In 1974, Joan Armatrading set out her musical philosophy when she told Spare Rib magazine: “Black women don’t sing sweet because they haven’t been brainwashed so much into thinking they’ve got to be weak. The opposite, they’ve got to be strong. So, they just get on with it.”
Seven years later, her song about racism in Britain, ‘How Cruel’, was nominated for a Grammy award.
She certainly didn’t sing sweet when she sang: “I bite my tongue and it bites me back/I bought a house and the neighbours moved/I had a dog, but it was stolen. Some people want to see my blood gush out/And others want to watch while I cry…”
The experience didn’t embitter her. On ‘To Be Loved’ from her new album Consequences, she is singing about the healing power of kind words.
Elsewhere on her 22nd release, there’s the whole shooting match of life evoked with both fragility and power: love on ‘Already There’, obsession on ‘Glorious Madness’, loneliness on ‘To Anyone Who Will Listen’. The former was inspired by an article about depression in a magazine.
Born on December 9, 1950, in Basseterre in Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, Joan lived with her grandmother on the island of Antigua until 1957, when she joined her family who had emigrated to Birmingham in England when she was three.
Her father was a carpenter, and money wasn’t flush. On ‘Mama and Papa’, she evoked her childhood in Birmingham: “Seven people in one room/No heat, one wage and bills to pay.”
“I was on my own a lot… I had a weird childhood,” she told Melody Maker, “and that’s probably been the strongest influence on my character.”
Her mother bought Joan a guitar when she was 14. She got it in a pawn shop in exchange for two old prams and started writing songs with it. At 15, she left school, and started working as a typist in the Rabone Chesterman factory, makers of fine engineering tools, in Hockley. Legend has it that they let her go because she played her guitar during tea breaks.
She played her first concert at Birmingham University when she was 16.
When she was 18, she moved to London and performed in a small production of Hair, where she met lyricist Pam Nestor. In 1972, they worked as together on Joan’s debut album, Whatever’s for Us.
Instead of returning to the factory in the Midlands, three years later, she released the Back to the Night album on a major label, followed by her self-titled follow-up, produced by Glynn Johns, known for his work with The Who and The Rolling Stones.
The hit single ‘Love And Affection’ (complete with its killer line, “I am not in love…but I’m open to persuasion”) set the singer on the road to stardom in 1976.
By the time, the albums Show Some Emotion and To the Limit, came out in 1977 and 1978, she was the first British female singer-songwriter to experience massive international success.
She also defied categorisation. In the 1970s black women weren’t supposed to play rock guitars. They were supposed to be soul or disco singers and sing about staying up all night dancing.
The music industry didn’t know how to market the singer with a mini afro who wore no make-up and dressed in androgynous clothes. In America, her music was deemed too “white” for a black singer.
“I heard somebody say once I was way too black,” she once sang. “And someone answers she’s not black enough for me.”
On May 14, 1977, she sang ‘Love and Affection’ and ‘Down to Zero’ on Saturday Night Live. Years later The Advocate would write that her performance saw “the collective gaydars pinged”.
The LGBTQ publication added: “Lesbians, it seems, have always gotten Armatrading’s music, the songs about love and redemption, about female friendship and romance, all in a gender-neutral context; her lyrics ‘read’ as lesbian, the same way the music of Melissa Etheridge did, long before either woman was out.”
In July, 1978, Bob Dylan asked her to play his festival Blackbushe in England. She was the only woman on the bill alongside Dylan, Eric Clapton, The Band and Graham Parker. “The Rock Gods don’t scare me!” she said.
She was very much not-your-usual female pop superstar of the time. It would be reductive, even offensive, to call Joan Armatrading a black lesbian singer-songwriter. But, in the late 1970s her lyrical concerns were like very few, if any, female singers in the mainstream. 1978’s Taking My Baby Uptown, in particular.
It dealt with the homophobia a same sex couple suffered simply by expressing publicly their love for each other, walking on the street, holding hands. “They were saying I should/Never have been born,” she sang. “I held your hand/And you kissed me/And then all the people started to stare/We started a commotion/Someone making comments/Morals, the state of affairs.”
The song would later become a LGBT anthem, not least for the final line: “And I said, ‘What we got is the best’.”
On ‘Rosie’, from 1979, she sang with empathy about a transgender person in Times Square in New York. A profile of Armatrading in a music magazine noted that there was a copy of lesbian-coming-of-age novel Rubyfruit Jungle on her bookshelf.
That said, she let her music do the talking – and it talked very well. She received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996. She wrote the music to an all-female production of The Tempest in 2016 at the Donmar Warehouse in London. She later released an album, The Tempest Songs.
Her sexuality was never up for discussion. Her private life was off limits in all interviews. She was dubbed Joan Armourplating.
In 2011, she entered into a civil partnership with her girlfriend, artist Maggie Butler, on the Shetland Islands. She said, when pressed, in 2017 about her LGBT following: “My songs are for everybody. The planet is going through very similar things, no matter the gender, or sexual orientation is.”
Bizarrely, in 2018, former Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton publicly asked Armatrading to rubbish the 40-year-old rumours that they had had an affair.
Listening to her new album – and the ones that preceded it – her music is clearly all that matters.
You can see why Morrissey invoked St Joan in 1988 on his debut solo single ‘Suedehead’: “Why do you come here? When you know it makes things hard for me?” (The chorus of her 1981 homage-to-guilt The Weakness In Me goes: ‘Why do you come here/When you know I’ve got troubles enough?’)
“I don’t see very often people saying, ‘I was influenced by Joan’, but I certainly hear it,” she once said. “Sometimes I think, ‘My goodness, it’s one of my songs with different words’.”
It is good then that she is finally acknowledged for all she has done.
Artists like Fiona Apple, Minnie Birch, Le Tigre, Bono (he sang part of ‘Love And Affection’ during U2’s Joshua Tree tour in 2019), Melissa Etheridge (she has performed ‘The Weakness in Me’ at her shows) and Tracy Chapman have cited her as an influence. Indeed, the latter was once called “the new Joan Armatrading”.
The old Joan Armatrading, at 70 years of age, is doing just fine.