Hackney singer Ade Omotayo talks singing with Amy Winehouse, his band Equals and the democratisation of music ...
For Ade Omotayo, the music never really stops.
Even when he isn’t touring as a backing singer for Gorillaz or doing gigs at the Shoreditch Blues Kitchen or singing in his own band Equals, he’s going to gigs and listening to new music - there’s a lot going on.
He got the bug when he was 18 years old.
“I didn’t know how to talk to girls and I felt like that might be a trump card,” he says. “A girl that I liked at the time told me I could sing and I believed her and decided to teach myself.”
And did the singing help him in that department?
“No comment!” he laughs. “It doesn’t hinder, let’s say that.”
Ade has an emotive singing voice, one that hits you right in the gut.
“I couldn’t afford a teacher so I initially joined the church choir and sang there,” he says. “At one point I was at the Hackney Library on Mare Street and saw these flyers for a singing workshop at the English National Opera. There were bullet points: Have you ever wanted to sing? Have you ever wanted to record your own music? And it was like the clouds opened, yes that’s me.”
That was where it all took off for Ade. He met other musicians of all kinds, and began to properly collaborate with artists.
“There was a guitarist at that workshop and he had a band. He said ‘would you mind singing with my band?’ He said ‘I hope you don’t mind, there’s another singer and I know how you singers get’. I didn’t mind. There was this girl called Amy, she was a teenager at the time. We hit it off from there, and when she started doing her thing she said ‘join in’.”
Ade sang with Amy Winehouse from the beginning of her career right up until she died in 2011, touring with her, performing live and on her studio albums.
“Working with her was “magical”, he says. “It was so natural for her, she just went ahead and did it the way she wanted to do it and it was always really good. It was one of those things you don’t realise how special it was until it was done. While I was doing it, it was just fun, it was just a thing with some mates, whereas afterwards you think oh my god, that was something.”
He recalls walking through Camden after she died and seeing the murals and tributes to Amy, the devotion that people had towards her.
“I used to equate all of that kind of stuff with Hendrix. It was like: Wow.”
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