Tunde Obe doesn’t say much, although the industry he and his wife who make up T.W.O are in feeds on loud talk and hype. In this interview with Assistant Life Editor, TERH AGBEDEH, at the entertainment couple’s palatial residence, he talks about why he doesn’t talk and a whole lot of other issues, including their latest album titled, T.W.O Plus.
How does it make you feel that your music, particularly ‘Adupe’, leads worship in a lot of churches?
I am not the kind of person that likes to take credit for everything, or say, ‘oh, I knew it was going to be a big hit’. That song came from God; that is the truth. I mean, somebody had prophesied at that period; it was a pastor who said, “God wants you to do a song for him”, and I was like, ‘Ehen’ because we are not gospel artistes. Our reputation and our music are always clean and devoid of any negativity. We don’t try to get people’s attention with negative lyrics; we try to get people’s attention with good music. So when he said “God wants you to do a song for him”, I said okay. I put it in one side and the song just came. I was sleeping and I woke up. The part that came immediately was ‘Oti se se o’. So, that is the hook. And once that came and I wrote it down, I knew I had to build a song around it. And I felt that my brother had always been a big gospel artiste, but we have never done a collabo; so I said this is the time to work with my own blood. At that time, T.W.O didn’t even use to do collabos; we just did our own thing. It was an instant hit, a hit even before the video came out. They were already singing it in churches before people knew who the artiste was. It took a while before the video came out and people said, ‘okay, so it is even T.W.O’.
You were not used to collaborations; what changed that?
You basically play music for your fans. So anytime you want to come out with a new project or album, you need to find out from them what they want. And people would be like, ‘you guys have been around for close to two decades; give us something refreshing from a different angle, let’s see you guys with the younger guys’. This is because the T.W.O brand is built in a box, on a pedestal somewhere. People didn’t really compare us to anybody, so it is time to mix up, to show that we are not that stiff and all that.
It was a good experience because I got to see how other people work. Sometimes when you are a creative person and you are forced to work with somebody else, there are two ways of doing it; you either come from the place of superiority and say ‘this is how it is done’ or you humble yourself and take the back seat and say, ‘what do you think? How would you like to…?’ Which was what we did. We have this; do you think this would work? Would you like to be on this? And everybody felt free to work with us. I think everybody didn’t know what to expect working with T.W.O, but I think when they finally met us, they realised that we are pretty humble and simple. Definitely, as an older artiste, you expect your respect; but we come down to anybody’s level. It was a nice experience.
The videos for ‘Green White Green’, ‘Wedding Day’ and ‘Te Amo’…
‘Te Amo’ is new.
All of them were wdirected by Clarence Peters?
All our videos. We did ‘Omonsa’.
Where did the concept for the videos come from; is it all Clarence Peters’ or partly T.W.O?
Clarence is like family to us; we watched him grow up, we are very close to his parents and it is more or less like a family thing. So when we want to do a video, we have sessions. I don’t know how he works with other people, but he comes around and we keep playing the songs, blasting it very loud, we just spend hours on it. Then ideas start; why don’t we try this? And then when we finally come up with a concept, he achieves it. He is one of the best video directors in Nigeria. He is very expensive, but it is worth it if you are trying to get your message across to people. And, of course, Nigeria is a place where name matters a lot. So that is one of the reasons we work with him.
That says versatility; you do videos with the best, you do collabos. Is that where your staying power in the industry lies?
Sometimes you look around for your colleagues you started with and you can’t find anybody; it is like everybody has vanished. But like I always say, I don’t like attributing anything to myself. It is God; anybody who is going to be successful. I mean, we are not the only ones that work hard. A lot of people work hard; so if God is on your side, that is when your work will be appreciated by people. So I say God first, but we don’t take anything for granted. Anytime we are doing an album, like my manager would say, ‘it should be like your first album; it should be like nobody knows you, like nobody has something to look forward to’. I am even harder on myself because I realised that music is really (let’s be honest, worldwide music) is for young people. The people who will always trend and who will always be… We have had our time when we were also knocking heads with everybody. But it gets to a point when it is really about the music. It is very difficult for people who are like young enough to be your children to idolise you. They normally idolise their age-mates and people who are slightly older; like I want to be like this in the next couple of years. It is when artistes start getting into their 40s that they begin to idolise T.W.O, and it is like, how do they do it? Most of my colleagues call me all the time to say ‘what is the secret? Can I do something with you guys? How are you guys managing? Give me a lecture on this thing. I need to learn. I want to come back.’
So, it is really God and you don’t take your audience for granted. For us, we realised that good music was kind of fading away and everything was about the beats and hooks. We didn’t want to compromise on our standard because some of your fans will be hard on you, no matter how good the music is. They might be dancing to the music, but still be hard on you and say, ‘see how your life has come to. This is the kind of music you are playing because you want to make money’. So we had to walk that fine line of being able to compromise a bit on serious hard topics or lyrics and stuff that are going to make you ponder and water down our lyrics a bit, but not totally, and then lean on the beat a little more. And that has worked for us.
Aside being a song for couples, is ‘Wedding Day’ also to celebrate T.W.O?
My manager more or less started ‘Wedding Day’. He said (it was from) the messages he gets, because he always feeds us back a lot on what he gets.
Who is your manager?
Don T (Tony Anifite). He used to be partners with Efe Omoregbe. We were with Now Muzik. He split. So we went with him to DicotyleDon. He said, ‘let’s do a wedding song because people are saying “T.W.O is probably the best, if not the only known, music couple in Nigeria; the best known at least”. You guys have never done a song for couples, why is it (and he gets this a lot), you guys just have to do something for couples. A lot of people look up to your marriage and use you as a point of contact, even when praying, that God should let their marriage be like that of Tunde and Wunmi.’ So he said you have to do a song for them and it has to be meaningful. It can’t be something that is going to be wishy-washy. It has to be something strong.
So, initially when I started working on the song, I made it humourous, a bit funny, because people always like our songs to be humourous; that is why we did ‘Mo gbo mo ya’ , ‘Fine Bara’, which was a big hit too because people like that humourous style. So I wanted to make the wedding thing humourous and the funny things that happen at weddings and all that. Then, when Teniim came to do his own bit, he was more like, ‘Bros, you know we who are not married, some of us are listening to your lyrics very seriously and if you now say this thing and make it like a joke, people will be more scared of getting involved in marriage. Just talk to me like I want to get married and I am scared. Give me advice. Just give us, the young people, advice on what we can do’. That was his own idea and he said he thought that is what people would want to hear: advice.
So we scrapped the first one and started:
When you meet a lady/the first thing that you must do/shine your eye well o/’cos one plus one’s not always T.W.O…
When we started that and everybody was like yeah! So it was like a real wedding song. That was how it came about. So it wasn’t like we just woke up and started this song. I think that no matter how old an artiste gets, for as long as you can humble yourself, and listen to people. You don’t say I have written this and this is it, I am baba, me, I have been doing this for 20, ah ah, I started this 30 years ago, what are you talking about? Do you know how many hits I have done? Do you know how many awards I have won? So this is it and this is how we are going to do it. No. there are times it is one of my security guards that just comes and is nodding his head and I say, ‘so you like this song?’ he would just say, ‘yes sir. But that place where you said this thing, I wish you can repeat it because I like that place’. ‘Omonsa’ where I said, ‘Omo mummy, Omo daddy’, I did it only once and they said let that beat come up and I said okay. We tried it and listened and said okay. So, anybody can have an input as long as you are on my team. I listen to everybody and it makes my working relationship with people around me a lot better, too.
Is that why you have ‘Te Amo’ in Spanish, ‘Omonsa’ a language from Ghana or is it because you travelled the world while you were younger and you can speak some of these languages?
Yeah, being born into that family where you are privileged to travel around. But that was not really the motivation for using those languages. When we first started recording, the first thing I wanted to do was to listen to what other people were doing. That is the kind of person I am. I (went) online to see what songs were big? What are people listening to? You have to. You can’t just come from your own position entirely; you can come with your own perspective of something. Let me give you an example; if reggae music is in, if you say it is apala you will sing, you know definitely that you will only appeal to a small niche of people. But if you are not really a reggae artiste but you want to now do your own perspective of reggae, you can. And it might work because that is what people want to hear at that time. So when I wanted to do that, a lot of my friends were the first to scream: ‘No. Don’t. We have enough of that. We want your own music. We don’t want…’ So, I listened to that and it made an impact on me that people really want an artiste to stand out. You can play 10 tracks and ‘Te Amo’ comes on and it’s different. The beat goes with the beat they are using now; the same tempo, the same beats per minute. But the music is different, the song is different; it comes from a whole different perspective. Somebody said it once that if they don’t tell you that these are Nigerians – except for where we use broken English here and there – if you listen from afar, you will think it is a foreign song. So that is what we were trying to go for and somebody said that it is because of the internet, music is so universal and you don’t know who is going to listen to it and say, wow, this came from Nigeria, this guys are brilliant. So we wanted to show that side.
People are beginning to make what we call instant music; you come to the studio, someone is playing a beat and you enter the booth and just start singing, saying all sorts of things. You are there for like two hours and they say try this, try that. Afterwards they start cutting it and joining it and it is a song. When I saw that happen, I was like is this where it is now? Because that is not music. You want to do a song that is evergreen. When you just crack an egg, it is a different kind of egg from when you mix in onions, tomatoes add whatever it is that you want in that omelette before you fry. It means that by the time you eat the two eggs, the sunny side up and the omelette, there is a difference. It shows that you took more time to do one egg than the other. That is how music is. You can’t just jump on beats. I have never agreed with that. To those that do it, good luck to them. But if you are looking for an evergreen song, and right now like my wife always says, it is all about our legacy; we have achieved everything we want to achieve. I am living in my home. I have put little investments here and there for the rainy day and everything is kind of looking like it is going to be okay for us.
Those investments that you never want to talk about.
(Laughter).
What happened to your St. Valentine’s Day boat rides that used to take place every year?
We stopped like four years ago around 2011 because the cost of doing the show was humongous and we realised that what we needed to charge to make the money back was a bit much. People expect to come and drink champagne like water and nobody wants to pay; so everybody is asking for free IV and if you don’t give them, they get really offended. If I have 10 friends and I give two or three of them IVs, the remaining are going to hate my guts. They always look at you like you are above poverty line.
You talk about your grace-to-grass-to-grace story a lot. Do you hope to document it in a book for people to read and learn from it?
It will come; somebody will initiate it and say I want to do something. I think the story of T.W.O should be told, so that people can learn from it. The way I became the person I am today is through life’s experiences. You are born into a home where you see all sorts of people around you every day; uncles and aunties, everybody wants to be your friend. Everybody seems so nice and pleasant. Then you lose your breadwinner and all of a sudden you find out that even to buy the most mundane thing, you can’t get it. We couldn’t get access to a lot of the things that my father left behind when he died, because I was barely a teenager, until I was 25.
He died at 45 and you were 10 then, correct?
You are trying to figure out my age, abi? (laughter)
Not particularly.
Let me run away from that o. Yeah, I was 10 and he was about 45 going to 46, and now I am older than he was. That is all I am saying. So I realise that he was young because I don’t feel like I was ready to die a few years ago. I feel like I still have a lot to contribute. I think he went before his time really. But it was so that we could be better people. I realise why a lot of people who are born into successful homes are themselves not successful. Because if you look at it, you will find that when things seem a bit on the easy side, then you don’t really stress yourself that much. It is people who know that what they gain depends on what they do. There is nothing to fall back on. There is nowhere to look. That is when you are (spurred on). That determination to succeed came after my father died and I realised that people like successful people. Initially, my mum did not say anything and I wondered why we couldn’t go to this person’s house, why can’t we go on holidays. One day, my mum told me that we were not rich anymore; that it is going to take a few years and we are going to still get back some of the things my father left behind. That was when she explained the whole situation. And I just made up my mind that I was going to make it.
