Candi Staton has still got the love

Staton cites life in Donald Trump’s America and the injustices African Americans face as motivation to continue some five decades after she first reached the US charts.

“This album speaks to the now,” says the Alabama-born singer, with that soft, southern States accent. “When Dr Martin Luther King was trying to change things in the Sixties, Mavis Staples came out with songs like ‘Respect Yourself’. It spoke to what was actually happening politically and racially. This album does the same thing.

“I’m encouraging people because there is so much bullying from the top. It’s amazing how people are cowering under it. We don’t know what to do. The Senate is deaf and dumb. They don’t say or do anything. Bills are passing, we don’t know what they’re doing in the dark. There is so much uncertainty now.

I was born in the Forties. We had prejudice and all that kind of stuff. It’s not prejudice in the form of segregation now. It’s in blue suits with police sitting up there on it. So it’s changed, but for the worse. We’re having a lot of problems with racism. It’s just blatant.

Staton began singing in a gospel group with her sisters when she was a teenager. She toured with a young Sam Cooke.

“I was 14 when I met Sam. I never knew Sam was going to be who he was. We got to be friends and we’d just sit and talk. He wasn’t a big star, he was just the lead singer of a gospel group. He was one of us.

“We’d arrive early at the school auditorium where we’d be performing. One of us would have a ball. We’d get a plank, not a baseball bat, just some old plank, and we’d play ball!”

Religion has been the foundation of Staton’s life. Her faith has guided her through many difficult periods, including a battle with alcoholism that lasted over 10 years.

At the start of her career, she found herself caught between touring and raising a family — and developed a taste for champagne at record company parties and became dependent on alcohol to perform.

Staton admits her faith was also tested during a string of abusive relationships and difficult divorces. The lyrics of her disco anthem, Young Hearts Run Free, were written while Staton was seeing what she calls one of her “bad guys”.

She remembers him holding her over a banister at a theatre she was playing at in Las Vegas with Ray Charles, and threatening to drop her.

Staton is happily married to her sixth husband now, a former US secret service agent who worked as a bodyguard for four presidents. They were introduced at a church where Staton was doing charity work supporting victims of domestic violence.

I married a wonderful man. It was strange because I’ve been used to the wrong kind. I wasn’t used to anyone that straightforward or so well respected.

Staton’s career was rejuvenated in the Nineties, when a song she recorded for a diet commercial was remixed and released by London DJ, The Source. You Got The Love was a hit across Europe.

“The story of that song could be a documentary! It was on the shelf and I forgot it was even out there. And when people told me it was in the top 10 here in Europe, I was floored. I was like ‘You got me mixed up with somebody else’. Then I got a call from a DJ asking me to talk about You’ve Got The Love.

“And then it clicked. ‘Oh that song I did in Chicago in ’86 for that diet thing!’ When I heard it, I didn’t recognise it. I’m a straightforward R&B and soul singer. So it was kind of like, ‘OK, but I’m not going to do this stuff’. But I did!”

The song has been covered many times. As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Staton whose reworking she likes the best.

“Florence + the Machine did a good job. We did it at Glastonbury and she recorded it on her phone! I was going to do it like that on stage, but she beat me to it!”

- Candi Staton’s album Unstoppable is released tomorrow