Tales from the far side

Words: John Masouri
Photo: Felix

Omar has been away but now he’s back. The kind of UK soul tells Chris Wells how much he’d like to sell some records.

Omar is feeling fidgety, nervous even. “I can’t wait for it to start again,” he declares, tapping the table top with fingers propelled by unused energy. “People keep telling me I’ve made a good album but I need some feedback from outside the circle, y’know? This is the fifth time and it either works now or nothing. If it doesn’t happen this time I’d better learn how to say, 'Do you want fries with that?”

it sounds like he’s only half joking. The man whom many regard as the uncrowned King of British Soul has yet to match that status with appropriate sales figures. A career at McDonalds wasn’t really on the menu, yet people still talk of his one big hit, There’s Nothing Like This, as if it’s the only record he ever made, the standard by which he will forever be judged – forgetting [or perhaps unaware of] four subsequent albums full of excellent music [Music, For Pleasure and This Is Not A Love Song following on from his debut] and two misfiring major label deals which really ought to have installed him as a pop star.

“I hear from journalists all the time that some big American star has been dropping my name,” he sighs, “and sometimes it’s hard to believe when I don’t even see my albums out over there. When people come up to me in the street and say, ‘Nice tune, Omar’ often I’m thinking, ‘Yeah thanks – but did you buy it?’ It’s frustrating to receive praise without seeing anything to back it up."

It was especially so last time around in the aftermath of This Is Not A Love Song. The majority of Omar supporters regarded the album as his most accomplished. His A&R man at RCA, Mike McCormack, patently loved it. But somehow, just around release, suddenly it changed from ‘Nice one Omar’ to ‘Where’s the single?’ and the enthusiasm which had drawn him to the label in the first place dried up along with the promotion and company back-up. To be fair to both parties, Omar was only one of many artists to be dropped during a period of internal discord at BMG, but it was little compensation to a guy who had just handed in some of his best ever work.

“It’s the enthusiasm I get caught up with,” he reflects with exasperation. “They say all kinds of things to sign you and they mean them – and then it fades. When I was signed to Polygram, Ed Ekstine flew over to see me personally – and they signed me up and put me on the shelf. I went over to some music conference and he didn’t wanna know me. They didn’t release the album over there in the end. I don’t know why that happens. Why would they waste their time like that?”

Perhaps I say, it’s because they wanted another tune as dripping with commercial potential as There’s Nothing Like This and maybe they feel like you weren’t giving it to them.

“I’m not about that, you know I’m not. I like to do different things. It’s like Tom Jones and It’s Not Unusual. Anyway, this time I sat down and tried to write 11 songs just like There’s Nothing Like This, so they can all shut up about it!”

By ‘like’ Omar doesn’t mean carbon copies: he’s talking standards of quality rather than cloning when he makes such a comparison. But if you’ve been following the guy’s story then you already know that. This is the young percussionist brought up in Kent, the teenager who polished his craft at Cheltenham’s Music School near Manchester [where he hung out with Max Beesley], the early nineties street soul brother who made a fortune for his father’s indie label when There’s Nothing Like This rose out of nowhere to become one of the signature tunes of that decade. It was just a nice little laid-back groove based on The Ohio Players ‘Heaven Must Be Like This’, and folks starved of such simple, soulful seduction music lapped it up, it established his sound – a sound even Stevie Wonder talked of in glowing terms – but it’s by now means his best record. There’s plenty of For Pleasure and This Is Not A Love Song to prove that. And there’s more on his new album Best By Far too.

Simply put, Omar’s first album for French label Naïve Records [licensed to Oyster here] could very well live up to its title. Featuring duets with Erykah Badu – one of his American admirers who backed up her kind words with action – and Kele Le Roc, and recorded in a tiny studio in Chelsea over the last year, it’s positively bursting with that natural, soulful vibe that’s been Omar’s trademark ever since he started. As usual its warmth and accessibility disguises all the hard work that went into making it sound so effortless. And it’s stacked with tunes that call out to the singles chart, given the requisite commercial backing. Can the latter be possible when two majors have already failed him?

“Both of my experiences with the majors were bad ones, true,” says Omar flatly. “Even with the second one, RCA, when I tried to get them involved the whole time I was in the studio out in LA with David Frank, so they knew what I was doing, still nothing happened. But I think the guys at the French label pay more attention to the music than the Americans and than we do here. They’re into the detail, y’know? And it’s funny, when I first met them I was telling them about how I had been getting in to film music, especially the work of Lalo Schffrin, and one of the guys who runs Naïve, Fred, tells me, ‘Oh, we just put out a compilation on him – he’s one of our favourite artists’. It felt right.”

Does he feel disappointed at having to look abroad for a deal? “Nah, I don’t give a fuck really. Well, OK, it is disappointing – but, on the other hand, I’m lucky to get a deal at all. I remember being at MIDEM and one of Jam and Lewis came over to me – I forget which one now – and said, ‘Your music is ahead of its time’ and…well, let’s hope that’s not true now. If it ever was.”

At the time we spoke Omar was putting together the band that would showcase his new material in London and Paris. You can bet that long term friends like vocalist Chris Ballin and bassist Jerry Mehan will be in there, along, he hopes, with horn players Duncan McKay and Jim Hunt and clarinet exponent Ben Castle, son of Roy. The latter plays an important parting the song Syleste, a piece inspired by an ex-girlfriend, and one of several tracks that ought to emerge in single format at some stage.

“There’s a line in the song that says, ‘I don’t mean to drink all night,” explains Omar. “It’s about an argument I had with her, in fact, she gave me the CD compilation called Tunes For Bachelor Pads and it has this Burt Bacharach thing on it I sampled. When I was writing the tune I got completely fucking drunk. And she came into the studio and found me! I’d told her on the phone that I wasn’t and she caught me! I was paralytic! So thanks for that one Syleste – you inspired me.”

Ah yes, that’s the other thing Omar’s been working on of late: himself. He freely admits that most of his best creative work is weed assisted, a particular peak being reached on the This Is Not A Love Song album, cut in Los Angeles. Trouble was, smoking gives you the munchies and in LA, whenever you want food, you either have it delivered or you get in the car and drive to it. What you don’t do is walk anywhere. So you get no exercise. And such a sedentary lifestyle, as many Californians have demonstrated, is prone to making you fat. And so Omar, no doubt gazing longingly at those old shirtless shots that accompanied his Music album, has been cutting down where he can and working himself back to something approaching D’Angelo-like fitness in the gym.

“I need to achieve a balance,” he says with a grin that tells you it’s a fine one. “I can still cane it sometimes, but I have to work it off again to make up.”

“But I do overdo it a bit, yeah. I remember when I toured North America I lost my voice about three weeks into the schedule. Then for practically two years I lost my falsetto and had to rely on Chris Ballin to sing the high bits for me at the gigs. Yeah, I began to think that two bottles of vodka and an ounce of green a week might be too much, y’know? But look at me now.

“One thing I have discovered though is that I get a completely different buzz from Jamaican sensi to the one I get fro skunk. This album was done on skunk, for all you connoisseurs out there. Yeah, you hear rappers talk about it and rastas talk about it – well I’m using it in the soul, man.”