Joan Armatrading

Singer/guitarist/songwriter Joan Armatrading was born in St Kitts in the West Indies on 9 December 1950. Her father was a fireman and carpenter who played bass in a band at night, but far from encouraging his children musically, he used to hide his guitar. Armatrading admits that the air of secrecy made music that much more attractive to her.

While she was still a child, the family moved to Birmingham, England. Her mother bought a piano “as a piece of furniture,” and Armatrading was assigned the task of cleaning it. That led to playing it, and around the age of 14, the girl who had thought of becoming a lawyer started to write songs.

When an elder brother heard her songs, he convinced her to play at the local school. By 16, she was playing cover material in local clubs.

Not long after, she accompanied a friend to an audition for the London company of Hair as a lark.

The friend didn’t get a part, but Armatrading did and toured the provinces for 18 months. She also formed a songwriting partnership with fellow West Indian immigrant Pam Nester.

Moving to London in 1971, Joan and Pam signed a production and management deal with Cube Records, but when the Gus Dudgeon-produced Whatever’s For Us album appeared, Nester received no label credit, and the resultant friction led to the break-up of the partnership and the demise of the Cube deal.

After two years in limbo, Joan was signed to A&M and came up with the Back To The Night album in 1975.

She continued to make records of warm, emotionally resonant music that earned her a devoted following on at least two continents.

Joan Armatrading (1976) yielded her breakthrough hit single Love and Affection and became one of the year’s best-selling albums in Britain, where it was named album of the year by music weekly Sounds.

Hitting full stride as a writer and singer, Armatrading’s 1977 release, Show Some Emotion, was another European hit and spent four months on the US charts, breaking her into the American market.

But when To the Limit came out the following year, some felt her work was growing stale. One critic called the LP “Joan’s Armageddon.”

Me, Myself, I (1980) was both a successful album and a hit single. Her 1983 album The Key spawned another major hit, with Drop The Pilot.

Sleight Of Hand (1986) was Armatrading’s first self-produced album, which she recorded in her own quaintly named Bumpkin studio, and which was remixed by Steve Lillywhite. It was her least successful album in commercial terms since her debut, stalling outside the Top 30 of the UK charts and considerably lower in the US.

The Shouting Stage (1988) was arguably her most impressive album in some time but failed to reach the height achieved by many of its predecessors despite featuring Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and Mark Brzezicki of Big Country as guests.

Despite brushes with chart stardom, Armatrading has remained an independent-minded cult star whose remarkable and individual voice, regardless of her albums’ assorted settings, never wavered.

She received an Ivor Novello Award in 1996 and was awarded the MBE in 2001. In April 2011, it was reported that Armatrading and her girlfriend, Maggie Butler, were to enter a civil partnership in the Shetland Isles.

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