Tunde Baiyewu of the Lighthouse Family: Still on a high
Much like James Blunt circa 2005, 2006 with You’re Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover, there was a time in the mid-90s when you couldn't escape hearing Tunde Baiyewu’s voice on the radio.
As the singer and co-songwriter with mega-selling pop duo the Lighthouse Family, his and bandmate Paul Tucker’s massive hits such as Lifted, Ocean Drive and High were absolutely everywhere. And they still get played today, with Tunde telling me that he recently heard High playing in the background in EastEnders.
I mentioned to the musician, now a successful solo artist who will soon be coming to Cambridge, the fact that even James Blunt’s friends were calling him while on holiday ‘complaining’ that his music was even being played in far-flung locations such as Thailand.
Tunde, speaking to the Cambridge Independent via Zoom, can relate. “Funny you should say that...,” he laughs. “I got a call I remember once from my friend. He was in America, I think it was in LA somewhere.
“He was in a shopping mall and one of our songs came on in the shopping mall and he did exactly that; he just called me and he held up the phone and said, ‘Listen to this' and I could hear it just vaguely in the background. He said, ‘I’m in a mall and your song is being played in the mall’. So yeah, I share that experience with James Blunt!”
Fast forward a couple of decades and the fifty-something has spent the last few years working on a new solo album: a collection of 1970s songwriter era-inspired recordings, with Lighthouse Family producer Mike Peden at the helm.
Expect to hear songs from such iconic singer-songwriters as Bill Withers, Elton John, Van Morrison and others, all delivered in the velvet-voiced singer’s inimitable style.
“In the last year, I’ve just been adding some finishing touches to a record that I made a while ago,” he reveals. “I made it a while ago and just kept it on the back-burner, still figuring out what I wanted to do with it. So I’ve been busy with that, musically, and I think that record is scheduled to come out sometime this year.”
It has certainly been a long time in-the-making. Tunde, who was born in London and moved to Nigeria when he was around five years old, returning to the UK some years later to attend university, says: “This was like seven years ago I made this record... I had some downtime because we weren’t doing anything with Lighthouse Family, and I remember speaking with Mike Peden.
“He produced our first two Lighthouse Family records and he's a very good friend of mine. He said, ‘Oh, let’s just go into the studio and you don’t have to put yourself through any stress of writing or doing anything like that, just do some covers’.
“So we went into the studio and just scrolled through a lot of songs from a particular era, some of them I grew up listening to as a child in Nigeria, so we made this record in Brooklyn, New York.
“We brought in some of my well-known musicians that have recorded with Lighthouse Family in the past and some of these awesome American musicians. So we made the record but that record’s just been sitting there for like seven years.
“Then just in the last year and a bit we got some ideas of ‘Ah, this is what we can do to this record’. It’s really fantastic as it is but we got these other ideas of what to do to take it up another level, and we’ve been just adding those finishing touches to it.
“I’m not going to give away any surprises, or to say too much about it, but it’s not going to be what people expect of me. But I’m really excited about it and looking forward to releasing it this year.”
Tunde reveals that certain artists were particularly popular in Nigeria when he was growing up in Lagos, and that many of them were present in his mind when it came to drawing up a list of songs to include.
“People like James Taylor, for instance, he was played on the radio a lot in Nigeria at the time, and I remember listening to him and I just loved the tone of his voice.
“There was a song called Carolina in My Mind and that was played on the radio all the time. I was young but I thought it was a Nigerian artist that did the song, or maybe as I grew up I used to think ‘Oh yeah, there was a Nigerian artist that made a cover version of that song’ — but I think it was actually James Taylor himself! I just loved the tone of his voice, he had this conversational style to his singing, so that had always been with me from a very young age, and a few other artists from that era.”
The Lighthouse Family released their debut album Ocean Drive in 1995, with the lead single Lifted going on to reach the top five on the UK singles chart. Ocean Drive was certified six-times platinum by the end of 1997, selling more than 1.8 million copies in the UK alone and spending 154 weeks on the UK album chart.
The duo’s follow-up album Postcards from Heaven achieved similar status in 1997, reaching six-times Platinum status, and the album after that, 2001’s Whatever Gets You Through the Day, also achieved Platinum status.
Tunde’s first self-titled solo album was released in 2004, with his second, Diamond in a Rock, following in 2013. In 2019, Lighthouse Family released a new album Blue Sky in Your Head, their first album in 18 years.
Tunde admits that he hasn’t “really done much since Covid shut everything down”. “But I did a tour last year,” he notes, “and that was a lot of fun, so looking forward to doing the same this year.”
The singer’s tour kicks off in Cardiff on May 26 and comes to Cambridge (the fourth date) a few days later on Friday, June 2.
[Read more: James Blunt to perform at Audley End House & Gardens]
Tickets, priced £31.50, are available at junction.co.uk. Expect to hear a lot of Lighthouse Family tunes. For more on Tunde, go to facebook.com/TundeBaiyewu/.