UK · electronic

Omar+

5 upcoming festivals

The British singer and songwriter widely credited with laying the foundations of UK soul as its own thing — decades of work that never chased the American template.

Omar Lye-Fook, who records simply as Omar, is a British singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose work helped establish a distinctly British strain of soul from the late 1980s onward. Classically trained as a percussionist before turning to writing and production, he had an early and lasting success with "There's Nothing Like This," a song that became a standard of the era and has been widely covered and sampled since.

His music draws together soul, jazz harmony, funk rhythm and elements of reggae and hip hop, generally built around his own keyboard playing and a light, conversational vocal delivery. Over the following decades he has continued to release albums and has worked with figures including Stevie Wonder and Erykah Badu.

electronic