Joan Armatrading: “No matter how old you get, there’s always stuff to learn”

Joan Armatrading has always been hard to pin down. In 2007, she made a blues record in her home studio deep in the Surrey countryside. That same year, she ran her first marathon aged 57. She followed this with a jazz album and the score for an all-women production of The Tempest. Last year, her first classical symphony premiered on London’s South Bank. Meanwhile, on her new album How Did This Happen And What Does It Now Mean, there are a couple of guitar-shredding jazz-rock instrumentals that sound like she’s morphed into Jeff Beck. “No matter how old you get, there’s always stuff to learn,” she says.

Now in her early seventies, Armatrading might seem a long way from her beginnings, as the groundbreaking artist responsible for unforgettable folk-pop songs such as “Love And Affection”, “Down To Zero” and “Willow”. Yet while she has consistently refused to fit comfortably into any category, her lyrical preoccupations remain largely the same: the gloriously messy and contradictory connections people make with one another.

When Uncut catches up with her on a wet autumnal Monday morning, Armatrading is at Bumpkin Studios in the grounds of her home, where she’s been recording since the mid-1980s. For many years, she has self-produced her albums and played all the instruments herself. It’s a self-contained approach matched by an unwavering resolve to guard her privacy. “Some people like everyone knowing all about them, but that’s not me,” she says. “I just write songs.”

Such reticence is not merely a shield from our celebrity-obsessed culture; it appears she’s always been this diffident. “People who like my music have a legitimate interest in me,” she concedes. “But I need privacy… when you go home, the reason it’s beautiful is because it’s personal just to you and the people you want to include in it.” She once claimed that only two people in the world have her phone number. Nor is it clear how much of herself is revealed in
her songs. On the surface they seem intimate and confessional but at their core lies a paradox. She writes with a rare eloquence about matters of the heart – but then insists it’s not her heart that she’s singing about. “My songs aren’t about me. I’ve always been an observer,” she says.

Born on St Kitts in 1950, Armatrading’s parents were part of the Windrush generation, leaving their Caribbean island for Britain when she was three. She remained behind with a grandmother until she eventually joined them in Birmingham four years later. In her teens, she taught herself to play piano and guitar and then joined the touring cast of Hair.

Her debut album, Whatever’s For Us appeared in 1972, showcasing her gifts for melody and songcraft, while her breakthrough came four years later when “Love And Affection” made her the first black British singer-songwriter to achieve major success. “Black women don’t sing pretty, because they haven’t been brainwashed into being weak. They have to be strong and get on with it,” she declared when she appeared on the cover of Spare Rib.

Over half a century she’s grown into a meticulous artist, releasing albums that seem to touch the listener in intimate and often unexpected ways. She seems to be enjoying a late career revival, too. Her last release, 2021’s Consequences, landed at No 10 in the UK charts, her highest charting album since 1983’s The Key. To suggest she’s become a national treasure would be the kind of cliché you’d never find in her lyrics, which are cultured enough to have been published in book form by Faber & Faber. But how else to explain an MBE followed by a CBE and an invitation to the coronation of King Charles…

Can we start by talking about the new album? It follows on from composing your first symphony, so did returning to three-minute songs about relationships and matters of the heart feel like getting back to your day job?
No, it’s just making music. They’re different forms but it didn’t seem strange to me, even if it does to other people.

After all these years, the songs still seem to be flowing. Apart from the symphony, this is your third album of new songs in six or seven years. Where does the inspiration come from?
As long as I’m alive there’s no reason for it to dry up. I love writing and there’s so much happening. I tend to write from observation, and as long as I can see and observe and be part of the world, I don’t see any reason for me not to keep writing. It’s never occurred to me that there would ever be a time when I couldn’t write a song!

You once said that Bob Dylan’s songs worked because he wanted to change the world, but that wasn’t you. However, the title track of the new album seems to be a kind of social commentary – or at least it asks pertinent questions about the troubled world in which we now live…
I’m still not trying to change the world but we’re in a different place. I can see what’s happening so I’m trying to work out where we are. There are a lot of things going on that make you ask, ‘What on earth does this mean? Where are we going?’ It’s quite incredible. I don’t have any answers – and there are no answers in the song. It’s asking, ‘What are we doing to ourselves? How do we fix this? Who is the right person to fix this? Can anybody fix it?’

That track has a darker feel musically which reflects the subject matter, but mostly there’s a very upbeat sound on this record, even when you’re singing about regrets or love gone wrong…
That tends to be how I am. The subject matter might be about the parting of the ways or whatever, but the music is usually uplifting. That’s tended to be true with most of my albums. I like positivity!

There are a couple of guitar-shredding instrumentals on this album where you really let rip in a way that might surprise people. Where did that come from?
If people go back and listen to my records, they might not have realised it’s me playing the electric guitar solos – but I always have done. I put a guitar instrumental on Consequences, but it wasn’t full-on shredding. On this record I woke up one morning feeling like I just wanted to play guitar loudly, so I went into the studio and recorded it. I was in the mood to shred. Then I thought, ‘I can’t just have one,’ so I recorded another…

In recent years you’ve done a blues album, followed by a pop album, then a jazz album and now this record sounds very much like the indie-rock album. Does reaching a certain age seem like a liberation – a realisation that you can do anything you like, whether it’s writing a symphony or recording jazz-rock instrumentals?
I’ve always felt that I could do what I want, so I don’t feel reaching an age made any difference. I’m not sure there’s anything I wasn’t able to do in my twenties or thirties or forties that I feel I can now do because I’m in my seventies.

Except that if you had followed “Love And Affection” in 1976 by writing a symphony, your record label might not have been too keen on releasing it…
Yes, but if I’d felt like doing it, nothing would have stopped me! I always knew that one day I would write a symphony. When I did, it was the same as the guitar instrumentals we were talking about. I woke up one day and went into my studio and started writing the symphony. There was no plan. It just felt right. It didn’t seem bold. It’s just writing music. That’s what I do. Some people might say, “Who does this person who writes pop songs think she is writing a symphony?” But that’s their problem. I did it because I wanted to do it.

There are songwriters who are autobiographical and songwriters who like you are more observational – but is the demarcation that simple? JD Souther said there was a thin line between his life and the fiction of his songs, but he wasn’t going to tell us where the line was drawn. I get the feeling you would probably echo that.
What he said was absolutely right. There’s a lot of people who say they write totally from personal experience and every song is about themselves, but I question that. If you’ve written loads of songs they can’t possibly all be about you – and if they are, there’s probably something wrong with you! It would feel weird for me to say I want my privacy and then put everything about me in a song, so I do tend to write from observation, although now and again a song will be from my perspective. Sometimes even as the writer you don’t know where the line is drawn. But I don’t feel I need to be writing about myself. That would be very boring.

When you sing songs today that you wrote decades ago, do you find that your relationship with them has changed? When Kris Kristtoferson re-recorded his classic songs from the 1970s, some 30 years later he was asked why he’d done it and his answer was that he’d finally worked out what they were about. Does that resonate?
If you take a song like “Love And Affection” then no, the relationship hasn’t changed over the years. I’m very proud of that song, I love singing it, I love the audience reaction to it and I love how they’re waiting for me to sing it and how they connect with it. But when I’m on tour I not only pick songs I know the audience wants to hear – “Drop The Pilot”, “Me Myself I,” “Willow” and so on. I also pick songs that I want to hear and feel like singing at that particular time. As I’m not playing the same songs on tour every year, I can have a really nice relationship with them and I don’t feel they’re stale or I’m revisiting them in a nostalgic way.

Can we go right back to the beginning. You arrived in Birmingham from the Caribbean when you were seven. How much of a culture shock was that?
I don’t remember it being a culture shock. I think I was just happy to see my parents again. The only shock I can think of was seeing snow for the first time. I was excited and my parents couldn’t get me to come back in the house.

British society had a deeply ingrained institutionalised racist streak at the time. How aware were you of that?
I was aware of it. We were all aware of it and we pulled together as a family.

And when did music first enter your life? You once said “the music was just in me waiting to be let out”. But what were your early influences?
Well, when I was growing up what I was really into was comedy – all those radio shows like The Clitheroe Kid and Round The Horne – and I’d write funny little stories and stuff. I’m sure the music was waiting to come out, and when my mother bought a piano, I immediately began to write songs. The great thing about a piano is that you didn’t really have to do anything. You could put your fingers on it and something nice comes out. It wasn’t a big deal. It just seemed natural. The inspiration came from the piano itself rather than other people’s music. Then my mother bought me a guitar.

Isn’t there a story about you getting sacked from your first job for playing the guitar during your tea break?
Yes, that’s true!

So was that the point at which you decided, ‘Forget the day job, this is what I’m meant to be doing?’
No, I didn’t think that until after I’d made the second album, Back To The Night. When I recorded it I was thinking, ‘Is this what I really want to do?’ It wasn’t the happiest time for me. Then I came to realise this is what I absolutely love doing. I was given the gift of being able to come up with melodies and lyrics, so I can’t take credit for what I do.

So it wasn’t being in Hair with Paul Nicholas and Richard O’Brien when you were 19 that set you on the path to becoming a professional singer and musician?
No. The only thing I have to say about being in Hair is that there was not enough money in the world or jewels or any precious thing that would make me take my clothes off!

It was while you were in Hair that you met Pam Nestor, who became the co-writer of the songs on your first album. It’s the only time you’ve ever had a songwriting partner…
Yes, but remember I was writing before I met Pam. She knew that I was writing songs and one day asked me to put some music to some poetry she’d written. So we were never composing together in the same room, she wasn’t on the album and I’ve never written with anybody else. I’m a very solitary writer.

Is it true that you originally planned to write for other people, rather than record the songs yourself?
Definitely. I never thought I was going to sing those songs. But whenever I played the songs to people, they said I should sing them, so that’s what happened.

Looking back at your early albums, as a young black woman did you feel like a pioneer? The singer-songwriter landscape at the time was very white, whether it was American troubadours like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, or Elton John and Cat Stevens in Britain. Did people say, “Why aren’t you singing soul or funk or reggae?”
Yes, they did say that. But there was no plan. I didn’t say I’m going to do this because nobody else is doing it. It was just the music I was drawn to and it was what I wanted to do. I was very lucky with the producers I had – first with Gus Dudgeon and then Glyn Johns. They recognised that I knew what I wanted and helped me achieve it.

The breakthrough came, of course, with the 1976 album Joan Armatrading, which included “Down To Zero” and “Love And Affection”. How did the shy and unassuming Joan Armatrading deal with the attention that suddenly engulfed you?
I didn’t take that much notice! I just got on with writing my songs.

It’s an enviable ability to be able to shut out all the noise – so would you say you are an introvert or merely a very private person? The likes of Dylan and Van Morrison have created a kind of mystique by guarding their privacy, but you wouldn’t describe either of them as introverted. Is it just about refusing to play the celebrity/media game, or is it deeper than that?
Well, I wasn’t born a celebrity. I was born Joan and so you’re always going to get Joan. Somebody said they were an introverted extrovert and I think that’s me. I’m an introvert, but I’m very extroverted about my songs. I love the idea that people get attached to my songs and fall in love and get married to them and name their children after them. That’s the sort of thing I can get big-headed about…

Into the 1980s you adopted a more pop-rock sound and you worked with producers like Richard Gottehrer and Steve Lilywhite. Was that something you wanted to do or was it record company pressure?
It was what I was writing at the time, and whatever the technology was I would use that. When Thomas Dolby played synthesiser on the Walk Under Ladders album it wasn’t because someone was saying, “Let’s put this on the top.” It was what I’d written.

MBEs and CBEs, honorary doctorates, Grammy nominations, an Ivor Novello award and getting Nelson Mandela dancing to your tribute song to him. What gives you most pride when you look back?
Meeting Mandela would be up there. I’ve met some of the other freedom fighters, too, and they were special people. I wrote about that in “The Messenger” and when I sang it for him [at the London School of Economics in 2000] he danced through the whole song. But people making an emotional connection with my songs is what I love above everything. That’s all I ever wanted.

This article originally appeared in Uncut Take 332 (December 2024)