Charles Bradley, soul star at the age of 62

Pseudo-inspirational music swells in the background and they are allotted a tiny shaft of limelight for a matter of minutes. Well, brothers and sisters, let it be known that there is hope to be found for the mature artist - not from that ruthless production line, but in the genuinely inspiring story of Charles Bradley, the American soul singer who, two years ago, released his debut album, No Time For Dreaming, at the grand age of 62, garnering great acclaim and a growing fanbase around the world.

Bradley is a proper old school soul shouter, who has been dubbed the Screaming Eagle of Soul. “I’ve got so much inside,” he says. “Sometimes I just gotta scream to get it out there.” But, however celebratory and cathartic his music, speaking to Bradley is a sobering experience. It is clear that this man, who has truly lived a life of ups but mainly downs, takes nothing for granted and is under no illusions that he has made it. Although his reputation as an electric performer precedes him, he is still coming to terms with the rigours of the touring life. “It’s rough sometimes,” he says, “because I’m carrying a lot of stuff with me.” And he doesn’t mean luggage.

Sleeping rough

When Bradley, the youngest of eight, was a baby, his mother moved to New York, leaving her kids in Florida to be brought up by their grandmother. When she summoned her family to Brooklyn eight years later, Bradley struggled with the transition. By his early teens, he had left home and was sleeping rough on subway trains.

A couple of years later he enrolled in the US Labor Department’s Job Corps, where he trained as a chef – and took his first steps as a performer. His musical epiphany had come at the age of 14 when his sister took him to see James Brown at the Apollo. When his friends at Job Corps noted his resemblance to the Godfather of Soul, they plied him with gin, shoved him on stage and his sporadic, itinerant career as a James Brown impersonator was launched.

His first group broke up when his bandmates were drafted into the Vietnam War, and Bradley spent the next 30 years living in different parts of the States doing odd jobs and playing modest gigs. In 1996, he returned to New York to be closer to his mother. Then in his fifties, Bradley was still struggling to get his life on track, living in the projects of Bedford-Stuyvesant, caring for his mother and playing JB tribute shows as Black Velvet, when his brother Joseph was shot and killed a few doors down from his mother’s house.

Much of this traumatic past came out in the moving 2011 documentary Charles Bradley: Soul Of America which captured the privation of his circumstances, as well as his heart-warming excitement at such turns in his professional life as a sold out album launch show or reading an article about himself in the local paper.

Changing luck

His luck started to change the day he knocked on the door of Daptone Records, the Brooklyn-based label responsible for kickstarting the international careers of the brilliant but neglected soul singers Sharon Jones and Lee Fields, as well as providing the consummate horn section who played on Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album. Bradley had heard that label boss Gabe Roth was looking for singers; here he was to offer his services.

Roth partnered him with producer/guitarist Thomas Brenneck of the Menahan Street Band and, after some false starts, the pair began to work on the songs which would become Bradley’s belated debut album. Brenneck would arrange a backing track and Bradley improvised personal lyrics over the top to create gut-wrenching songs such as Heartaches And Pain (about his brother) and Why Is It So Hard?

All clichés aside, you can feel Bradley’s pain when he sings. He is a true soul man in the tradition of Otis Redding, the kind you very rarely hear these days. In his case, he is not just singing his life but singing for his life.

“I don’t want to go back to poverty, and I will fight to try to keep myself out of poverty,” he says. “It took a long time to come and now that I got it, I got to take care of myself. There’s still a road to climb. For now I’m just taking one day at a time and trying to grow honestly and righteously.”

Hands-on

Bradley has a strong Christian faith and testifies in soft and soothing terms. He is known for getting hands-on with his audience, clambering into the crowd to hug his fans, with whom he appears to have an empathic relationship.

“There’s a lot of people out there going through trials and tribulations and nobody wanted to hear their pain and that is why I sing it and I hug them,” he says. “I try to give them a little experience that I been through and sometimes they open up to me and tell me about their pain. You can look in another person and see the hurt – and sometimes I don’t want to see it. Sometimes I go offstage and I’ll be drained because when I get on that stage I give, give from the heart.”

It sounds as if music has been a blessing and a curse for Bradley, a vital means of connecting which comes at an emotional price. He says he has been a loner since childhood, but not through choice. “It was the hand that I was dealt. I seen so much in life that sometimes I do get frustration inside and I need to pray that God gives me strength. Sometimes I don’t want to go out and face the world because of things that I have experienced. I don’t want to hurt no one, I want to live and let live and keep going and show the world what kind of soul that I am. That’s it.”

• Charles Bradley plays the ABC, Glasgow on 5 October. No Time For Dreaming and its follow-up Victim of Love are available on Daptone Records. www.thecharlesbradley.com