Why, I asked Womack, who was 66 at the time and wearing sunglasses even though we were indoors and it was night-time, was he here? “People always send music, want you to do something,” he replied, scratching thinning hair under an ever-present hat. “But I was really in a state where nothing new was interesting to me. My daughter, she’s 23, I was playing a tape, and she walks in the house and she says, ‘Dad, what are you doing with that?’ ‘What am I doing? I’m listening to it! Somebody sent me it, they want me to do something.’
“She said, ‘Dad, that’s Gorilla [sic]!’ I said, ‘Gorilla!’ I said, ‘I ain’t never heard of the Gorilla [sic]!’ And she said, ‘Dad, you got to do this…’ She’s been my daughter as long as I can remember, and I ain’t ever seen her this excited! So I said, ‘OK, whatever it is, I’m gonna do this.'”
And so, more than a decade since he last released an album, and some 20 years since he kicked epic addictions to cocaine and alcohol, Bobby Womack was back in the recording studio, and back performing live.
Later that night, on the huge Coachella stage, Womack strolled in and out of the Gorillaz circus, often hesitant on his feet yet always with a spring in his gait. He hadn’t experienced crowds as big as this, he would later reflect, since he supported the Rolling Stones in 1975. He sang his Plastic Beach songs “Stylo” and “Cloud of Unknowing” – although for the latter he had to read the words from lyric sheets.