mother of Bajan descent, he grew up in Bayswater and Hampstead and studied music at the Eric Gilder School of Music in Soho. After school he drove a taxi and delivered goods before choosing music. In the 1960s he played jazz guitar in a house band at Annie Ross's club in Soho. He signed to Pye International in 1970 and released a debut album that included a cover of the Bee Gees' “Words”. Neither it nor its singles charted.

The next years brought the songs that people remember. In 1972 “It Must Be Love” reached number 14 in the UK, and the title track of Crying Laughing Loving Lying reached number 11. Madness later covered “It Must Be Love”. Another early track, “Bless the Telephone”, went viral on social media more than half a century after its release. His biggest moment was “(Something Inside) So Strong”, an anti-apartheid song inspired by a television documentary. It reached number four in the UK and won him an Ivor Novello Award.

Siffre was never only a songwriter. He published essays, a stage and television play called Deathwrite, and three volumes of poetry. Nine albums appeared between 1970 and 1998, and “It Must Be Love” remains the song that sounds easiest and was hardest to write: a plain admission of tenderness, sung without decoration.