You know the riff. Even if you think you don't, you do. That lurching, rubbery bassline and choppy electric piano that opens "My Name Is", the track that turned a skinny kid from Detroit into the most talked-about rapper on the planet in 1999, didn't come from Dr. Dre's studio. It came from a 1975 album by a British singer-songwriter from Hammersmith called Labi Siffre. And the story of how it got from one to the other is better than most music biopics.
"I Got The…" is the opening track on Labi Siffre's fifth album, Remember My Song, released in 1975. The song is six and a half minutes of rolling, jazz-funk groove. Siffre on electric piano, laying down a rhythm so infectious it practically dares you not to move. The bassline? That was played by Dave Peacock. The guitar? Chas Hodges. The pair would go on to become Chas & Dave, the cockney pub-rock duo best known for "Ain't No Pleasing You" and Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup songs. The idea that the same fingers that played the "Gertcha" bassline also laid down the foundation for one of hip-hop's most iconic beats is, frankly, one of music's best jokes.
The album was co-produced by Big Jim Sullivan, a session guitarist who'd played on records by everyone from Tom Jones to the Rolling Stones, and Derek Lawrence, a producer who'd worked with Deep Purple in their early days. Remember My Song didn't chart. It sat in relative obscurity for over two decades, known mainly to crate-diggers and rare groove enthusiasts who'd latched onto another track from the same album, "The Vulture", which had been doing the rounds on London's rare groove scene since the late eighties.
Labi Siffre is one of British music's most quietly extraordinary figures. Born in 1945 to a Nigerian father and a mother of Barbadian and Belgian descent, he grew up in Bayswater and Hampstead, studied music in Soho, and spent his early years playing jazz guitar at Annie Ross's club and driving minicabs to pay the rent. By the early seventies he was releasing albums of folk-inflected soul that were both tender and defiantly individual. Crying Laughing Loving Lying from 1972 remains his masterpiece, and his original recording of "It Must Be Love" hit number 14 in the UK a full decade before Madness took their version to number four.
Siffre is also a poet, a playwright, and an openly gay man who met his partner Peter Lloyd in 1964, a time when being gay in Britain was still a criminal offence. That context matters, because it's central to his most famous composition: "(Something Inside) So Strong", the 1987 anthem that became synonymous with the anti-apartheid movement after Siffre wrote it in response to a TV documentary showing South African soldiers shooting at black civilians. It won the Ivor Novello Award and was reportedly Nelson Mandela's favourite song. What Siffre revealed years later was that the first two lines came out of him before he'd even consciously started writing, and they were about his life as a gay man. The apartheid imagery triggered something deeper and more personal. The song was about every kind of oppression he'd known.
This is who Eminem was asking permission from.
In the late nineties, Dr. Dre, the former N.W.A producer who'd already reshaped hip-hop once with his G-funk sound, was working with a new signing to Aftermath Records. Marshall Mathers was 26, broke, and had one commercially unsuccessful album behind him. Dre heard something in Siffre's "I Got The…" that he wanted to rebuild around. The bass riff and electric piano from the song's extended coda became the entire rhythmic backbone of what would become "My Name Is".
There's a wonderful detail in the margins of this story: Beck and the Dust Brothers had independently been planning to sample the same track for Midnite Vultures. When Jimmy Iovine at Interscope caught wind, he sat Beck down, played him the "My Name Is" video, and told him the kid Dre had just signed was going to be massive. Beck shelved his version.
On their first day recording together, Dre and Eminem finished "My Name Is" in an hour. Siffre is credited as a writer on the track. The liner notes describe the riff as an interpolation, meaning Dre's team re-recorded the parts rather than lifting the audio directly, though the debt to the original is unmistakable.
Here's where the story gets properly interesting. Dre and Eminem needed Siffre's permission to use his music. And Siffre listened to what they'd written over it.
He said no.
Attacking the victims of bigotry rather than the bigots themselves was, in Siffre's view, lazy writing. Diss the oppressors, not the people they oppress.
The original version of "My Name Is" contained lyrics targeting women and gay people, standard-issue late-nineties shock rap. Siffre, a gay man who'd spent his entire career writing about the dignity of the oppressed, was not having it. He refused to clear the sample until the offending lines were changed. Eminem and Dre agreed, but only for the clean version. They sent Siffre this version, he approved it, and the sample was cleared. What Siffre didn't know at the time was that the explicit version would also be released using his music, with the original lyrics intact. He later said he should have insisted the stipulation covered all versions, but he was unfamiliar with hip-hop's dual-release conventions. By the time he realised, "My Name Is" was already one of the biggest singles of 1999, peaking in the top ten in the UK and winning Eminem his first Grammy.
There's something remarkably principled about the whole episode. Siffre didn't object because he was precious about his music being used in hip-hop. He objected because the lyrics punched down. He drew a line, and he held it, even knowing the commercial stakes.
"My Name Is" turned Eminem into a global star and The Slim Shady LP into a multi-platinum album. It also brought Siffre's music back from the dead. "I Got The…" was released as a standalone single in 2003, nearly thirty years after it was recorded. Remember My Song was remastered and reissued by EMI in 2006. Royalties from the Eminem sample provided Siffre with a financial lifeline at a time when he'd stepped away from music entirely. His partner Peter Lloyd had suffered a stroke in 1998, and Siffre had closed his studio to become a full-time carer.
And Siffre wasn't done being sampled. Jay-Z had actually got there first, using a different section of "I Got The…" on "Streets Is Watching" from his 1997 album In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. Kanye West later sampled "My Song" from Crying Laughing Loving Lying for "I Wonder" on Graduation in 2007. Siffre's catalogue has kept giving to hip-hop across three decades.
The timing of this article is almost absurd. On 16 February 2026, just days ago, Siffre released "Far Away", the lead single from Unfinished Business, his first album in 28 years. He performed it live on BBC Radio 2's Piano Room with the BBC Concert Orchestra. He is 80 years old.
The Siffre revival has been building for a while. His 1972 ballad "Crying Laughing Loving Lying" was used in The Holdovers in 2023, introducing his voice to a new generation. "Cannock Chase" appeared in the Oscar-nominated Sentimental Value. His track "Bless the Telephone" went viral on TikTok last year, racking up over 52 million streams. And now a new album on Demon Music Group, with a special 2LP expanded edition of Crying Laughing Loving Lying coming out for Record Store Day 2026.
He is, in short, having a moment. The kind of moment that makes you want to go back and listen to everything.
Remember My Song, the album that started all of this, has been reissued several times, most recently by Mr Bongo. Original 1975 UK pressings on Pye Records are collectible but not impossible to find, and there's something quite special about hearing "I Got The…" on vinyl, where that bass riff has a weight and warmth that streaming doesn't quite capture. The 2006 EMI remaster is the easiest route in and sounds excellent.
Crying Laughing Loving Lying is the one to own if you're only buying one Siffre record. It's where "It Must Be Love" and "My Song" (the Kanye sample) both live, and the upcoming Record Store Day 2LP edition will be the definitive pressing.
For Eminem completists, The Slim Shady LP has never been out of print on vinyl and is easy to find from UK retailers.
But the real discovery here is Siffre himself. A songwriter whose work has shaped three decades of hip-hop, whose anti-apartheid anthem doubled as a queer liberation song before anyone knew it, whose session musicians went on to become Chas & Dave, and who, at 80, has just announced his first album in nearly three decades. Start with Crying Laughing Loving Lying. Then try Remember My Song. Then put on "I Got The…" and wait for the riff to hit. You'll hear "My Name Is" in there immediately, except this time you'll know where it really came from.