‘I will preserve enjoying so long as I breathe’

On the age of 75, Stevie Marvel remains to be going robust.

His newest UK tour, which wrapped up earlier this month acquired rapturous evaluations, with critics calling the star “recent and on kind” for “a riotously festivity” of his music.

However whereas contemporaries like Billy Joel and The Eagles are decreasing their musical commitments, Marvel says he won’t ever contemplate retiring.

“For so long as you breathe, for so long as your coronary heart beats, there’s extra so that you can do,” the Motown legend advised the BBC’s Sidetracked podcast. “I am not gonna cease the reward that retains pouring by my physique.

“I like doing what I am doing. An artist by no means stops drawing. So long as you possibly can think about is so long as you will be inventive.”

The star additionally confirmed he was nonetheless engaged on a brand new album, titled Via The Eyes Of Marvel, which he first mentioned in 2008.

The undertaking has beforehand been described as a efficiency piece that may replicate his expertise as a blind man.

It might be his first studio album since 2005’s A Time To Love; extending a recording profession that began in 1962, when he was simply 11 years outdated.

Marvel spoke to Sidetracked presenter Annie Macmanus, the day earlier than he headlined the BST pageant in London’s Hyde Park – enjoying a two-and-a-half hour set that encompassed his greatest hits, from Superstition and Is not She Beautiful to You Are The Sunshine Of My Life and I Want.

A lot of the set was drawn from the Seventies purple patch when he received the Grammy Award for finest album 3 times in a row, for Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs In The Key Of Life.

Marvel advised Macmanus that he by no means bored with revisiting these data.

“Songs are like kids, they’re with you eternally,” he stated. “They’re assertion from the spirit inside you.

“And singing these songs is like me taking one other breath.”

Earlier this month, throughout a live performance in Cardiff, the musician addressed a long-standing conspiracy concept that he’s not truly blind.

” there have been rumours about me seeing and all that?” he advised the viewers, “However severely, you already know the reality.”

“Reality is, shortly after my start, I turned blind,” he advised followers.

Calling his incapacity a present, Marvel continued: “Now, that was a blessing as a result of it is allowed me to see the world within the imaginative and prescient of fact, of sight.”

In his Sidetracked interview, the singer talked in regards to the significance of utilizing music to unfold positivity and converse fact to energy.

All through his life, he has been a vocal civil rights campaigner, and performed a key position within the marketing campaign to have the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr recognised as a nationwide vacation within the US.

Marvel, who campaigned for Democrat Kamala Harris in final 12 months’s US presidential election, advised Macmanus that America was at the moment beleaguered by “folks making an attempt to go backwards”.

“It isn’t gonna go down like that,” he insisted. “I believe that when you look again in historical past, there’s at all times been a degree when folks get up.

“And I believe that, for many who suppose it is gonna go down like that, do not forget that God is watching you.”

You may hearken to Stevie Marvel’s full interview on the Sidetracked podcast on BBC Sounds.