In 1969 London, a Ghanaian saxophonist put together a band of four West Africans and three Caribbean musicians. Two years later, their debut album was in the UK top 20.
The band was Osibisa. Its leader, Teddy Osei, had come to London from Ghana to study music. With fellow Ghanaians Sol Amarfio on drums and Mac Tontoh on trumpet, and musicians from Nigeria and the Caribbean, he formed a group that mixed highlife rhythms with rock, jazz, funk and Latin music. They described their sound as “criss-cross rhythms that explode with happiness”.
The name
The name Osibisa comes from osibisaba, a Fante term associated with an early form of highlife dance music on the Ghanaian coast. The choice signalled where the band’s roots were, even as their sound drew on everything happening in London at the turn of the 1970s.
The debut and the Roger Dean cover
Osibisa’s self-titled debut album was released in 1971. It was produced by Tony Visconti, known for his work with David Bowie and T. Rex, and its cover featured a flying elephant painted by Roger Dean, the artist later famous for his Yes album covers. The album reached number 11 on the UK chart and number 55 in the US, the band’s best chart positions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Their second album, Woyaya, followed in the same year. Its title track, a song about travelling towards a destination without knowing the road, was covered by Art Garfunkel and became one of their most enduring compositions.
Sunshine Day
The band’s biggest singles came in the mid-1970s. “Sunshine Day” was a UK hit in 1976, and “Dance the Body Music” followed. They appeared on British television, played festivals and toured widely, including across Africa, where they were treated as heroes: African musicians who had made it in the heart of the Western music business on their own terms.
Opening the door
Osibisa arrived before “world music” existed as a marketing category, and before most British listeners had heard of highlife or Afrobeat. Their success showed British record labels that African rhythms could sell, and it inspired a generation of African musicians who came to London later. They were among the first African bands to reach the British album top 20.
The line-up changed many times over the decades, but Teddy Osei remained the leader and the band kept recording and touring. Mac Tontoh died in Accra in August 2010, Sol Amarfio in December 2022, and Teddy Osei in London on 14 January 2025, aged 88.
The legacy
Osibisa’s influence shows up in the long line of African and diaspora bands that followed them in Britain, and in the way Afrobeats artists today talk about London as a second home. They were fusing African rhythm with Western pop more than fifty years before the current wave.
The band’s slogan promised rhythms that explode with happiness. On “Sunshine Day”, they delivered it in three minutes, from a London studio, with a Ghanaian saxophone leading the way.
