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Soul 2 Soul/ Marshall Jefferson collaborator Kim Mazelle chatted candidly about becoming an evangelical Christian this week, and
admitted that she struggled with success when moving to the UK in the early 90s from America.
“Show business can be a very bad place and I ended up on a lot of rocky roads, whilst in this country,” she told the Voice newspaper, “I
fell into a lot of things, like the whole partying scene, and then met a guy and got into the things he was doing, which was drugs,” she
confessed.
The former opera singer, whose biggest solo hit was ‘Love Me The Right Way’, nowadays performs at evangelical gospel events in both
Ibiza and London and spoke cheerfully of witnessing conversions at her show. She also found success covering ‘Young Hearts Run
Free;’ the 70s disco classic written by soul diva Candi Staton, who herself converted to evangelical Christianity in the early 80s.
Chatting to Skrufff several years ago, Candi described hanging out with then close friends Diana Ross, Gloria Gaynor, Patti Labelle and
Chaka Khan and admitted she thoroughly enjoyed the notoriously decadent disco scene.
“I loved the dancing, the excitement, the people. I used to go to Studio 54 and stay there all night,” she recalled, “I had my drinks for
free, the DJs would recognise you and bring your drinks over, then ask you to dance. It was just a never ending party.”
By 1982 she’d embraced evangelical Christianity wholeheartedly (teaming up with subsequently disgraced charismatic leaders Jim and
Tammy Bakker) and said she remains much happier since finding God.
“I still love worshipping the Lord, it gives me so much peace,” she said, “I’m in a state right now that I wouldn’t trade for any money in
the world, I have the kind of peace that I’ve always looked for. The Lord is my man now,” she added.
Acid house pioneers DJ Pierre and Green Velvet also converted in recent years as did the man who enjoyed Britain’s first crossover hit
Love Can’t Turn Around: Farley Jackmaster Funk. Chatting to Skrufff in 2004, Farley recalled seducing ‘harems of girls’ as his career as
a superstar DJ took off.
“I blew my mind, it would blow anybody’s mind, and that was when I started losing all touch with reality,” he confessed.
“You start thinking these girls want you because you look so good, it’s not that, it’s because people are drawn to success and power
positions. Because I was the DJ in the club, I was the guy with the most notoriety in the club so of course girls would gravitate to me. I
wasn’t the best looking guy; I was overweight. So there had to be another reason these girls were flocking to me.”
“But I lost all sense of who I was, when I’d look in the mirror I stopped seeing the person I used to see and I saw what I wanted to see,
because all these girls were flocking to me. I was looking at myself thinking ‘these girls want me because I’m the most handsome guy’,
but no, I’d lost all touch with reality,” he added.
Fighting to stay at the top, his career gradually imploded until he reached out to God in 1990 and reassessed his priorities.
“Being number 1 is one of the hardest things in the world to handle because as the bible itself says ‘you can gain a whole world but lose
a whole soul’ because you end up giving up all moral things just to stay number one,” said Farley.
“Whatever I had to do to stay number one, I did,” he continued, “You stop caring at all about whose feelings you hurt because all you
want to do is continually have people praising you and telling you you’re so great. And what extent you will go to, to stay number one is
the part where you lose your soul,” he adds.
Thanks. God Bless.
Aaron.
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