Kwame Kwaten started his artistic career in the middle of the eighties at the Warminster Athenaeum as part of the school band Outcry. He spent the next few years learning his trade in many different bands. Kwame had started working at the Borderline Club in London as a compère when he and Steve formed the band D - Influence with Ed Baden Powell , Sarah Anne Webb and Ned Bigham. D - Influence had taken their demos to record labels without any luck and so they decided to release their own music independently. The first of these recordings was I’m the One which they sold straight to record stores themselves out of the back of a van.
D - Influence own productions started to gain notoriety amongst other musicians and labels - working on productions and remixes for artists such as Mick Jagger from The Rolling Stones, Seal, Jay Z, Tom Jones, Beverley Knight, Lighthouse Family.
Shola Ama was the discovery that broke D - Influence as mainstream producers. The story of her discovery has also become folklore. Kwame Kwaten was refused a cab at Hammersmith Station so he turned and walked in to catch a train. There he heard Shola Ama humming as she walked. He auditioned her on the platform and gave her his business card. Her first album Much Love went on to sell over a million copies worldwide.
Kwame was the founder of the biggest European Urban Music Seminar. The seminar was set up to pass on much of what he and many others had learnt about the music business as they saw it. It was, as Kwaten describes it, a “harsh no frills edutainment spectacle” whose numbers swelled from 500 people in 1998 to 15,000 over two days at the Royal Festival Hall in 2004.
Kwame is the manager of Rumer, Master Shortie and Kerry Leatham under the ATC Management umbrella.