The reason the Cleveland-born, Los Angeles-based icon with the 50-year career is in the UK: to record an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show. The broader reason: the ongoing life of the fantastic album he released last year, co-produced by Albarn and Richard Russell, owner of XL, the British record label that is home to Adele. It’s titled The Bravest Man in the Universe – a touch of vainglory, a hint of self-deprecation, yet also, given his life of unbelievable trauma, something of an understatement. The album brilliantly layers the lived-in Womack voice over jittery beats, sweet electronic melodies and synthetic squelches. Just as he said it would three years ago, that “positiveness” Womack was surfing came good.
Still, it almost never happened. After touring the world with Gorillaz for much of 2010, Womack fell catastrophically ill. He had pneumonia, heart failure, “I’m diabetic, plus my kidneys… I was in a coma for 17 days. My doctor was going to pull the plug. He says, ‘This guy’s organs are shot. They’re not supporting anything.’ I didn’t know this! Then on the 17th day they came in and my eyes were open. And they’d brought in my wife,” he says, meaning his ex-wife. “And I’d been divorced from her now at least 20 years. And they said that I said: ‘I never met that woman before in my life! Get out of here! She ain’t my wife!'”
Shortly thereafter, Bobby Womack told an American writer that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.