Words: Lloyd Bradley

“When the album first came out last year, everybody assumed I was a big, fat, 40-year-old geezer – the stereotype image of artists that do the sort of more melodic soul music I do. With the television and press I’ve been doing, at least people know what I look like now.”

It’s only after extensive consideration that Omar (slim, 23 and blatantly blessed in the barnet department) comes up with his novel example of the advantages of being signed to a major record label. However, that he avoids the usual platitudes about his new firm nuturing his musical development or its being “like a family” is not so surprising. His music was pretty well developed before Phonogram offered him a contract – his first release for them, the album There’s Nothing Like This, is the same one he put out last summer – and far as family goes, his previous record company, the North London based black indie Kongo, quite literally were his family: his dad owns it. Indeed, the LPs 1990 sales figures of some 35,000, peaking at 54 in the charts and spending over two months as the UKs best-selling soul album, were such that he never bothered to actively court the big league. It was only on selling out a show at Hammersmith Odeon just before Christmas that Omar figured he was perhaps under laying his hand.

“When the album first came out, my dad’s company weren’t geared up for huge national sales. It was on vinyl only because we couldn’t afford a CD or cassette release, and we didn’t have the distribution to get it into shops outside London, or the press and promotional personnel to organise a big campaign. We concentrated on the specialist magazines and radio stations like Kiss FM, Choice and Jazz FM (modest black-orientated local operations), which gave me a strong following in London’s black communities. This was so gratifying, ‘cos people were buying the album for the music rather than some big hype, and as my peer group, it was the audience I most wanted to impress. Then, as the sales figures kept going up, I suppose I felt I didn’t need to go anywhere else.

“It was when I saw that the audience at Hammersmith was a complete cross-section of age and race that I knew the album wasn’t fulfilling its potential. Also, news that I was the first black indepenent to sell out the Odeon got round the music industry, so people started checking my sales figures and suddenly we had six or seven companies trying to make deals.”

He opted for the one to offer him the most creative freedom – ie he delivers finished tapes – a condition he refused to compromise on, and not without justification. As well as the album’s pre-proven potential, his pedigree is well above average: at primary school he played drums, piano, cornet and guitar; out of short trousers, he mastered the tuba in his next school’s brass band, toured with the Kent Youth Orchestra; then spent two years studying classical music at Manchester’s Cheltenham’s Music’s School of Music, followed by a similar period learning jazz at the Guildhall. Omar is only half joking when he remarks he probably knows ore about music than almost anybody in any record company. Anywhere. And now Omar wants to use his new found status to advance UK soul music.

“All it seems to be now is record companies telling new acts to rip off the same beat that somebody’s just had a hit with. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I want to re-introduce the big arrangement – brass, string, everything, having the budget to try it is the best thing about having this success.”