Interview: Joan Armatrading (original) (raw)

Joan Armatrading is worn out. She is in the middle of a tour, it is pouring with rain, she has just filmed a television interview and has been asked to talk to the Guardian at very short notice before heading home on the train (to "somewhere near" Guildford, she says, with trademark elusiveness). I turn up 20 minutes late, flustered and apologetic, expecting a terse reception. After all, this is the woman who is so famously guarded that she has been dubbed Joan Armourplating - apparently, journalists who so much as tiptoe towards her private life are given short shrift.

Instead, the 54-year-old singer/songwriter, MBE and trustee of the Open University greets me with a warm smile and a cool handshake, sits down, and orders a mineral water (she never touches alcohol or coffee, and looks about 40). Despite the reputation for being uptight, she is, she says in a rare self-referential aside, "very laid-back".

The same has been said about her music, although, lyrically at least, it is anything but. She strolled into the top 10 in 1976 with an afro that was about five years out of date, a seriously uncool acoustic guitar and an air of unruffled confidence. Her first hit, a deceptively feisty ballad called Love and Affection, became an instant classic. She followed it with Show Some Emotion, a song interpreted by a generation of women as a quasi-feminist call to arms to challenge the emotional illiteracy of men, and has penned a string of tough-but-tender anthems (Down to Zero, All the Way from America), and spirited solipsisms ("It's not that I love myself/I just don't want company/ Except me, myself, I") that have become the soundtrack to the lives of a fiercely loyal fanbase. When she tours now, she says, her audiences are diverse - "punks and bikers, couples and teenagers. The whole of society, really. Though," she adds, when pressed, "they are more white than black." White or black, they "know all the words to my songs," she says, with a smile.

These days, she's traded the afro for a straightened bob, her one concession to vanity. Otherwise, little about her has changed. She has never courted fame, nor allowed herself to be drawn into anything approaching controversy or gossip, despite repeated rumours about her sexuality. Naturally shy, she "prefers birdsong to chatter", she quips. But with maturity has come a kind of confidence - this week she takes up the, for her, unusually public role of president of the Women of the Year lunch, on its 50th anniversary.

"I'm grown up now and I manage to appear as if I'm not shy," she says. "When you become successful and start meeting people, often they are nervous around you, and one of you has to say something."

She gives a deep chuckle. She laughs often, is gracious, polite and thoroughly nice, but her guard is always up. Given how long she has been around, it is surprising how much territory is cordoned off. Ask about what she does in her spare time and she answers crisply that she doesn't have any. She talks animatedly about the importance of family and friends, so I ask if she regrets not having children. She shrugs and says good-humouredly, "I hope you are not straying towards personal things." Surely the decision to have children or not is just a life question, not a personal one? "Well, you're gonna have to to wait for an answer to that one," she says, unbending.

Luckily, then, we are here to talk about a subject that enthuses her: the Women of the Year lunch, and her new five-year tenure as its president. In previous years, Kelly Holmes and Hillary Clinton have shared plaudits and petits fours with the likes of Birdie McDonald, a woman from Wembley who has fostered 700 children, and British Rwandan Mary Blewitt who founded Surf, an organisation for widows and orphans of the genocide in her home country. For the publicity-shy, politically reticent Armatrading, taking on the task of being a figurehead, making speeches and motivating people seems tantamount to, well, putting her head above the parapet. So why did she want to do it?

"Lady Lothian [founder, in 1955, of Women of the Year] was such an inspiration," she says. "She invited me to the lunch in 1980 and I was totally bemused to see a room full of women who have been high achievers in all sorts of ways. You realise you never see that. And she managed to keep the spirit and the enthusiasm alive for 45 of the 50 years it's been going.

"I think they asked me because the president is someone who has to have a care and concern for the organisation."

But haven't sisters done it for themselves - do we still need an event to celebrate the achievements of women? "It's still important to bring issues to people's notice. And it's not about excluding men, just bringing these high achievers to prominence."

In fact, Women of the Year is just one of numerous good causes to which Armatrading quietly devotes her time. She is proud to be a trustee of the Open University and happy to talk about her work for the Prince's Trust. There are others, too, but it is hard to prise details. "I don't want the publicity. Being a 'celebrity' who helps is only helping in a surface way. The real work is done by those who do it day in and day out."

Keeping her head down and her mind focused is what Armatrading has always done. She was born on St Kitts, one of six children whose parents left the Caribbean for Birmingham when she was three. Four years later, she was put on a plane to join her parents. What were her earliest impressions?

"All that mattered was seeing my mother again after so long. That's all I can remember," she says. When she was about 14, her mother bought a piano, and Armatrading "just started to play it. I'd been writing bits and pieces, and taught myself to put them to music. Later on I taught myself guitar." She left school at 15 and did a number of mundane jobs, all the while working on demo tapes. She was still a teenager when she started touting them around record companies. Although she hardly fitted the Identikit of marketable pop at the time, her talent and the strength of her material shone through.

"They all offered me a contract," she says simply. "I've no idea why. I just went with the one I liked best."

She was the first black British singer/ songwriter to achieve major success, yet she has always felt her lack of formal education keenly. In 2001, she was awarded what she describes as "her best achievement ever" - a degree in history from the Open University, completed over five years, mostly when she was touring. Songs were one thing, but essays another, she discovered.

"I've always written in a free, unencumbered way," she explains. "I've written what and when I want to. It's been about expressing myself. But with the degree, I had to learn to do everything in a very specific, disciplined way. I am very disciplined, but this demanded a totally different kind of discipline. A real challenge."

So how did it compare with the challenge of being asked in 1999 to write and perform a tribute song for Nelson Mandela? "If there was one person I might have been starstruck by it was him," she says. "He has a special charisma and yes, he is very special. But he's not the kind of person who has an aura that says, 'Look at me and what I've done.'"

She could be talking about herself: her modesty is almost pathological. "I am constantly being told that I have been a big influence for many people, including other musicians," she says. The proof of which is how many of her songs have been covered (practically all of them). But what's her taste?

"I like Coldplay, and I think Bloc Party are great. And that single by Justin Timberlake with Snoop Dogg was fantastic."

She has special admiration for Robbie Williams. "He's the whole package, one of the best. He has this interesting mixture of modesty and arrogance. He's a showman, he sings well and he has respect for the past."

Has she never been tempted to change her sound, and try to reach new audiences? "You find what you are best at and stick to it," she says simply. "I found my sound early on. Look at U2: they haven't changed their music for 20 years. Anyway, many people come unstuck when they try to change what they do and what they are known for."

So she plans to carry on much as she has done, writing and recording when she likes, touring and doing her charity work. But quietly, always quietly.