Dave Okumu transforms the personal into a conversation

Dave Oku­mu is con­cerned about com­mu­ni­ty. ​“Every­one is encour­aged to go down a soli­tary road at the moment, where oth­er peo­ple don’t mat­ter and you can just find every­thing out your­self online instead,” he says. ​“Where­as my vision is about shared expe­ri­ence and cul­tur­al enrich­ment. I want to be around peo­ple that I love who inspire me. I want to have an embod­ied expe­ri­ence where we all feed into each oth­er’s growth.”

On a typ­i­cal­ly grey, rainy Lon­don after­noon, the 46-year-old pro­duc­er, song­writer and mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist is sit­ting in his Green­wich stu­dio com­plex, bathed in warm light and the spiced scent of burn­ing palo san­to. Over the past three years, Oku­mu has built this labyrinthine space as a phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of his col­lab­o­ra­tive ethos. In the airy rooms sur­round­ing his there is a hive of activ­i­ty – singer Rosie Lowe is down­stairs, while the oth­er spaces are var­i­ous­ly occu­pied by musi­cal direc­tor Avi­ram Barath, singer Eska, engi­neer Nick Pow­ell and a ros­ter of young instru­men­tal­ists and producers.

“It’s a vibrant and lov­ing com­mu­ni­ty with a lot going on in each room,” he enthus­es. ​“There’s operas being writ­ten, we made Yas­min Lacey’s record [Voice Notes] in this room, Eska’s daugh­ter even has her vio­lin lessons here. It’s its own lit­tle ecosystem.”

Com­ing to promi­nence in 2009 after form­ing the art rock trio The Invis­i­ble and earn­ing a Mer­cury Music Prize nom­i­na­tion for their epony­mous debut album, Oku­mu has since gone on to work with an envi­able list of col­lab­o­ra­tors. He has pro­duced, writ­ten or played with every­one from Afrobeat pio­neer Tony Allen to Amy Wine­house, Adele, Jessie Ware, St Vin­cent and Grace Jones, employ­ing his calm­ing bari­tone and genre-span­ning curios­i­ty to coax out stu­dio magic.

After spend­ing almost 20 years in the music indus­try, Oku­mu is now final­ly embrac­ing the spot­light to release his most per­son­al album yet. ​“I released my first album under my own name in 2021, Knop­perz, but that was a remix record of [com­pos­er and pianist] Duval Timothy’s work, named after a choco­late bar I was obsessed with snack­ing on while mak­ing it,” he laughs, mak­ing the thick sil­ver rings on his clasped hands shake. ​“For this new album, I didn’t want to make a ​‘soli­tary hero record,’ but I want­ed to see if there is a way for me to make a per­son­al state­ment about my life and to cel­e­brate my col­lab­o­ra­tive spir­it. I want­ed to do some­thing that gives me life.”

The result, I Came From Love, is an involved tapes­try of fre­net­ic post-punk, bounc­ing Afrobeat, squelch­ing P‑funk and emo­tive spo­ken word. Across its 15 tracks Oku­mu plays with his new­ly-mint­ed 7 Gen­er­a­tions band, which fea­tures The Smile drum­mer Tom Skin­ner and stu­dio part­ner Barath on synths, as well as trum­peter Byron Wallen, vio­lin­ist Raven Bush and poet Antho­ny Joseph, among oth­ers. Uni­fy­ing the range of groove-laden music is a deep the­mat­ic explo­ration into Black iden­ti­ty, with Okumu’s lyrics cov­er­ing every­thing from the sto­ry of 18^th Cen­tu­ry slave girl Priscil­la to the 1981 New Cross Fire and even the work of French poet Aimé Césaire.

“Just mak­ing some cool beats and get­ting famous friends on it was nev­er going to do it for me,” Oku­mu says. ​“I want­ed to turn the telling of my sto­ry and iden­ti­ty into a con­ver­sa­tion, by includ­ing mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives that might share a sim­i­lar DNA to mine. That way, I’m invit­ing lis­ten­ers in, to bring the per­son­al some­where more universal.”

The lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences can serve to com­pli­cate Okumu’s per­son­al sto­ry as much as they con­tex­tu­alise it, but in hear­ing him recount his child­hood, it is clear that his iden­ti­ty has always been dif­fi­cult to pin down. ​“I have Kenyan par­ents but I grew up in Vien­na as the youngest of eight sib­lings,” Oku­mu says. ​“I was spoiled and indulged and I loved the feel­ing of togeth­er­ness we had in our house. We would always have friends of my par­ents com­ing to stay with the 10 of us and that informed my out­look deeply in real­ly valu­ing a feel­ing of shared experience.”

At home, life was com­fort­ing and for­giv­ing, but out­side Oku­mu expe­ri­enced anoth­er world. ​“My mum would caress my body and rub cream into it after every bath, mak­ing me feel so delight­ed and val­ued. But when I walked the streets of Vien­na, I was some­thing dif­fer­ent,” he says with a pause. ​“Peo­ple would open­ly shout racist abuse or invol­un­tar­i­ly put their hand into my hair. It was painful and alien­at­ing try­ing to under­stand my place in this world.” On the fam­i­ly trips back to Kenya, things were still uncom­fort­able in a dif­fer­ent sense. ​“I was dis­con­nect­ed from this place that my par­ents talked about. It didn’t always feel like a home­com­ing,” he says.