I wanted to have a sound that wherever you took it, people would say: 'That's the Womack sound'." It was the company that was famous, and I wanted my style to be so unique. "It was like all of those acts was branded. "I wanted to be different from all the Stax cats," he told me on his tour bus. (Predictably 1976's BW Goes C&W was his worst-selling album, but I like it.) He dug hanging out with Sly Stone, who influenced the coked-out funk of Communication, but he also liked cronying with the Stones, who had their second US hit with his song It's All Over Now. He drew many elements into his signature R&B sound, from pop to singer-songwriter ballads to country music. Though he wrote I'm a Midnight Mover for wicked Wilson Pickett, Womack was himself far less conventionally macho as a Soul Man. He talked about playing guitar on Aretha Franklin sessions and of his deep immersion in the soul of Memphis and the Muscle Shoals sound studio. He spoke painfully of the ugly fallout from his marrying Sam's widow. He spoke of the child-star days with his brothers on the gospel highway, and of their mentoring by secularised soul idol Sam Cooke. In my three days on the road with him – taking in a slightly surreal wander around Warwick Castle – Womack talked through his whole life and multifarious career. And that was the man I got to know over three days in late September 1984, when the Poet II tour climaxed with three exhilarating nights at London's Hammersmith Odeon. He was nothing if not honest about his faults and flaws. What you also heard in it, with his tortured gospel baritone fascinatingly framed by futuristic electro keyboards, was the good man inside him struggling to get out. On that intermittently brilliant record Please Forgive My Heart, you heard a lifetime's contrition as Womack looked back on decades of addiction and loss (including the tragic deaths of two sons and the murder in 1978 of his brother Harry). Now he is dead, at the age of 70, after experiencing yet another career upswing with 2012's The Bravest Man in the Universe, a heart-wrenching album masterminded by Damon Albarn and XL's Richard Russell after many years in which Womack again lost his creative way. "I felt terrible last night," he tells me the next morning after a show he knew had been poor. "I'm fuckin' tired of it." Making matters worse, after 90 minutes of sporadic conversation with his wife we hit a long tailback and realise that Oxford United are at home for an evening game. "I been doin' this for 20 years now," he tells me on waking. Thirty years later, it occurs to me that he might have watched the sun rise with his old friend Ronnie Wood. Having chowed down and brought the sugar levels back up, Bobby almost immediately falls asleep he spends the rest of the journey in that state. To say it's mildly undignified would understate matters, especially from the viewpoint of someone who for a decade had worshipped Womack as one of soul's great singer-songwriters, and who is additionally delighted by the recent career uplift that's come with The Poet (1981) and The Poet II. "Lady, jes' gimme the meat!" he finally says with much exasperation.įifteen minutes later, as we head west on the M4, Womack is spreading various items of food across the back seat and shoveling them down, to the barely-stifled amusement of his third wife, Regina, and young son, Bobby Truth.
#THE LAST SOUL COMPANY HOW TO#
He asks the limousine driver to pull over in South Kensington, where he loses it with an assistant who can't work out how to make the sandwich he wants. He hasn't had time for lunch, let alone breakfast, and the blood-sugar levels are dipping perilously. He woke late in his Belgravia hotel and is now in a crazed hurry to get to the Oxford Apollo for a show to promote his new album, The Poet II.
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