Almost 60 years on, Candi Staton still recalls clearly the moment when an angry divide between religious and secular music came into shocking focus for her.

“I was about 12 and I was at a concert when Rosetta Tharpe came on,” Staton says. “She was a top gospel artist in America. She went over to Europe and they really accepted her. But then she came back, and the news came before she arrived that she had ‘backslidden’ – that means going back from the gospel – and I was there when they booed her off stage and threw things at her. It was terrible. It scared me no end.”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe – who would later, incongruously, perform a concert for Granada TV on a rainy disused railway station platform in Chorlton-cum-Hardy – was not the only gospel singer who risked religious ire by recording secular songs. Sam Cooke was another gospel singer whose first forays into pop had to be recorded under a pseudonym for fear of the wrath of God-fearing fans.

So pop music really was dangerous stuff in the USA of the 1950s?

“It was serious,” Staton agrees. “They would not receive you again if you crossed over and sung anything other than Amazing Grace or other gospel songs. It had to be all or nothing.”

Today, on her fifth marriage, her problems with drugs and alcohol now 30 years behind her, and after a lot of soul-searching, Staton is much happier with her God and Christianity in general. She will perform her southern soul at the Manchester International Festival’s Pavilion Theatre, but will also sing her gospel music at Manchester’s New Testament Church of God - part of  MIF’s  Sacred Sites, which also includes, at other venues, songs and recitals from Sikh, Jewish, Hindu and Islamic performers.

“That’s great,” Staton says of this multi-faith concept. “I wish them well. I bless them and keep on going.”

Such inter-religious understanding was in short supply during Staton’s childhood. Born in Alabama, in 1940, she was sent to a religious academy from which she was picked at the age of 12 to sing in a gospel trio.

“We were the only gospel group out there with a band.

“And some people were so religious they would not even allow the band to come into the churches. Bass, drums, piano ... all that was ‘the devil’s music’.

“It was fun at first, but when I got to be 16 or 17, I realised we were being taken advantage of. They were making money off us we never saw.”

Staton rebelled against the “rigid laws” of the church.

“I went out and started going to clubs. I started to do what I wanted to do,” she says.  “But I was trying to find my way and find myself. I had been taught by everybody else’s ideals. I found out that a lot of the interpretations they were giving me were not right. God loves us even with all our faults.”

Staton had a string of  R&B hits in the US from the late 1960s, and by 1976 was at number two in the UK chart with Young Hearts Run Free – a soul anthem whose lyric was a veiled reference to Staton’s unhappiness with another abusive relationship.

In 1982 Staton returned to gospel music, and presented her own Christian TV show in the USA. For years, those hits went unsung.

“I found the TV show really fulfilling and I didn’t miss the secular world. I didn’t miss Young Hearts Run Free.”

What brought her back to secular music was a song which was never intended to be a hit. The 1991 hit You Got The Love, by The Source, was a dancefloor anthem (and a favourite at Manchester’s Hacienda club) built around a song Staton had recorded for a diet commercial. In lieu of a fee, she had been granted 50 per cent of the publishing rights on the song. What with a blizzard of remixes and chart entries, plus a cover almost 20 years later by Florence and the Machine, that proved a very shrewd option for Staton.

“I didn’t even remember the song, to be honest,” says Staton.  “I got a phone call from one of the reporters over there saying ‘Did you know you have a top ten?’.  I said, are you kidding? I said, what’s the name of it? And they told me, and I said You Got The Love ... when did I make that?

“I went through my archives and pulled out the tape I had of that song and listened to it. I thought, they like THIS song? “They sent me a remixed version and I couldn’t even understand it because this was house music and I was doing gospel music. It was a foreign language to me.”

» Candi Staton performs as part of MIF’s Sacred Sites at New Testament Church of God, Upper Chorlton Road, Manchester, on Thursday July 7 and the following two nights at 7.30pm (free, but booking required), and sings her soul music at the Pavilion Theatre in Albert Square on Sunday July 10 at 8.30pm (£19.50, £10 concessions) . For ticket details go to mif.co.uk or call 0161 876 2198.

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