She's got the love at last

Soul survivor Candi Staton has seen it all in her 35-year career. She thought that era of her life was over, but then discovered that people still wanted to hear the blues, she tells Jim Carroll.

When Candi Staton started recording her new album, it took her a while to get used to the music she was hearing. There she was, in a Nashville studio surrounded by top-notch musicians, and she sounded just like she did more than 35 years ago. It was a flashback to another world.

"I remember thinking on the very first day in the studio that I was going backwards," she remembers. "Music is so transitional and everyone is looking for the new stuff and I sounded like I sounded back in the 1970s."

But she was returning to her southern soul roots for good reason. In 2004, the Honest Jon's label released a compilation of tracks Staton had recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for the Fame label back in the early 1970s. These tracks are as good as southern soul gets, a lip-smacking parade of gritty blues, brassy high notes, properly pitched strings and Staton's yearning voice bringing it all back home.

The universally positive reaction to this release persuaded Staton to leave her gig on a Christian TV network and go back to spinning hard-luck tales of love and pain. His Hands, the album which came from those Nashville sessions, is a showcase for a veteran voice which has lost none of its bittersweet potency over the years and for a sound which still possesses panache galore.

Staton still seems slightly bemused by this turn of events. "It was a total surprise to me that so many people wanted to hear that old stuff, that southern soul type of bluesy music," she says.

"To me, it was an old-fashioned type music. I thought everyone wanted to hear just hip-hop or pop these days and that that era in my life was over and I would never hear that music again. Then the compilation came out and people were raving about it. I was very pleased but yes, very puzzled."

THE CANDI STATON who's talking today is a far cry from the young singer who stood in front of a microphone in Muscle Shoals. Back then, as cliched as it might sound, she really was a cotton-picking young girl who had just left an abusive marriage with the son of the local preacher-man. The former gospel child-star hadn't sung in years before going into that studio because her husband didn't want her singing or performing at clubs.

So when she had a chance to sing songs about heartbreak and hurt, she wasn't faking any emotions. "After that marriage, I felt terrible. I knew I was out of my element. I was married but I wasn't happy. I was trying to be someone I was not designed to be.

"I was very frustrated to the point where I had a nervous breakdown. I knew I had to get out of that marriage so I took my kids and tried to raise them the best I could."

These days, she approaches songs from a different perspective. "The bad memories were all in the songs on the compilation, so I'm over that," she says firmly. "I lived through all that and, thank God, I survived it all. When I listened to the compilation, some of the songs brought back memories of what I was going through when I recorded back in the 1970s.

"But the new CD, there are no bad experiences on that. I'm more like an actor now. That happened to me once so I can sing about it. I can feel the presence of what I did go through and I can relive it for the moment of the song, but I'm not there as a person."

Yet Staton's domestic troubles didn't end when she divorced her first husband and cut those tracks for the Fame label. Three other husbands have come and gone since then.

"I've made some wrong choices along the way and got with people who were not good for me," she says ruefully. "Out of all the men, I always seemed to get one that was a pimp type of guy, someone who would pimp my voice and live off that."

She left Alabama, signed with Warners and headed to California.

"I was tired of singing songs about getting beaten and being hurt and 'oh this is terrible' and 'I don't know what I'm going to do with my life'. It felt like an old dead song-and-dance routine to me at that stage."

She needed something new and disco provided that in the shape of Young Hearts Run Free, the biggest hit of her career. Producer Dave Crawford penned the song for Staton in 1976 after hearing her tales of woe and unhappiness about her third husband and manager. "It was a positive thing, even though I was singing about the same old thing. It's a sad happy song."

In the early 1980s, Staton became a born-again Christian and went to host a TV show for a cable network. "I did it for over 20 years. It was a mix of music and interviews and it was about encouraging people. I don't consider myself to be a preacher, so I teach a little bit on the basis on what I've gone through."

But popular music wasn't prepared to abandon her quite yet. Round about 1990 or 1991, Staton began to get calls from Britain about her new song and how well it was doing in the charts.

"What new song?" was her reaction. She was still asking that question when You've Got the Love reached No 1.

THE STORY BEHIND how Staton became the voice of that evergreen rave classic is bizarre in the extreme. The song, originally written by Anthony Stevens on the death of his father, was slated to be used in a film about the world's fattest man's quest to shed some weight.

"They wanted somebody to sing the song who would sound convincing, which is where I came in," says Staton.

She sang the song and took half the publishing rights as payment. The video never happened ("I think the guy never lost the weight"), but a few years later the track ended up in the hands of London dance producer John Truelove, who remixed and released it.

"It was a huge surprise for me when I heard what was going on and when I finally worked out what the song was."

Seeing as the tune gets re-released every other year, it has turned out to be a lucrative gig for Staton.

Today, Staton says, she's never been happier with her lot. She lives with her new partner, a retired psychology professor, in a nice part of Atlanta surrounded by her kids and grandchildren. The new album and the retrospective are bringing a whole new crowd to her side. And she thinks she may finally be about to get her dues.

"I think I was a little overlooked the first time because there were so many soul singers around at the time," she says.

"It wasn't down to the wrong choices I was making. I mean, all the women singers were having the same problem with that, even Aretha Franklin.

"No, the problem was I didn't have a good team with me. I needed good management and a good label and good publicity people and a good promoter, and I didn't have all of them with me. Now I have people who want to see me succeed and that's the difference."

His Hands is released on Honest Jon's Records/EMI