Soothsayers is a

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

-based band who perform and record original

Afrobeat Afrobeat (also known as Afrofunk) is a West African music genre, fusing influences from Nigerian (such as Yoruba) and Ghanaian (such as highlife) music, with American funk, jazz, and soul influences. With a focus on chanted vocals, complex i ...

and reggae-influenced music. Formed in 1998 by saxophonist, Idris Rahman, and trumpeter, Robin Hopcraft, they have released ten studio albums and a number of vinyl singles on their own label Red Earth Records as well as WahWah45s.

Band history

The Soothsayers' first album, ''Lost City'', was released in 2000. The band spent their formative years performing in

South London South London is the southern part of Greater London, England, south of the River Thames. The region consists of the Districts of England, boroughs, in whole or in part, of London Borough of Bexley, Bexley, London Borough of Bromley, Bromley, Lon ...

venues and developing a compositional style influenced mainly by the music of South African township musicians such as

Abdullah Ibrahim Abdullah Ibrahim (born Adolph Johannes Brand on 9 October 1934), previously known as Dollar Brand, is a South African pianist and composer. His music reflects many of the musical influences of his childhood in the multicultural port areas of Cap ...

and

Hugh Masekela Hugh Ramapolo Masekela (4 April 1939 – 23 January 2018) was a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, singer and composer who was described as "the father of South African jazz". Masekela was known for his jazz compositions and f ...

, and instrumental reggae artists such as

Tommy McCook Tommy McCook (4 March 1927 – 5 May 1998) was a Jamaican saxophonist. A founding member of The Skatalites, he also directed The Supersonics for Duke Reid, and backed many sessions for Bunny Lee or with The Revolutionaries at Channel ...

and

the Skatalites The Skatalites are a ska band from Jamaica. They played initially between 1963 and 1965, and recorded many of their best known songs in the period, including "Guns of Navarone (song), Guns of Navarone." They also played on records by Prince Bus ...

. The album includes the song "Follow Your Path", which features Nigerian singer/musician Adesose Wallace and shows how the band developed their own version of

, which would become an important feature of their later work. ''Lost City'' also features South African guitarist Lucky Ranku, as well as many London-based musicians who became part of the Soothsayers collective. Their second album, ''Tangled Roots,'' was released in 2005 and was more Afrobeat inspired. It featured collaborations with

Keziah Jones Keziah Jones (born Olufemi Sanyaolu on 10 January 1968) is a Nigerian singer-songwriter and guitarist. He describes his musical style as "Blufunk", which is a fusion between raw blues elements and hard, edgy funk rhythms. Also his Nigerian roo ...

, Adesose Wallace,

Maxi Jazz Maxwell Alexander Fraser (14 June 1957 – 23 December 2022), better known by his stage name Maxi Jazz, was a British musician, rapper, singer, songwriter and DJ. He was the lead vocalist of British electronic band Faithless from 1995 to 2011 ...

and Netsayi Chigwendere. Rahman and Hopcraft wrote, produced and mixed this album. It was a more studio-produced album than ''Lost City'' and represented a step forward in the pair's quest to combine elements of Afrobeat groove and melody with dub production and sound. Soothsayers released the track "Blinded Souls" from this album as a ten-inch vinyl single, with remixes by Quantic and

Mad Professor Neil Joseph Stephen Fraser (born 27 March 1955, Georgetown, Guyana) known by his stage-name Mad Professor, is a British dub music producer, engineer and remixer. He has collaborated with reggae artists Lee "Scratch" Perry, Sly and Robbie, ...

. The third studio album ''One More Reason'', was released in 2009 (under the name Soothsayers and the Red Earth Collective). It featured a collection of

reggae Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica during the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its Jamaican diaspora, diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first ...

veterans such as

Johnny Clarke Johnny Clarke (born 12 January 1955) is a Jamaican reggae musician, best known for his recordings with producer Bunny Lee in the 1970s. Biography Clarke grew up in the Kingston ghetto of Whitfield Town and attended Jamaica College.Michael Prophet Michael George Haynes (3 March 1957 – 16 December 2017), known professionally as Michael Prophet, was a Jamaican roots reggae singer known for his "crying" tenor vocal style, whose recording career began in 1977. Prophet was one of Jamaica’s ...

and

Linval Thompson Leval Alphonso Thompson (born 12 October 1954, Kingston, Jamaica), also known as Linval Thompson, is a Jamaican conscious roots reggae vocalist, dub musician and record producer. Biography Thompson was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, but spent ti ...

. This album was the first to be mixed by London reggae producer and DJ Manasseh. It was also the first album to feature the

harmonic In physics, acoustics, and telecommunications, a harmonic is a sinusoidal wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'' of a periodic signal. The fundamental frequency is also called the ''1st har ...

vocal style that has since become an important feature of the band's sound. Their fourth album, ''Red Earth Dub'', was released in 2010. It was a collection of dubs and

remix A remix, also sometimes called reorchestration or rework, is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, poem, or photograph ca ...

es by Manasseh, which also included two new compositions created in collaboration with Manasseh. Their fifth album, ''Human Nature'', was released in 2012. At the time of its creation, Soothsayers had fully developed their own three-part harmony vocal style (featuring the voices of Rahman, Hopcraft and younger band member Julia Biel) which had become an integral part of the sound of the music. The music, while still fundamentally inspired by dub, reggae and Afrobeat, now had a unique compositional and production style, bringing together the various strands of bass-heavy, groove-inspired music that had characterized their work over the previous decade. ''Human Nature'' has been played by DJs on

BBC Radio 2 BBC Radio 2 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It is the List of most-listened-to radio programs, most popular station in the United Kingdom with over 14 million weekly listeners. Since launching in 1967, the sta ...

, Radio 3, Radio 4,

BBC 6 Music BBC Radio 6 Music is a British digital radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It primarily plays a wide range of alternative music, from established and emerging artists and bands. In 2002 it was the first national music radio station t ...

and numerous radio stations worldwide. It was featured on

Gilles Peterson Gilles Jérôme Moehrle MBE (; born 28 September 1964), better known as Gilles Peterson (), is a broadcaster, DJ, record label and festival owner. He is renowned for his genre-defying approach to music with jazz at its core. From this base he ...

's 'Best of 2012' show. Soothsayers signed to London-based label Wah Wah 45s in 2017. The label had released two EPs in 2017, ''Speak to my Soul'' and ''Speak to my Soul Remixed'' (released in July and September 2017 respectively). Their sixth album, ''Tradition'', was released in 2018. ''Tradition'' marked the first album to be recorded by the Soothsayers after their signing to Wah Wah 45s in 2017. ''Tradition Remixed'' was released the following year and contained remixes by, amongst others, Wu-Lu, Sarathy Korwar, Steve Cobby, Manasseh and Ben Hauke. ''We Are Many'', was released in 2020, featuring Victor Rice on bass plus musicians from Sao Paolo, where initial sessions for the album were recorded. The collaboration with Victor and other Brazilian musicians continued during lockdowns via zoom and produced the double album ''Soothsayers meets Victor Rice and Friends'' ''Fly Higher'' is a new album due out in September 2025

Touring

Throughout their career, the band has predominantly performed in the UK and Europe, playing at major jazz, reggae and world music festivals

Rototom Sunsplash Rototom Sunsplash is a large European reggae festival founded in 1994 in Gaio di Spilimbergo (Pordenone, Italy), and since 2010 held in Benicàssim, a few miles north of Valencia, Spain. It attracts thousands of fans from all over the world, th ...

, the

North Sea Jazz Festival The North Sea Jazz Festival is a festival held annually on the second weekend of July in the Netherlands at the Ahoy venue. The festival moved to Rotterdam in 2006 after the demolition of the Statenhal in The Hague where it was originally held. ...

and

Glastonbury Festival The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts (commonly referred to as simply Glastonbury Festival, known colloquially as Glasto) is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts held near Pilton, Somerset, England, in most su ...

. Soothsayers have also performed and toured extensively with

and Cornel Campbell, performing some of their classics as well as new collaborative material.

Collaborations

Hopcraft and Rahman have also collaborated with many other musicians, including

Osibisa Osibisa is a Ghanaian-Caribbean Afro rock band founded in London in the late 1960s by four expatriate West African and three London-based Caribbean musicians. Osibisa was the most successful and longest lived of the African-heritage bands in ...

, Rico Rodriguez,

Jerry Dammers Jeremy David Hounsell Dammers GCOT (born 22 May 1955) is a British musician who was a founder, keyboard player and primary songwriter of the Coventry-based ska band the Specials (also known as the Special A.K.A.) and later the Spatial AKA Orch ...

Ayub Ogada Job Seda (1956 – 1 February 2019), better known as Ayub Ogada, was a Kenyan singer. He was a singer favoring the nyatiti (an eight-stringed lyre with its origins credited to the Luo, a tribe in Nyanza Kenya) as his characteristic instrument. ...

, Aswad, Julia Biel, Zoe Rahman and Arun Ghosh. in 2011, they were asked by members of the band Antibalas to participate in the London production of the musical

Fela! ''Fela!'' is a jukebox musical with a book by Bill T. Jones and Jim Lewis, based on music and lyrics by the late Nigerian singer Fela Kuti, with additional music by Aaron Johnson and Jordan McLean and additional lyrics by Jim Lewis. It is based ...

''', about the life of Afrobeat creator

Fela Kuti Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì (born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti; 15 October 1938 – 2 August 1997) was a Nigerians, Nigerian musician and political activist. He is regarded as the principal innovator of Afrobeat, a Nigerian music genre t ...

, which ran for four months at London's National Theatre. Hopcraft was the musical director and trumpeter and Rahman played the saxophone part mimed to by the actor in the title role.

Lineup

* Robin Hopcraft (trumpet, vocals, production) * Idris Rahman (sax, vocals, production) * Emmanuel Afram (bass) * Saleem Raman (drums) * Julia Biel (vocals) * Andrew Gibson (guitar) * Kishon Khan (keyboard)

Members of the wider Soothsayers Collective

Discography

Albums

* ''Lost City'' (2000, Red Earth Records) * ''Tangled Roots'' (2004, Red Earth Records) * ''One More Reason'' (2009, Red Earth Records) * ''Red Earth Dub'' (2010, Red Earth Records) * ''Human Nature'' (2012, Red Earth Records) * ''Tradition'' (2018, Wah Wah 45s) * ''We Are Many'', (2020, Wah Wah 45s) * ''Soothsayers Meets Victor Rice and Friends'' (2022, Red Earth Music)

EPs and singles

* "Blinded Souls" 10", featuring remixes by Quantic and

(2005, Red Earth Records) * "Bad Boys" 7', featuring

(2009, Red Earth Records) * "I'll Never Leave / I'm Leaving" 7", featuring Cornel Campbell and

Lutan Fyah Anthony Martin (born 4 December 1975), better known as Lutan Fyah, is a Jamaican musician, singer, and member of the Rastafari movement Bobo Shanti. Background Born in Spanish Town, Saint Catherine Parish, Jamaica, Martin studied Architecture ...

(2011, Red Earth Records) * "We're Not Leaving" 7" (2012, Red Earth Records) * "We're Not Leaving" 12" (2012, Red Earth Records) * "Goodnight Rico" 7" (2016, Red Earth Records) * "Nothing Can Stop Us / Take Me High" 7" (2016, Red Earth Records) * "Speak To My Soul" 10" (2017, Wah Wah 45s) * "Speak To My Soul Remixed" 12" (2017, Wah Wah 45s) * "Dis & Dat" 12" (2018, Wah Wah 45s) * "Sleepwalking (Black Man's Cry) / Natural Mystic" 7" (2018, Wah Wah 45s) * "Watching The Stars" (2018, Wah Wah 45s)

Compilations featured

* Vibrations from the Motherland ("Crocodiles" featuring Busi Mholongo, 2008, Melt 2000)

References

{{Authority control Musical groups from London