Songs of experience

The Screaming Eagle Of Soul’s last holler ’n’ screech. By Geoff Brown.

Charles Bradley ★★★ Black Velvet DUNHAM/DAPTONE. CD/DL/LP

BLACK VELVET was Charles Bradley’s stage name as a James Brown impersonator, his steadiest gig in music before signing to Daptone at the age of 62. There, his producer/co-writer Thomas Brenneck spent most of the next (almost) seven years trying to wean him off the Godfather Of Soul’s vocal mannerisms, not entirely successfully, but by the time Bradley had earned his own soubriquet, the Screaming Eagle Of Soul, he’d carved out his place in this man’s man’s man’s world. Bradley’s life was packed with adversity, but he overcame all the setbacks and sorrow, heartache and pain to enjoy an all-too-brief late-flowering career that ended in September 2017, weeks before his 69th birthday, when the cancer he’d fought returned. Those years of struggle, as detailed in 2012 documentary Soul Of America and the 2013 feature in MOJO 239, enabled Bradley, like all the best soul singers, to make songs his own by channelling his experiences into the performance, often giving the lyric a gritty truth. Thus, when Bradley heard and first sang Why Is It So Hard To Make It In America, a jokey folk song as originally sketched out by Brenneck, “this really funny song, from the perspective I had written it, just transformed into Charles’s life story,” the guitarist told me. A first posthumous release, Black Velvet collects tracks recorded during the sessions for his three previous albums but set aside. So it’s no surprise that there isn’t the immediate drive of 2011’s Daptone debut No Time For Dreaming, or the energy and cohesion of follow-ups Victim Of Love (2013) and Changes (2016). But Black Velvet’s appeal grows. The songs are more personal – about love and relationships – with none of the grittier, political themes addressed in The World (Is Going Up In Flames), Change For The World, Confusion, or Where Do We Go From Here, songs that elevated the preceding albums. Opening with the upbeat, chunky funk of Can’t Fight The Feeling, one of three new songs, and Luv Jones, a 2015 single recorded with LaRose Jackson, the mood eases down into heartfelt new ballad I Feel A Change, followed by the first of the album’s three covers. It’s an intriguing choice, I’ll Slip Away by Rodriguez, another ‘rediscovered’ artist who has enjoyed wider fame late in life. Bradley’s raw and forceful singing strikes a more defiant pose in his 2012 version than the gentle leave-taking note of the 1967 original, when the songwriter was Rod Riguez. Taken at a J.B.’s funky chugging mid-pace, Nirvana’s Stay Away draws a 2012 performance almost entirely built on James Brown’s phrasing. The track ends abruptly, but for the duration, it works. By contrast, his 2011 version of Neil Young’s Heart Of Gold isn’t as successful as previous reinventions such as Black Sabbath’s Changes. Produced for Record Store Day 2014 and not exactly a cover, (I Hope You Find) The Good Life stitches together two US Number 1 pop hits – Goffin & King’s Go Away Little Girl and the movie theme The Way We Were – to create a gentle kiss-off to a lover. Third new song, and one of the poppiest Bradley has ever recorded, Fly Little Girl is another take on the recurring theme of departure and pushing away, a quiet end-of -set to leave us humming a happy tune. But it’s not the final track. That’s a reprise of Victim Of Love, title track of his second LP, in which acoustic guitar is replaced by warmer electric, the ballad feeling more measured, less raw. “Before I met [Brenneck and Daptone] I was on the edge of giving up,” Charles told me in one of our interviews. “I started letting myself go, my health and everything. [They] pulled me back around… I still wanna be able enough to get on that stage and say, I may be 64 but I can still give you a show. Oh, I’m gonna tear that stage apart.” He did. Technically, Charles Bradley wasn’t the greatest soul singer you’d ever hear, but in a world of artifice and sham, his was an utterly sincere voice. It was a too-brief acquaintance, but a truly rewarding one.