Their parents were Womack & Womack, Uncle Bobby was a superstar and so was their grandfather, Sam Cooke. The trio explain how, after driving Ubers and being told soul was dead, they joined the family business<\/p>\n
Backstage at a London festival, on a Sunday afternoon, the Womack Sisters are assembling themselves on a sofa, still clad in the clothes they were wearing on stage a few minutes ago. They look very stylish in their black dresses, tights and high heels, but they are not, it has to be said, dressed appropriately for the weather, which is sweltering. \u201cYou don\u2019t feel anything on stage,\u201d says Zeimani with a shrug. \u201cYou just feel amazing, like you\u2019re floating.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we\u2019re committed,\u201d nods her sister BG. \u201cYou know, we were taught by professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed they were. BG, Zeimani and Kucha Womack\u2019s father was Cecil Womack: he wrote Teddy Pendergrass\u2019s oft-sampled classic Love TKO, as well as hits for the O\u2019Jays, the Four Tops and Patti LaBelle, and was one half of Womack and Womack, of Love Wars and Teardrops fame. The other half was their mother, Linda Womack, the daughter of \u201cking of soul\u201d Sam Cooke. Their uncle was Bobby Womack, who initially performed with Cecil in early-60s band the Valentinos \u2013 their most famous song was It\u2019s All Over Now, later covered by the Rolling Stones \u2013 before going on to record a string of classics that earned him the unofficial soubriquet The Greatest Soul Singer in the World: from Across 110th Street to If You Think You\u2019re Lonely Now to the triumphant final album he made before his death in 2014, The Bravest Man in the Universe. Their half-brother\u2019s mum, meanwhile, was Mary \u201cMy Guy\u201d Wells.<\/p>\n
Given their heritage, Zeimani says her father thought a career in anything other than music was a waste of time: when she approached him with the idea that she might go to medical school, he reacted with something approaching horror. \u201cHe said, \u2018Just go in the studio and make music.\u2019 I told him I needed to have a Plan B. He was like, \u2018Plan B? Do Plan A, go hard, get on it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In fairness, the Womack Sisters had long been apprenticed in the family business. They had spent their childhood travelling the world with their parents: Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas or Bob Marley\u2019s studio in Jamaica; homes in Bangkok, Phuket, Johannesburg, London and, slightly less glamorously, Southend-on-Sea. \u201cWe were raised between London, Thailand, Paris and Amsterdam, but mostly here in London,\u201d recalls Kucha. Their mum and dad didn\u2019t just take the kids along with them, they got them involved \u201cin everything they did, in the studio, on stage, in meetings. They wanted to make sure that we knew what they were doing with their time, so they communicated with us a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
BG says that if I had interviewed her parents back then, \u201cWe would have been in the interview. If they went on a television show, we were on the couch with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zeimani made her first public appearance as a baby, in her mother\u2019s arms on the cover of Womack and Womack\u2019s Conscience, the 1988 album featuring Teardrops. The sisters made their recording debut, alongside their four other siblings, on the 1993 album Transformation to the House of Zekkariyas. \u201cWe opened their shows,\u201d remembers Zeimani. \u201cAnd it was the start of us realising that we could be a group, because before, we were just sisters. \u2018Yo, actually this is a good feeling, I could do this for the rest of my life.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
But still, she says, \u201cwe didn\u2019t take our dad\u2019s advice\u201d. They decided they did need a Plan B. \u201cWe were a little hard-headed. We wanted to go out and explore.\u201d<\/p>\n
The three sisters moved to Los Angeles and attempted to balance regular jobs with getting a musical career off the ground. There was a cleaning company, and a brief stint, as Zeimani puts it, of \u201cselling drugs\u201d, which turns out to mean they ran a marijuana dispensary. But it wasn\u2019t as easy as they had hoped. \u201cWe kept getting fired,\u201d says BG. \u201cI got fired from Zara for trying to take a couple of trips out of town for shows.\u201d The sisters also drove Uber taxis. \u201cUber was a lifesaver! I swear, without it I would have been turning tricks,\u201d BG laughs.<\/p>\n
To compound their problems, there was the music industry\u2019s attitude towards them. The group \u201calways had soul in mind,\u201d says Zeimani \u2013 they were huge fans of Amy Winehouse \u2013 but the labels they met with kept pushing them towards pop. \u201cWe would go to them with our demos and tell them what we would like to accomplish, with a live band, an orchestra, everything. They were just like, \u2018Soul\u2019s not what\u2019s happening right now, here in the States, particularly for brown artists.\u2019 So for years we were trying other things. We dabbled in R&B. They even had us rapping a couple of times.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hang on \u2013 are you saying you were told that Black artists shouldn\u2019t make soul music?<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I know,\u201d nods BG, rolling her eyes. \u201cThey told our manager that, and he didn\u2019t want to tell us, he was so embarrassed. Eventually, we just put our foot down and said, \u2018We\u2019re not doing anything else.\u2019 Couldn\u2019t get anyone to invest in what we were doing, so we funded our own thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Happily, their own thing caught the attention of Daptone Records, home to Jalen Ngonda, Thee Sacred Souls and the late Sharon Jones, whose house band the Dap-Kings are best known for backing Winehouse on her Back to Black album. \u201cAn instant connection!\u201d enthuses BG of their meeting with the label\u2019s co-founder, Bosco Mann, who now plays bass in their backing band. \u201cWe just hung out and listened to music for a year before we actually recorded anything. So when we finally came down to it, it just rolled, it flowed, the music was just pouring out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result was a string of acclaimed singles, among them Chauffeur \u2013 which details the downsides of the sisters\u2019 period as Uber drivers, including realising that you\u2019re invisible to the \u201cfine-looking\u201d man you just picked up \u2013 and If I Let You, which last month enjoyed a burst of social media virality after support from a startling array of luminaries: SZA, Timbaland, Ghostface Killah, Pharrell Williams, Erykah Badu and Questlove. One suspects the stars were drawn by the Womack Sisters\u2019 fusion of traditional and modern: the music on their upcoming debut album is as deeply rooted in soul\u2019s past as you\u2019d expect (\u201cWe are,\u201d as Kucha puts it, \u201cso familiar with these streets\u201d), but it never feels self-consciously retro.<\/p>\n