The saga of the Joubert Singers’ route to their debut UK gig is both heartwarming and incredibly convoluted. Lengthy scholarly articles have been written about the curious afterlife of Stand on the Word, a track from a privately pressed 1982 gospel compilation that until recently represented their entire recorded oeuvre. In short: it briefly enjoyed success in New York clubs thanks to the legendary DJs Tony Humphries and Walter Gibbons; was subsequently forgotten for decades before being rediscovered by cratediggers, erroneously credited as a remix by another disco legend, Larry Levan; it turned up on compilations and film soundtracks, inspired the sound of Justice’s 2007 track D.A.N.C.E., and a cover version by Keedz became a hit in France.
You can’t really blame its composer, Phyliss McKoy Joubert, for capitalising on its belated success: the Joubert Singers have started touring and recently recorded their debut album. Something about the track seemed to have an appeal that stretched far beyond the usual audience for obscure gospel disco rediscoveries – the vast majority of those assembled in the Jazz Cafe look substantially younger than the track itself. Delightful as it is to see a great piece of music find a new audience decades after the event, there’s no getting around the fact that there’s something slightly peculiar about a gig entirely predicated on four minutes of music from 35 years ago. “Thank you very much for enjoying my song and … the other songs,” offers Joubert as she walks on stage, to a round of slightly nervous laughter. It’s a state of affairs compounded by the fact that aside from Joubert, who vocally takes a back seat, it isn’t entirely clear how many, if any, of the singers actually performed on the original track.
They bookend the set with versions of it – it sounds great, its jubilant power intact – and in between there’s substantially less gospel than you might expect, the vocal pyrotechnics displayed on versions of Ezekiel Saw the Wheel and Joyful Joyful vastly outweighed by pop and soul covers: Purple Rain, I Will Always Love You, Like a Prayer. If the crowd are disappointed, they do an immensely good job of covering it up, and you can see why. You don’t get anywhere in the world of gospel by quacking on like Mark E Smith, and the vocalists duly sing up a storm. If it ultimately amounts to padding, it’s entertaining padding, so long as you don’t dwell too long on the question of precisely what it has to do with the record that belatedly made the Joubert Singers famous in the first place.
