Labi Siffre was born in London to a British mother and a Nigerian father, the fourth of five children. He was brought up in Bayswater and Hampstead and educated at a Catholic monastery school, St Benedict's School, in Ealing.
Openly gay, Siffre met his partner, Peter Lloyd, in July 1964. Under the Civil Partnership Act 2004, they became legally recognized partners when the Act entered into force in December 2005.
While trying to become a full time musician, Labi worked as a warehouseman in Bethnal Green, a filing clerk at Reuters in Fleet Street and as a minicab driver and delivery man. In the early 60s, in a Jimmy Smith style trio, with Bob Stuckey on Hammond Organ and Woody Martin on drums, Labi, on guitar, played for nine months at Annie's Room, a jazz club fronted by the singer Annie Ross.
He had a "turntable hit" in 1970 with the single "Pretty Little Girl (Make My Day)/Too Late" which despite being heavily played on Radio Luxembourg never made it to the charts. Six albums were released between 1970 and 1975, and four between 1988 and 1998.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1977 and wrote with Tom Shapiro. Around this time Siffre decided to quit the music business as a performer and concentrate on writing. After nine months in California he moved back to the UK when, in 1978 two of his songs, "Solid Love" (performed by Siffre) and "We Got It Bad" (co-written and performed by Bob James) reached the UK finals of the BBC's A Song for Europe.
Siffre came out of self-imposed retirement from music in 1985 when he saw a television film from South Africa showing a white soldier shooting at black children. In 1990, collaborating with the South African R&B, jazz-fusion singer-songwriter and guitarist Jonathan Butler, Siffre wrote the lyrics of five of the nine songs on Butler’s album "Heal Our Land".
Labi released a new album, The Last Songs, on EMI in 2006: "You will not hear better acoustic-guitar work so effortlessly merging blues, jazz and folk-roots genres". Kanye West's 2007 album "Graduation" holds a song titled "I Wonder" in which he samples Labi Siffre's "My Song" from Siffre's album Crying Laughing Loving Lying.
Siffre's "It Must Be Love" was also used in one of Vodafone's adverts, in late 2007.
He is listed as a prominent donor to the British Humanist Association's campaign to fund humanist messages on London buses.
