Lighthouse Family on how their 'unfashionable' music has endured

Singer Tunde Baiyewu talks to us about how the healing qualities of their songs

Tunde Baiyewu performs at the Baloise Session in Basel, Switzerland. EPA 

In a rapidly changing music industry, one aspect that has always remained constant is the importance of touring.

Whether it is after releasing an album, while in your prime or during your twilight years, the tour is a way to reconnect with fans. Because up on stage is when a crowd determines whether you, as an artist, still have something to say.

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This is what Lighthouse Family experienced back in 2011 when embarking on their first tour in more than a decade. They had no new material since their 2001 album Whatever Gets You Through the Day, which was followed by the band gently dissolving. The tour was baby steps, to go out and see if the group could still pull it off live. The UK tour was a success. It rekindled the creative spark that eventually led to this year's solid new album Blue Sky in Your Head, released in July, the band's first in 18 years.

But when the group returned, it was to a different landscape. The days of selling millions of records, as happened with their previous three albums, had been replaced with digital streaming. When it comes to new music, it is probably fair to say Lighthouse Family don't fit into some of the influential playlists that drive sales.

This brings us back to the importance of touring, which, says lead singer Tunde Baiyewu, gives the band all the validation it needs. Speaking to The National ahead of their performance on Friday, November 1, as part of Dubai's Party in the Park festival, he describes the crowd's reception to their comeback as humbling.

“You really don’t know how you are going to be received at the end of the day,” he says. “But the people have been brilliant so far. I mean, we have always been asked if we would ever tour again, but it is only when you are on stage, in front of thousands of people who are singing along to your new and old songs, that you just think ‘wow, this is so good and so beautiful’.

Proudly out of step

Perhaps the reason why the band's new material resonates almost as well as their biggest hits, High and Lost in Space, is their similarity. This is not a disparaging comment. The key to Lighthouse Family's success is how stubbornly unfashionable they are. It is almost a badge of honour.

When the group first appeared in 1993, the UK was in peak boy band mania and the charts were littered with fizzy pop numbers and chest-clutching ballads.

The band's breakout singles, Lifted and Ocean Drive, gave us a chance to take a collective breath. Those two songs best crystallise the sound of the Lighthouse Family, which is a kind of pre-Dido meditative pop made up of pianist Paul Tucker's evocative compositions and Baiyewu's soulful baritone. The group's latest re-entry is similar in that, once again, they are out of step with the hip-hop and EDM stylings that are currently all the rage. Baiyewu says the group never considered updating their sounds.

"That was never really what we are about and I think that made the music timeless," he says. "If I was, say, in a boy band and we came back now then I just feel it wouldn't have worked. We would have been stuck because we appealed only at a certain time. The Lighthouse Family always did its own thing and I think people kind of gravitated to that." Indeed, evoking the band's name, the group was formed in relative seclusion from the music industry. Baiyewu and Tucker met when working in a pub in Newcastle, north-east England. Both aspiring songwriters at the time, they created a bunch of demo songs which led them to be snapped up by a record label – all before embarking on their first official tour.

"We never really wrote songs for people. It was really just to please ourselves," Baiyewu says. "And because of our background, the fact that we entered the industry after we were already working, finished university and all that, we just had a different perspective. It was, I guess, more mature. We were writing songs about big emotions; things like life and death and questioning what love means today."

Secular hymns for a troubled time

Blue Sky in Your Head is full of such subtle examination, particularly in lovelorn tracks such as Clouds and Who's Going to Save Me Now. The latter, with its stately orchestral strings and Baiyewu's yearning vocals, almost sounds like a secular hymn for these troubled times.

It is an aspect of his craft that he picked up while living in Nigeria as a child. “My mother would take the family to church and she enrolled me in the choir,” he recalls. “And for me I just loved it. I loved singing from the book of hymns, they just had this healing quality to them and I always felt great to sing them.”

And it is that quality that will ensure Lighthouse Family’s longevity for a while to come. In an increasingly polarised world, their concerts and festival appearances have been hailed for their feel-good nature. This explains the Dubai festival organisers’ canny decision to give them the prized sunset slot.

"People tell us all the time that the songs make them feel all these emotions or it helps them heal from difficult moments, and it is all just so touching," he says. "And this is one of the ways how we define success now. It is about going out there and performing to as many people as we can and connecting with them."

Party in the Park is at Dubai Media City Amphitheatre on November 1, from 2pm. More information is available at www.partyinthepark.ae