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‘Wherever he sends us, we’re willing to go’: Annie and the Caldwells on God, gospel and a debut album 40 years in the making

Fearing pop would lead them to the devil, Annie Caldwell recruited her daughters into her band. They’re now sending audiences into ecstasy with disco-tinged soul gospel

From West Point, Mississippi Recommended if you like The Harlem Gospel Travelers, DJ Greg Belson’s Divine Disco compilations Up next Single, Wrong, on 28 January. The Dutch festival is admirably eclectic and boundary-pushing – the bill this year ranged from Japanese noise-rockers Bo Ningen re-imagining the soundtrack of Jodorowsky’s 1973 surrealist classic The Holy Mountain to the self-styled “putrid, drug-filled gutter rock” of New York quintet Couch Slut – but even so, Annie and the Caldwells’ appearance looks extraordinary: a mother and her three middle-aged daughters, clad in matching multicoloured harlequin-print dresses, belting out raw, disco-tinged soul gospel in the midst of a delirious stage invasion by ecstatic, dancing punters. Annie and the Caldwells are the band she subsequently formed in the 1980s with her guitarist husband, Willie, after hearing their daughters rehearsing for a talent show: they were singing secular material, which she didn’t like the sound of.

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