This week’s open thread theme focusing on Black British musicians and singers.
Willow – 1976
Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, MBE (born 9 December 1950) is a British singer, songwriter and guitarist. Armatrading is a three-time Grammy Award-nominee and has been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She also received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996. In a recording career spanning 40 years she has released a total of 17 studio albums, as well as several live albums and compilations.
Joan Armatrading was born in Basseterre, on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, in 1950, as the third of six children. Her mother was born in Antigua and her father was from Saint Kitts. When she was three, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham, England, and she lived with her grandmother on Antigua. She joined her parents in a largely white district of Birmingham in early 1958, at the age of seven. Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. Armatrading began writing lyrics and music at the age of 14 on a piano that her mother had purchased as “a piece of furniture”. Shortly thereafter her mother bought her a guitar from a pawn shop and the younger Armatrading began teaching herself the instrument.
Armatrading first performed in a concert at Birmingham University for her brother at the age of about 16. She performed her own songs around the local area with a friend from school, and played bass and rhythm guitar at local clubs. In 1968, Armatrading joined a repertory production of the stage musical Hair. There she met the lyricist Pam Nestor in 1970, and they worked together on Armatrading’s debut album Whatever’s for Us, released by Cube Records in 1972. Nestor wrote the lyrics to eleven of the fourteen songs on the album, while Armatrading wrote the lyrics to three of them, performed all the vocals, wrote all the music and played an array of instruments on the album. Although Nestor was credited as co-lyricist, Cube considered Armatrading to be the more likely star material. These events produced a tension which broke up the partnership.
In 1975, Armatrading was free to sign with A&M Records, and issued the album Back to the Night, which was promoted on tour with a six-piece jazz-pop group called The Movies. Armatrading credited English singer Elkie Brooks on the sleeve notes as she had cooked for Armatrading and the band in the studio while they had been making the album, which was produced by Brooks’ then husband Pete Gage. A major publicity relaunch in 1976 and the involvement of producer Glyn Johns propelled her next album, Joan Armatrading, into the Top 20 and spawned the Top 10 hit single “Love and Affection”. The album mixed acoustic work with jazz-influenced material, and this style was retained for the 1977 follow-up Show Some Emotion, also produced by Glyn Johns, as was 1978’s To the Limit. These albums included songs which continue to be staples of Armatrading’s live shows, including “Willow”, “Down To Zero”, “Tall in the Saddle”, and “Kissin’ and a Huggin”. A live album entitled Steppin’ Out was released in 1979.
In 1980, Armatrading radically revised her playing style and released Me Myself I, a harder pop-oriented album produced by Richard Gottehrer, who had previously produced albums for Blondie. The album became Armatrading’s highest ever charting album both in the UK and the US, while the title track became her second UK Top 40 hit single. The same pop style, now coupled with synthesisers, was also evident on the 1981 album Walk Under Ladders and 1983’s The Key. All three of these albums were Top 10 successes in the UK. To capitalise on her success, A&M released the best of compilation album, Track Record in 1983.
Armatrading’s next studio album was 1985’s Secret Secrets. The album was a top 20 hit but failed to yield any hit singles, cementing Armatrading’s status as an “album artist”. Taking over production responsibilities herself, she continued to record the albums Sleight of Hand (1986), The Shouting Stage (1988) and Hearts and Flowers (1990) for A&M Records, which all made the UK Top 40 but failed to achieve the level of success of her earlier works despite successful national tours (a show from her 1988 “Shouting Stage” tour was also filmed for television).
In 1991, A&M released the compilation The Very Best of Joan Armatrading which returned her to the Top 10. However, her following studio album for A&M, 1992’s Square The Circle did not replicate this success and would be her final recording for the label. Following her departure from A&M, a label she had been with for almost 20 years, Armatrading signed with RCA for her 1995 album, What’s Inside. Despite various television appearances and a full tour (which included a string quartet in addition to her stage band), the album was not a commercial success, becoming her lowest charting studio album in 20 years.
Later work
In 2003, no longer attached to a major label, she released the album Lovers Speak. Though it was her first album in eight years, it met with little commercial success.
Me, Myself, I – 1980
Her 2007 album Into the Blues debuted at #1 on the US Billboard Blues Chart, making Armatrading the first UK female artist to earn that distinction. Into the Blues, which Armatrading calls “the CD I’ve been promising myself to write for a long time”, was nominated for a Grammy Award, also making her the first female UK artist to be nominated in the Grammy Blues category.
Armatrading has been nominated twice for a Brit Award as best female vocalist and has received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996 and in 2006 received an honorary degree from Aston University, Birmingham. In 2008 she was part of Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Tour 2008.
In March 2010, she released a new album, This Charming Life. The album peaked at #4 on the US Billboard Folk Albums chart. She embarked on an international tour to promote it, and a concert from this tour in April 2010 at the Royal Albert Hall in London was released on the CD/DVD album Live at the Royal Albert Hall, along with two tracks from a concert in Denver, Colorado, U.S., in February 2011. In November 2010, “This Charming Life” was played on the season finale of Sons of Anarchy, the hit television show on FX. In 2011, “It Could Have Been Better” was featured in the British film Kill List.
Armatrading’s music is considered to be mostly pop with forays into rock, folk, jazz, blues, soul and even reggae.
Armatrading is reluctant to discuss her personal life in interviews. In a 2003 interview with David Thomas of The Daily Telegraph, she said:
In addition to her music career, in 2001, after five years of studying, Armatrading gained a BA (Hons) degree in History from the Open University, of which she is now a trustee. In April 2011, it was reported that Armatrading and her girlfriend Maggie Butler were to enter a civil partnership on May 2, 2011, in the Shetland Isles
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