MOJO EYEWITNESS
L ABELLE SOAR WITH NIGHTBIRDS
Non-standard girl group survivors and prodigious harmonisers, PATTI LaBELLE, NONA HENDRYX and SARAH DASH were aided by The Who’s managers and Stevie Wonder before heading to New Orleans, re-inventing themselves as silver funk sirens and charting big with their “Womanifesto” 1974 LP and its spicy worldwide smash single Lady Marmalade. “We filtered the Zeitgeist,” say the group, manager Vicki Wickham and others. “We blazed a trail. But it wasn’t how people wrote about us.”
Interviews by LOIS WILSON
Silver dream hit-machine: Labelle Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash and Patti LaBelle, 1975.
John Bryson/Shutterstock
Nona Hendryx: We started out as Patti LaBelle & The Bluebelles: Patti Labelle, Sarah Dash, Cindy Birdsong and myself. We had hits with Down The Aisle (The Wedding Song) [1963], You’ll Never Walk Alone [’64] and Over The Rainbow [’66], and then Cindy left to join The Supremes.
Vicki Wickham: I met the girls in 1966 when they appeared on [ITV music show] Ready Steady Go! which I was producing. When Cindy left in ’67 I was running Track Records in New York for [Who managers] Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. Sarah called and asked if I could help. They played the Apollo, so I took Kit and he said, “Sign them if you want.” My big thing was they were a girl group – they dressed alike, looked alike, did everything alike and that time had gone. We needed to start from scratch. I put them in jeans and T-shirts, like The Who and the Stones. It wasn’t really them, but it was different.
NH: Initially it was a trial-and-error period; we were stretching, evolving, dressing this way, doing our hair that way and singing songs we loved by The Who and the Stones, and at the same time Vicki, Chris and Kit encouraged us to write. There was no storyboard and we recorded [1971’s] Labelle and [1972’s] Moon Shadow for Warners and we began to create this new path.