It was the whipped cream textured baseline of his debut single the seminar ‘There’s Nothing Like This’ that introduced his face to the nation. Omar was hot property, every magazine was touting him as the flag bearer for the live, more jazzier than the US sound of Brit soul. You’d think that after such adoration someone would have been prepared to put their money where their mouth was and give him a tall enough platform to broadcast his wares throughout the world, but sadly until now, that wasn’t the case.

The same old story of under funding on promotion plagued Omar’s second album. “A lot of people didn’t even know that ‘Music’ was out!” he says. “The people who had my interests at heart weren’t the people who were controlling the budgets. What matters in getting your record out there is the dollars. It’s funny how certain people are in control of certain types of music in record companies but that’s an old story and we don’t want to get into that.”

Yeah, enough of the sob stories, the first summer sun has just risen above the dewy horizon for Omar, with a mutually satisfying marriage with RCA Records and a fine new album on the cards. ‘For Pleasure’ can in many ways be termed the first true showcase of his talents. It was over a year in production. Every rack literally screams its own unique merits. Pigeonholers will have a nightmare trying to categorise it as the influences are so broad ranging. The track ‘My Baby Says’ with its busy rimshot and Saturday’s salsa smurph’ish keyboard display a distinct latin feel while ‘I’m Still Standing’ has a very p-funk whizzing key riff. On the other hand, the first single ‘Outside’ could easily be Roy Ayers at his finest, or ‘Need You Bad’ one of those schmoove Barry White grooves and ‘Little Boy’ could have come straight out of the vaults of Diane Reeves ballads. The list goes on.

Through employing the talents of, as Omar puts it, “big time veterans” from the r&b hall of fame like Motown songwriting giant Lamont Dozier, Chaka Khan keyboard player David Frank, Heatwave bass player Derek Bramble and someone called Stevie Wonder – ‘For Pleasure’ is just that. What a number of themes and all encompassing universally appealing tunes that will have Omar aficionados literally weeping in ecstasy and many who hadn’t previously locked on tuning in their droves.

The attractions of this album are obvious, but weren’t there any trepidations in employing, with all due respect, producers who may have had their day? “I think that all of these people who have worked on this album with me” replies Omar as he turns off his mobile, “they have their own distinctive sound and I wanted to utilise that. If you listen to the album you’ll hear that it sounds like them but it also sounds like the kind of stuff that I would do. There’s a lot of elements in this album that I wanted to use but I didn’t want it to sound too blatant that I was mixing styles, like with the Cuban and latin influences. The main thing that I was really pleased about was that all these producers knew that I had a certain sound and they weren’t out to put their mark on it and drown my ideas out.”

Born to a Chinese Jamaican father and Indian Jamaican mother in Canterbury, Omar Lye Fook – even without the encouragement of his drummer father felt music in his blood from a very early age. After learning to play the trumpet, piano and drums, as a teenager he made it to the county’s youth orchestra as a percussionist which led on to two years classical training in Manchester. “I’ve always been doing music, I didn’t always know exactly where I was going,” he says. “I suppose at one stage I just could have ended up as a music teacher but I think that as I got older I realised I wanted to perform as well as play. I was always in orchestras and brass bands and percussion ensembles and stuff but in those you’re just one of a crowd. “I remember being in the Kent Youth Orchestra when we went to Brazil once and we did something for TV over there. At this time I was on the timbales which is like five different snare type drums and while you’re playing it you gotta be tuning them at the same time and moving about so in a sense you’re performing as well as playing. Some, even though I was one of about 40 players some guy came up to me and gave me his most treasured jazz record wrapped up in some tissue paper and said that he saw me on TV and he thought that I was the best. It was then I suppose that I clicked, I realised that I wanted to do something individual, to perform as well as play.”

Omar displays a healthy sense of humour when it comes to the million and one bandwagon jumpers in the States who latch on to a sound and bash it to death, a state of affairs which can be extremely unhealthy with regards to progression of music, but he accepts that taking a risk across the pond can be far more potentially dangerous than here. Despite the successes of the live sound of the Brand New Heavies over there, and the underground classic status of the Young Disciples first album the very electronic ‘swing sound’ certainly still rules the roost. Omar enthuses, “A good way of describing their music industry is like a Formula One car race. Like, there’s a load of cars and they’re all following right close in the wake of the one in front of them and as soon as that car ahead slips up they take their place. And going to cars again, you could say that your SWV, Jodeci and R Kelly are the 500 SEC models of Mercedes and the others are straight 3 series, every rude boy and his cousin has got one and they’re not that hard to come across!”

Another facet of the US soul sound is that they seem to be stuck in a rut when it comes to subject matter, Wrecks ‘n Effect ‘All I wanna do is my zoom zoom zoom in your poom poom’ lyrics is from ‘Rumpshaker’ about sums it up really, and Omar is again a subscriber to the belief that there is a lot more to soul than a glorified chat up line; “I like to express myself,” he says, “things that I’m thinking about in my own way. Of course you think about other things in life and that’s the approach that should be taken There’s so much of this ‘I wanna get your knickers off baby’ and that’s like the accepted subject to sing about but there’s also other things that have been eating at my conscience that need to be addressed. Like on the track ‘Making Sense Of It’ which is about a man who is feeling sorry for himself because he can’t get no work and then he sees people in far worse positions than he is… and he just tries to make sense of it all. You know, that’s life and it should be addressed.”

Even so, accompanying the streetsoul mix of ‘Saturday’, expect a top Frankie Focett swing mix which, accompanying the merits of this fine album should help Omar achieve his deserved position at the top of the stakes. Like his title track, ‘It’s for pleasure for leisure…whatever you want it to be.’