Tunde

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 moniker Tunde, releasing an eponymous album that betrayed a slight folk influence alongside its light R&B. At the tail-end of a Lighthouse Family reunion, he issued another solo effort — Diamond in a Rock — in 2013, this time as Tunde Baiyewu. 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 his sister. Baiyewu learned to speak Yoruba but was sent away to boarding school — five hours outside of Lagos — after he became unsettled in his new surroundings. During the ’80s, 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 Five on its reissue in 1996 — 1997 was 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. 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 in 1998 before his mother passed away in 2000. During this difficult time, Baiyewu promoted a third Lighthouse Family album, 2001′s Whatever Gets You Through the Day, until 2003, when 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, Tunde 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 saw a second solo album, the soul-pop-filled Diamond in a Rock, which featured the lead single “Move.” To promote it, Tunde supported M People on their 20th anniversary greatest-hits tour later in the year. After the 2019 Lighthouse Family album Blue Sky in Your Head, Baiyewu reunited with Mike Peden — the producer who oversaw LF’s mid- to late-’90s golden streak — and worked in the studio on arrangements of ’70s singer/songwriters. It was this material, along with the most popular Lighthouse Family songs, that got an airing on Tunde’s 2023 solo tour. ~ James Wilkinson