Interview: Bobby Womack, soul singer

HIS HEALTH is failing and his friends are all dead, but soul legend Bobby Womack has just produced his best album for years, discovers Aidan Smith.

Normally an interview subject who forgets the name of his singing co-star, the most-hyped woman in pop, would be something of a let-down – especially when he also gets the name of his record label wrong and cannot remember ever playing Scotland. But here we’re talking Bobby Womack and the compensations are immense.

Someone near the top of my list of questions for The Last Soul Man (© Robert Dwayne Womack) was Lana Del Rey and whether the 68-year-old enjoyed duetting with the sultry pop sensation on his comeback album. I never find out because the story he tells me, in which she only has a bit-part, is far more interesting.

“The day I was due to record my song Dayglo Reflection with – I forget the lady’s name – I found out my mom was dying. Down at the studio they said: ‘Bobby, we’d like you to take two or three days off.’ But I was like: ‘I don’t want to stay in my hotel, I want to cut that song.’ I think if anyone buys the album they’ll get something they’ve never heard before. I’m singing to Naomi, my mom, and to Sam Cooke, my mentor. It’s Sam’s voice you hear at the start of the track, from an old interview with Dick Clark, who also just died. Sam says: ‘As a singer grows older, his conception goes a little deeper because he’s lived life and he understands what he’s trying to say a little more.’ That’s how I felt, making this album.

“After the track was done of course I went to see my mom. She told me she was tired of living. I was like: ‘Ma, don’t even talk like that.’ But she said she wasn’t in pain, that she couldn’t wait to see Friendly, my dad. Her last words were: ‘I’ve carried you guys – Womack & Womack, Bobby Womack, all of you – as far as I can. You can make it from here.”

Bobby is just about making it. “The doctors had to look at my prostate, then when they dug that out they found a tumor on my colon. My lungs completely shut down and I got pneumonia twice in a month.” The tumor was found to be non-cancerous but the various ailments threatened to derail the album, his first for 12 years. It’s called The Bravest Man in the Universe and it’s terrific.

The producers are Richard Russell, head of XL Records (“LX” to Bobby) who’d previously coaxed Gill Scott Heron back into the studio for one last record before his death, and Damon Albarn. Womack had never heard of Albarn before being invited onto the last Gorillaz album.

“He said that because I was a hero to them, because I’d survived so many wars and was the last soul man standing, it would be a blessing if I’d come sing with them. I said: ‘You’re talking ’bout the Bobby Womack of 30 years ago, how do you know I still can?’ Damon said: ‘Don’t make excuses, Bobby, just meet us in New York.’”

What impressed him about Albarn? “That he didn’t do drugs. He was straight, the way I used to be, when I could write a song without even thinking about it. When I started making commercial [music], I lost something. That was when record companies tried to outrun each other but it was me who was doing the running; they were sitting in the back of the buggy cracking the whip if I slowed down.”

He says XL treat him better, “like I’m family.” They only wanted a record when he was ready for one. “Recently, every time I tried to write, it kept sounding like something I’d written before. I was telling the same story, about being broke. I got to thinking: ‘Maybe I just done too much drugs and I ain’t got the feeling for this anymore.’ Also, I thought music had gotten too mechanical.”

Now, though, he’s ready, and The Bravest Man sounds like the record he always meant to make. Intriguingly, the backing provided by Albarn is very contemporary, but the clattering electronics know their place. They’re not allowed to overshadow Womack’s voice, not that they ever could. This is the voice of a man who’s lived four and half lives already, who played with James Brown, Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix, provided guitar on Presley’s Suspicious Minds, penned the Stones’ first No 1, The Last Time, and traded classic soul licks with Wilson Pickett – and who was working with Janis Joplin and Marvin Gaye when the former took a fatal heroin overdose and the latter was murdered, outliving just about every one of what he calls “my constituents”.

Life at home has been even more tumultuous. One of his sons suffocated aged four months, another killed himself, a third is in jail for second degree murder. His brother Harry was stabbed to death by a jealous girlfriend. Straight after Sam Cooke’s murder he thought he was doing “the right thing” by marrying his widow, Barbara, but his career suffered, and Barbara’s reaction to discovering his affair with his step-daughter was to shoot him. You wonder how he ever ran out of subject matter but he did.

He’s getting tired and my time is almost up. “Thanks for not asking dumbass questions,” he says, although truth be told I’ve hardly got in a word. Bobby Womack gives what you want, from the Zelig-like great moments in musical history (he was touring segregated America when, at 3am, Cooke unveiled A Change Is Gonna Come) to the dodgy jokes about opting to stay in motels “because, well, you can get mo’ tail”. He gives me a final check on his health: “I do wonder, where did all my people go? I wave at death myself but not for too long. I’m getting closer to good.”

• The Bravest Man in the World is out now on XL.