‘I knead the audience, like a baker!’ House music legend Peven Everett on life after cancer and vanquishing the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement

A new documentary follows the Chicagoan from child trumpet prodigy to Gabriel-singing icon and DIY maverick. ‘Not everybody wants to see musical genius’, he says

At We Out Here festival in Dorset in August, thousands of people could be heard singing a trumpet melody as if it was a giant brass-band karaoke session. On stage was Peven Everett, performing a rendition of Gabriel, one of the most celebrated anthems in dance-music history. Co-created with producer Roy Davis Jr, the best-known version, which blew up in UK clubs in the mid-90s, is a spiritual garage-house track about the “archangel of love” that can bring both punters and DJs to tears.

But Everett is much more than one song. Damon Albarn of Gorillaz tells me that “Peven has a once-in-a-generation voice … he’s a great inspiration to us all.” We Out Here founder, Gilles Peterson says that the Chicagoan is, alongside Detroit’s Moodymann and Amp Fiddler, “the closest thing dance music has to a Prince-type figure”. A prolific multi-instrumentalist and one-man cottage industry, Everett’s catalogue spans more than 500 tracks, across house, neo-soul, hip-hop, samba and more.

As with Prince, Everett’s audience can expect something different with each performance; they’re often improvised and don’t have strict setlists. “I’m kneading the audience into position, like a baker,” says the 51-year-old. He claims the Prince-fluence goes both ways after the latter attended one of his shows in the mid-to-late 2000s. “He started going more into dance music at that exact time,” says Everett. “He knew what I was doing: he’d seen it for himself.”

When we speak, Everett is preparing to join Gorillaz for the Chicago stop of their world tour. It’ll be the first time he’s been on stage with them since 2022, having contributed to their 2017 album Humanz. “It’s going to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” he says. “I used to have some control over how much I gave emotionally, but tomorrow, I don’t think I’ll have that.” Two years ago, Everett was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, just as his career was gathering pace. “A part of me feels like I let the people down by getting sick,” he says. “I missed a step.”

He’s now completed treatment and his life and artistry is the subject of a new documentary by Denholm Hewlett (son of Jamie, the visual artist behind Gorillaz). “People always refer to him as a house music artist,” says Hewlett. “But he was a trumpet prodigy by the age of 12 and was raised by jazz royalty.” Before dance music, Everett gave up a scholarship at Boston’s Berklee College of Music to go on the road with his mentor, Betty Carter, and the Marsalis brothers, Wynton and Branford. When he was 21, a 1995 New York Times article asked whether Everett was the next Miles Davis.

But Everett returned to Chicago to look after his ailing mother, where he teamed up with the producer Roy Davis Jr. Out of those mid-90s sessions came 1999 deep house staple Watch Them Come, as well as Gabriel. The original version of Gabriel has more of a typical four-to-the-floor beat but it was its Live Garage Mix that resonated in the UK as DJs found that its swung drums matched the pace of the nascent UK garage scene.

It was rereleased in 1997, reaching No 22 in the charts. At the time, US dance music was often associated with a big “diva” vocal; in the documentary, producer Marc Cary claims that Everett “brought a richness to house music” that previously didn’t exist.

Peterson says the song has become a dance-music standard, while Everett recalls dancing at Chicago’s Red Dog club in the early 2000s, when he claims that Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk and vocalist Benjamin Diamond approached him. Two years earlier, they had a huge hit with Music Sounds Better With You under the name Stardust. “That was funny. They were like, ‘Yo, we made Stardust because of Gabriel, we used that as a template.’ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. At least they had the grace to tell me.”

Though some early Gabriel promos did not mention his name, and some have known the song as a Roy Davis Jr track, Everett says he was not simply a hired hand (he also played that unmistakable trumpet part). “When I go into any studio,” says Everett, “I make the vocals: I arrange them, I sing them. I make the horn and keyboard parts: I arrange them, I play them.” In the past, Everett has raised the subject of his contributions to the track on social media; today he can only say “the situation itself is still pending”.

Despite releasing other contemporary house classics such as 2007’s Stuck – and soundtracking the Hermès catwalk at Paris fashion week last January – Everett is far from a household name. In an interview in the documentary, Moodymann says Everett is “everyone’s favourite artist, you just don’t know it yet”; elsewhere in the film, he is compared to Stevie Wonder and James Brown.

Yet Everett runs a DIY enterprise, and has self-released more than 50 albums on his Studio Confession Entertainment label. “He’d make an album in one week and then burn it on to CDs and sell them at record stores in Chicago,” says Hewlett. “People haven’t been able to keep up.”

“For the majority of my career, I’ve been blacklisted,” Everett claims obliquely, citing his home town music industry in particular. Why? “For being a musical genius,” he replies. “Not everybody wants to see that.”

Everett sees himself as following on from where musical greats such as Marvin Gaye and Barry White left off in the late 1970s, as disco’s name was being sullied by the racist, homophobic “Disco Sucks” movement. “That didn’t sit right with me, it was hateful,” Everett says. “It tarnished great music. So I said, guess what? I’m gonna make the records that I know should have happened right after.”

The day after our interview, a video circulates of Everett and Albarn at Gorillaz’s Chicago show, as an emotional Everett prepares to sing the late Bobby Womack’s part on the Gorillaz tune Stylo. Artists as varied as Shirley Manson of Garbage, Kelela and Honey Dijon commented on the video with words of support. Everett says that his time was always supposed to be now. “I’m glad that I did it this way,” he says. “I maintain control of my catalogue, I still have the enjoyment of making music, and I got through a huge disease. I feel blessed.”

“He’s going to have his moment,” adds Hewlett. “It feels like he’s just getting started.”