Tunde Baiyewu

The sweet, plaintive, soulful vocals of Tunde Baiyewu are most closely associated with the highly successful, '90s-formed, multi-platinum-selling U.K. duo, Lighthouse Family. Following that act's initial, early-career hiatus, Baiyewu struck out in 2004 as a solo artist using the mononym Tunde, releasing an eponymous album which betrayed a slight folk influence alongside its light R&B. On the tail of a Lighthouse Family reunion, he issued another solo effort -- Diamond in a Rock -- in 2013, this time as Tunde Baiyewu. Then, in 2023, following a fourth Lighthouse Family album -- 2019's Blue Sky in Your Head -- Baiyewu carried out an extensive U.K. solo tour. Born in 1968, to Nigerian parents in Willesden Green, London, Babatunde Emmanuel Baiyewu returned to Nigeria at the age of four with his mother and sister, after the death of his father to cancer. Here Baiyewu learned to speak Yoruba but was sent away to boarding school -- five hours out of Lagos -- after he became unsettled in his new surroundings. During the 1980s, his mother married Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's military leader and a former head of state. Later that decade, Baiyewu moved to Newcastle, England to study accounting at the University of Northumbria. It was in that north-eastern city, that he began making music with the multi-instrumentalist, Paul Tucker. The pair formed Lighthouse Family in 1993 and went on to sell over 15 million albums worldwide. Building on "Lifted" -- a single which hit the U.K. Top 5 on its reissue in 1996 -- 1997 represented the band's commercial peak. Their reissued debut, Ocean Drive, went six-times platinum that year, becoming the biggest-selling debut album in the U.K. ever to emerge from a north-east England act. Simultaneously, October 1997's Postcards from Heaven hit the upper reaches of charts worldwide. In contrast with the feelgood, carefree nature of Baiyewu's vocal delivery, back in Nigeria his family were in turmoil. Following three years of political imprisonment, his stepfather was released from incarceration in 1998 before, in 2000, his mother passed away. At a difficult time, Baiyewu put his head into the promotion of a third Lighthouse Family album, 2001's Whatever Gets You Through the Day until, in 2003, the duo once again went their separate ways. He worked with Grant-Lee Phillips on "Passing the Hours," the opener to the following year's debut solo album. However, Tunde was co-written in the main with Portland's Sebastian Rogers and performed well, reaching the Top 40 of the U.K. album chart. In 2007, Baiyewu married the Nigerian model Tope Adeshina and the pair settled in London, raising two daughters. 2010 marked the first Lighthouse Family live shows in more than a decade. 2013 brought a second solo album, the soul pop-filled Diamond in a Rock which featured the lead single, "Move." To promote it, later that year he supported M People on their 20th anniversary greatest hits tour. After the 2019 Lighthouse Family album, Blue Sky in Your Head, Baiyewu reconvened with Mike Peden -- the producer who oversaw their mid-to-late-'90s golden streak -- and worked in the studio on arrangements of the '70s singer/songwriter canon. It was this material, alongside the most popular Lighthouse Family songs, that got an airing on his 2023 solo tour.
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