Montrealers, know that tonight will be the last chance concert. “I’m retiring!” » says Candi Staton, great voice of American soul, disco diva born in the good graces of gospel and the poverty of the South. At 83, the singer will make one final stop here, at the Rialto, on Friday evening, playing POP Montréal, before retiring from the kind of tour that took her to one of the stages last summer of the Glastonbury festival, in England, where his notoriety is even greater than on this side of the Atlantic.
The images from this last concert at Glastonbury are magnificent. Early evening, the sun setting on thousands of fans dancing to his greatest hits, Young Hearts Young Freeher version of the Dolly Parton classic Stand by Your MindofIn the Ghetto popularized by Elvis or even You Got the Lovea song that Florence + The Machine resurrected around ten years ago to once again make it a hit on the charts.
At 83 years old, Candi Staton pushes the note by dancing too. What energy the lady has! “I admit, it was a difficult evening for me,” she said, laughing. It was so hot, the sun was blinding me, I couldn’t see anything, and the wind was blowing so hard that I kept removing my hair from my mouth. I did the best I could, but I am my own worst critic, she adds. I am a perfectionist: when I go on stage, I want to give the best of myself. » Supported by her musicians, including two of the sons she had during the first of her five marriages.
“The first time I was invited to sing in England, it surprised me a lot,” continues Candi Staton. I didn’t realize they liked my songs so much. I remember that my first concerts were at the Jazz Café in Camden. I had a full house for three nights in a row. »
There it is You Got the Love that made it famous, a song with an astonishing destiny, a simple chorus recorded for a weight-loss product commercial, says Ms. Staton, “with the help of a record producer who must have weighed 800 pounds — is that can that be? Then a DJ took my voice and put it on one of his beats… What was his name again? Franke Knuckles, Madame, the legendary composer, DJ and pioneer of American house. He made it a dance floor anthem.
However, in America, we especially know the soul and gospel singer with an agile and trumpeting voice. For more than six decades, Candi Staton has led a dual musical career, one foot in the church, the other on the dance floor. “Gospel is my foundation, my origins, my favorite style,” she says. I started singing in church when I was five, and I haven’t stopped since. […] And soul was born in church, was born in gospel: the harmonic progressions, the chord changes, the same as in church. It’s only the lyrics of the songs that differ. »
“When I was young, singing the blues was even considered a sin. And I said to myself: Oh, really ? So, I started studying the Bible, on my own, to better understand that it was not a sin to sing the blues since we all experience it. We all go through moments of depression, anxiety, we all go through a divorce, I personally had to fight cancer. We can talk about it, we must be able to sing it”, which she notably did on her big disco hit Young Hearts Run Free (1976).
“It’s my life, it’s my story, that I sing” on Young Hearts Run Free, summarizes Candi Staton. “I was going to dinner with my director David Crawford, I was talking to him about my relationship with this man I was trying to get rid of. I didn’t realize that he had written down what I was telling him — he made a song out of it, summarizing my story in three minutes. Arriving in the studio, I recorded this song in one take. I sang it as if I had been singing it for years: everything I was experiencing at the time came out at once. »
It’s my life, it’s my story, that I sing
Responding to the hedonism characteristic of disco music, Young Hearts Run Free instead proposed a feminist anthem on the dance floor: “What’s the sense in sharing, this one and only life / Endin’ up, just another lost and lonely wife “, Staton first sings there before finding the courage to sing “My mind must be free, to learn all I can about me / I’m gonna love me, for the rest of my days » and to leave the man to whom she felt chained. “A lady recently wrote to me on Instagram to tell me that she had known this song for years, but that she had never paid attention to the text. She was going through the exact same thing that I had been going through myself. »
“The important thing is to tell stories,” says Candi Staton, who, even though she has decided to stop touring, has not finished telling stories: a new album, Earth Rootsshould be released next month, on which we will find a lot of gospel, some “secular” songs (“ secular music “), a cover of a Rolling Stones song (Shine a Lightfrom the album Exile on Main St.1972), and this new extract, more spoken word, entitled 1963.
“I wanted to do something to remember the children who died sixty years ago this year” during a dynamite attack by members of the Ku Klux Klan against a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. “I was there, not far from this church, when the explosion occurred. I wanted to commemorate the tragedy by naming these four children who died in the explosion. »