'I needed to be different'

Vernon Kay presents Radio 2 from 9.30am, Monday to Friday. Add his show to your watchlist

I open the Zoom window expecting the Chaka Khan who, in a recent interview, was described as glamorously dressed, her hair tumbling to her waist. Unfortunately, I’m met with a blank screen and a disembodied voice. I ask if I’ll get to see her face – “We weren’t prepared for that!” comes the friendly response from her manager and half-sister, Tammy. When you’re Chaka Khan, a name often preceded by “icon” or “diva”, either the shop window has to be dressed properly or the shutters have to be down.

Khan will be on full display, however, as the headliner of Radio 2 in the Park on Saturday 12 September, which is being held this year in Stirling. What should audiences expect? “We’re always looking at all the songs that we can pull up. So, Rufus [her first band]; stuff I’ve done when I lived in New York; songs that didn’t get out there yet – that’s for some new sparkle, you know what I’m saying? Someone told me, if I remember all the things I’ve ever done in my life, I’d probably kill myself!” she deadpans.

Khan is currently living a bucolic lifestyle on an 80-acre estate in Georgia. “It’s really beautiful,” she says, “I have horses, dogs, cats, and keep chickens… their free-range eggs are unbelievable.” It’s a lifetime away from the heady, urban, cosmopolitan lifestyle she once led.

Born Yvette Stevens in 1953, by the time Khan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, she had taken the journey from being raised in poverty in Chicago, joining the Black Panther movement, becoming a funk pioneer in the 70s and then the doyenne of the 12-inch single with a string of 80s hits – I Feel for You, Ain’t Nobody, I’m Every Woman – followed by a descent into addiction from which she emerged as the internationally recognised Queen of Funk.

I ask her if music has always been her mission? “I needed to be different,” she responds. “I started searching for things I could do with my life at an early age. My mother was taking us to little places in the city, where groups would compete. They used to call me ‘Little Aretha’.” Khan was 11 at this point. “Those competitions were really telling for me. They let me know I had this thing in my back pocket.”

Only two years later, Khan joined the Black Panthers – a radical Black organisation founded at the height of the civil rights movement in the mid-60s. Was she always political? “In a city like Chicago, you were born into that madness, it’s just there. Everywhere. All the time.” When fame came calling, did she feel it a duty to talk about politics? “Yeah, whenever I could. I was gonna focus on [my career], but also, you know, wanted to bring my belief systems with me.” How far does she feel the civil rights movement has progressed since then? “It has not. Let me be honest about that.” Not one inch? “No.”

Unable to see her face, it’s hard to read whether her staccato answers are closing the matter or willing me on. I ask her how America feels at the moment. “It always was kind of crazy. Different sorts of people trying to just keep their wits about them, tackling whatever they’re trying to do in life.” Would she call herself a political person now? “Yeah of course. I’m about the cause, about the changes, about all the great things the Panthers taught me… I’m a spiritual revolutionary.”

‘I’m about the cause, about all the things the Black Panthers taught me

Khan, whose adopted name is of Yoruba origin, has been very vocal about slavery reparations. “How can anything be different here when they’re still hanging people from a tree, every day?” The last legal hanging in the US was in 1996, but there are unsubstantiated reports of lynch mobs still practising to this day.

It must be important to have music as a salvation? “It is a softer spot for me to live in and to dwell in, yes.” Her voice becomes warmer, her answers longer. In the week she joins Vernon Kay to choose her Tracks of My Years, it seems that something that defines her life is collaboration. “That’s the best thing you could do. It’s the same thing with any art form or self-expression – collaboration is always better.” I ask her about her most famous collaborator, the writer of I Feel for You. “Prince brought out everything that I wanted in working with another person. He was a thinker, a mastermind.”

She seems to be drawn to people who, like her, have music running through their veins. “Absolutely. Stevie Wonder – he’s another crazy, beautiful person – he and Prince have a similar kind of thought process with that feel for music. They are geniuses.”

There is also an elemental need in Khan to produce music that will see her release her 23rd album – CHAKZILLA – two weeks after her Radio 2 headliner. There’s also the musical of her life, I’m Every Woman. She must be torn somewhere between the past and the future? “I’m a real next person,” she says. “I don’t remember half of the things I’ve done in my life!” So the ‘next’ thing will always be music? “I do music, that’s what I do best in life.”