Joan Armatrading: 'I was told my career would be over in five years' (2024)

“I’m a positive person,” says Joan Armatrading in a cheery Brummie twang that suggests as much. “I like being happy. I like being relaxed. I like up-ness.” She’s been that way, she says, since she was a child – “the Joan now at 73 is the same Joan that I’ve known since I was able to know I’m Joan” – but now even she is looking around and wondering what is going on in the world.

The trailblazing singer-songwriter’s superb, vibrant, melodic, pop-facing new album – the 23rd of a five-decade-plus career – is called How Did This Happen And What Does It Now Mean, questions many of us are asking. “I’m not being specific about any one person or any one thing,” she says with a laugh when I point out that our video conversation is taking place two days on from Donald Trump’s re-election. “I’m being general, in that this seems to be where the world is. We’re looking at stuff that’s happening, and none of us have the answers. How do we fix it? Will we ever fix it? We have to be careful we’re not repeating ourselves in a bad way or going backwards in a bad way. It’s a very questioning time.”

When I ask about Trump, she says, “I try not to get into politics and all that stuff,” but suggests that truth has gone out of the window. “We’re at that stage where people are telling us something only from their point of view, ‘their truth’. That’s just not a thing. There is no ‘their’ truth. It’s ‘the’ truth. The truth still remains the truth.”

Armatrading is a great British musician, a million-selling, Ivor Novello-winning, three times Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who in the early 70s became the first British female singer-songwriter to achieve worldwide acclaim – an achievement that’s even more impressive given the scarce opportunities for black women. With songs like “Love and Affection”, “Down to Zero”, “Drop the Pilot” and “Me, Myself I”, Armatrading specialised in writing with a keen social eye about love, pain, desire, heartbreak and solitude, using a vast musical palette of everything from of blues to jazz, folk to soul, electronics to pop, and, last year, her first-ever orchestral piece “Symphony No. 1”, performed by the Chineke! Orchestra at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. Some songs have become emblems: 1978’s “Barefoot and Pregnant”, about a woman entrapped in a controlling relationship, became a feminist anthem.

It feels like Armatrading is having a moment. A wave of newer artists, from Little Simz and Arlo Parks to Laura Mvula – who said Armatrading “speaks very deeply to who I am” – have declared their admiration over recent years; her last album, 2021’s Consequences, put Armatrading back in the top 10 for the first time since 1983’s Grammy nominated The Key; in 2020, her MBE was upgraded to a CBE for services to music, charity and equal rights, to go with a host of honorary doctorates and her 2020 Woman of the Year lifetime achievement award. Characteristically, she plays down the accolades. “It’s nice,” she says. “But we all matter in this world. Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world, but only because there are 10 other people behind him. He needs those people as well.”

How Did This Happen And What Does It Now Mean – written, produced, engineered and programmed by Armatrading, who has self-produced since the mid-80s – sounds personal on first listen, with songs about falling and being madly in love (“25 Kisses”, “Irresistible”) but also relationship uncertainty (“Someone Else”, “I Gave You My Keys”).

But Armatrading says she has seldom written about herself. “I wrote observationally,” she says. Her 1979 track “Rosie” was a sympathetic portrayal of a transgender woman she saw on the streets of New York; 1979’s Grammy-nominated “How Cruel” evoked real racial tensions. “It’s about looking at people. You can’t experience everything in the world. You can’t take everything from inside of you because you’re limited. You have to have empathy.”

Her new track “Redemption Love” is about a recovering addict’s support network – when Armatrading has never even drunk alcohol. “I don’t drink. I don’t swear or smoke. I’m the only one in the family that’s kind of like this,” she says with a chuckle. Lead track “I’m Not Moving” is about an alarming real-life public meltdown she witnessed. “I saw a young person going through that whole situation shouting, ‘I’m not moving, I’m going to kill everybody’… they were just in a state. And it was such a thing for me to watch that I immediately wrote the lyrics there and then. And I lay money that nobody else wrote a song about that. As creatives, that’s what we do. We observe, and report on it.”

If Armatrading had ever wanted to write about her own life, it’s certainly been eventful enough. Born in St Kitts in 1950, she flew from Antigua on her own aged seven to be reunited with her parents, who had earlier emigrated to Birmingham. “I didn’t feel as if I was making any adjustment or any kind of culture shock. I was just happy to be back with my parents. I was too young to know if it was a big deal.”

Her parents found it easy to integrate into the community – “I’ve never had any issues” – and gave her the foundation for her music career. Particularly her mother, who bought a piano (“only as a piece of furniture – she didn’t play”) to which Armatrading was automatically drawn, teaching herself chords. Her father also had a guitar. “But he didn’t want me to play, so he wouldn’t let me touch his guitar. And I think purely because of that, I wanted to play the guitar.”

Her mother then bought Armatrading’s first guitar from a pawn shop, a £3 instrument she bartered for by swapping two old prams. “Good on my mum – she’s the start of it really,” she says proudly. “I still have that guitar.” She had to teach herself how to play that, too, given her father wouldn’t show her. “My dad taught me how to tune it. But then he wouldn’t show anything else. But that’s fine, because I just got on with it myself.”

Armatrading was driven by great self-belief, even back when she started writing songs at 15 during breaks at her office job in a local factory. In an interview last year, she said she was “confident to the point of being big-headed”. “Because I was born with this talent,” she says now. “It’s my job to use it to the best of my ability, but I always say I can’t take any credit for it, because I did nothing for it.”

This confidence held her in good stead as she entered a very male-dominated music industry. She was once told: “In five years, your career will be over.” Did she find there were more barriers as a black woman? “I mean, probably,” she says, “but I had no idea, because I was just doing my own thing. I haven’t got time to think about if you’re trying to stop me, because I know what I want to do.”

At first, the idea was to be on the sidelines: she reluctantly changed course. “In the end, the way for people to know the songs was for me to sing. I sing because I write, not because I want to sing, necessarily.”

But with her 1972 debut Whatever’s For Us, a collaboration with lyricist Pam Nestor, and particularly by 1976’s breakthrough self-titled third album, she was soon centre stage, a star travelling the world in the very anything-goes rock scene of the 70s. How was it for her? “It was all right, because I’m pretty quiet anyway. I didn’t really get involved.” I remind her of the first line of a 1975 Sounds interview where she stated: “I’m the most boring person in the whole world.” She starts laughing. “I would have said that because I keep myself to myself. I don’t go out and mix.”

Armatrading has always carefully guarded her privacy through the years, living by “Me Myself I”. When she entered into a civil partnership in 2011 with the artist Maggie Butler in the remote Shetland Islands, people only found out because someone saw the statutory public notice and told the local paper. Despite being easy-going in conversation, she says, “you don’t really want to be talking about yourself all the time”. But she doesn’t mind getting recognised; people are very lovely, she says, and just want an autograph or to tell her they named their children after songs like “Willow” or “Rosie”. “It’s fantastic. Although some of the songs that they choose to get married to, it’s quite strange,” she says laughing. “But that’s their thing.”

She says a common reaction is for people to say she’s a pioneer – which she undoubtedly is. “It’s nice to hear, but I can’t get involved in it. I’m still just trying to get people to hear my songs, enjoy them, relate to them, get attached to them. It’s not about walking down the street and having people go, ‘Oh, there’s Joan Armatrading.’ I’d much rather walk down the street and hear somebody singing or whistling one of my songs.”

‘How Did This Happen And What Does It Now Mean’ is out now