Wunmi
Jon Lusk meets the unique Wunmi to get the lowdown on finally releasing her long-awaited debut album A.L.A.
With her outrageous hairstyles, eye-catching clothes designs, freaky dancing, and original speak-singing vocals, Ibiwunmi Omotayo Olufunke Olaiya – a.k.a. Wunmi – has been ‘bubbling under’ on the underground dance music scene in New York and London for far too long.
She made a big splash as the iconic, silhouetted dancer in the video for Soul 11 Soul’s smash hit Back To Life way back in 1989, and released her first single What a See (A Guy Called Gerald Mix) in 1998. So why has it taken so long for her debut album A.L.A. to appear? Since Dr. Victor Olaiya (“The Evil Genius of highlife”) is her uncle, you might think Wunmi’s journey into music was straightforward. But you’d be wrong.
She was born in London to Nigerian parents who split up soon afterwards. At the tender age of four, she was sent to Lagos, where she spent the next ten years living with cousins. They may have turned her on to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat revolution, which would later prove a crucial influence, but she always felt out of place there.
“I was always made to feel that because I wasn’t born there that there was something about me that was not quite right. It was like ‘wow I’m really a foreigner here’”, she explains. Arriving back in England at fourteen was also a shock: “I ended up feeling exactly the same thing again. And really it was at that point my identity started shifting, like…who am I?”
Craving attention, she retreated into a world of her imagination, finding expression in clothes, and in her later teens on the dance floors of London’s clubs, (“I find my oneness when I’m performing, when I’m dancing.”) where her unique solo style eventually caught the eye of Soul 11 Soul’s Jazzie B.
Wunmi had developed a love of English music (check her version of Message In A Bottle) but her fear of sounding ‘too African’ prevented her from singing for years after leaving Soul 11 Soul once she felt the ‘chemistry was no longer there’. She toured clubs as a one-woman dancer with a DJ and percussionist and was ‘inundated’ with recording offers after returning from a trip to Japan in 1990. Instead of taking one up, she began styling other pop stars such as Caron Wheeler and PM Dawn, and dancing on TV shows like Smash Hits, dividing her time between London and New York (as she still does) from around 1992.
She eventually ‘stopped running’ from music in 1994 and recorded a demo (which included Woman Child and Greedy Body, now on A.L.A.), but her worst fears were confirmed when her ‘ethnic’ tones fell foul of fashion in an era when new jack swing and bland R&B/soul artists dominated the charts.
Then one day Wunmi got a call from Roy Ayers, who she had met several years before, and refers to affectionately as ‘uncle’ or ‘surrogate father’ for his mentoring role. Having worked with Fela, Ayers could see the beauty in her Anglo-Yoruba inflections, and he coaxed her into recording with him. “I had to get to love my voice, to accept my voice. That was the beginning of accepting completely me, really letting go of my past, my history, the pain of growing up in Nigeria, alone.”
Wumni threw herself into New York’s underground music scene, ‘started having fun’ with singing and eventually came to the attention of Masters At Work, with whom she recorded her breakthrough fusion of Fela’s Expensive Shit and Upside Down as Maw Expensive in 1999. Having died, Fela was now in fashion, but it would still it would take several years of collaborations before Wunmi had the confidence to launch a solo album: “It was safer to do collaborations,” she explains.
‘A.L.A’ stands for ‘African Living Abroad’, a definition Wunmi finally seems comfortable with. Her speaking and singing voices combine cockney glottal stops with a rich mix of Yoruba/Pidgin English and clubland slang expressions, and her music marries Fela’s legacy with broken beat, drum‘n’bass, Afro-house and Nuyorican influences, among others, reflecting her diverse life experience: “The life I’ve lived is not one shade,” she declares. “I am as English as I am African.”
A.L.A. is out now on Documented.