Joan Armatrading: 'I’ve always been confident about my songwriting'

Fifty years on, she remains at the top of her game, as demonstrated by a new album, Live At Asylum Chapel, and lyric book, The Weakness In Me. It really doesn’t “at all” feel like a half-century since she began, she says. “I think part of that is because I’m still trying to make it,” she laughs.

The live album covers songs from across Armatrading’s career. She says “all of them” hold significance for her. “It’s like people say to me, ’what’s the best gig you’ve ever done?’ Well, they’re all the best gigs I’ve ever done,” she continues. “Every audience is special because they’ve turned up, they’ve applauded after I’ve sung the songs, they’ve stayed there until the very end and often stand up at the end en masse, they come back time and time again, so they all become quite special. Without that audience I wouldn’t have this 50-year career.”

Regarding the book, she is unfazed by the idea of her lyrics being divorced from their musical context, saying: “When I write I try and make sense of what I’m saying, so if you read the lyrics away from the music they still sound good.”

She admits to being quite a bookish person herself. “Certainly when I was younger, I was non-stop reading,” she says. “I think that’s why I got into writing lyrics because I would read just about everything that was going from Shakespeare through to Dickens to Agatha Christie to Enid Blyton, you name it. Whatever the thing was to read, whether it was Tom Sawyer or Treasure Island, it didn’t matter what it was, I was reading all of those books. Looking at the way people wrote their words and strung them together, it made me very interested and I think when I write, I try to write in a way that makes sense and they’re not just words to make up a rhythm.”

As the recent BBC documentary Me Myself I showed, Armatrading had a remarkable poise from an early age. At seven years old she travelled alone from Antigua, where she was born, to join her parents in Birmingham where they were making a new life for themselves. It was there again when she made her performing debut at Birmingham University at the age of 16.

“I’ve always been confident about my songwriting, maybe people might think that’s big-headedness,” she says. “I’m not big-headed, I’ve just got confidence in my writing and musical abilities, and then you rely on the John Peels and the Bob Harrises and all those other people who allowed the public to hear your music, but it’s not a case of having somebody say ‘Joan, you’re really good but you don’t know it’; I know it.”

Armatrading taught herself to play piano and then guitar, initially against her father’s wishes. If a vocation as a songwriter always beckoned, she says she wasn’t aware of it early on. “It was really after my second album, Back To The Night, that I decided this is my career, but it wasn’t like a plan,” she says. “I knew I loved writing songs and I knew I was good at it, but I didn’t think this is what I would be doing for ever. But you know, sometimes when you’re young you don’t necessarily think like that, you just think ‘I want to do this’ and then you do it and it goes into something else. I think that’s how I was with my career: once I’d started I just knew that this is what I want to do but I didn’t have a 50-year plan.

“People did say to me that they would give my career five years, so that’s a very long five years.”

She has fond memories of making Whatever’s For Us with Elton John’s long-time producer Gus Dudgeon in France and London in 1972. “I’m really happy that Gus Dudgeon was my first producer because he was excellent,” she recalls. “The beauty of Gus was he knew what I wanted. He was the big-deal producer at the time, but he didn’t say that to me. He knew that I knew what I wanted and made sure what I wanted was what happened. I was very involved in the production of all my albums, from the very first one until I took it on completely myself. I just didn’t get the credit for my involvement in the early albums.

“But Gus was great, he was my friend until his death (in a car accident in 2002). How lucky am I that I got to work with Gus Dudgeon on my first album and Glyn Johns on my third album? You can’t get much luckier than that.”

Changing record labels to A&M, Armatrading struck gold with her third, eponymous album in 1976, which contained her first hit single, Love And Affection. Johns, who also worked with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, would later describe it as probably the best album he had ever been associated with. “I knew I had written some good songs but I didn’t know the album or the song would be as popular in 2022 as it was then, but I certainly thought if people heard it they would like it,” she says.

“I asked the record company if (Love And Affection) could be a single and they said, ‘Remember Joan, you asked for it’. I had a sense that it would be something that people would like but when we were all making the record – myself, Glyn, all the musicians involved – we all felt it was a good album.”

Over the years, Armatrading’s songs have addressed all kinds of themes including relationships, race, and sexuality – Barefoot and Pregnant even became a feminist anthem – yet she still cites the key to their success as being because they are more broadly about people. “They are written about people and they’re for people, they’re for everybody,” she says. “There’s a song of mine called The Weakness In Me and many men will come up to me and say ‘That song means so much to me’ or ‘I’ve been through that experience’ – that tells you everything you need to know, the song is for whoever wants it. I don’t write a song thinking ‘This is only for people who are five foot five’. The songs are for people, if you want to own it, it’s yours.

“What you have to remember is once you write a song and you put it out there, you’ve actually lost control of it because people will interpret it exactly the way they will see it and that’s right because I do it myself. I’ll hear a song and think ‘That’s obviously about that’, of course that might not be what the writer intended, but that’s the way I interpreted it and the writer has to just give it up, just let me think what I think. Unless you’re going to go round to everybody’s house and say ‘I don’t want you listening to this song’.”

Armatrading has also embraced all kinds of musical styles throughout her career, from folk to jazz to blues and even hard rock. She says she had always had eclectic tastes. “I just love music,” she says simply. “No matter what it is – whether it’s country, pop, rock, jazz, blues, reggae, bluegrass – if I think it sounds nice then I’m going to like it. Music is a wonderful thing and all those different genres give you different aspects. When I was growing up you heard lots of different styles of music, you’d hear Jim Reeves followed by Frank Sinatra followed by Led Zeppelin followed by The Beatles, so you got a sense of difference, not so much today because everything is compartmentalised. If you’re into rap you’re just into rap, if you’re into trap you’re just into trap or whatever, so it’s maybe not so easy for people to be eclectic, however if young people’s parents were then they tend to be themselves.”

Over the course of her long career, Armatrading has received many awards, including an Ivor Novello Fellowship as well as an MBE and CBE. “Don’t believe anybody who says they don’t want an award,” she says wryly. “It’s people saying ‘we really admire what you’ve done and this is a way of showing our appreciation’...It’s wonderful. I’m always surprised when I get something because I’m not a high profile sort of person, it would be quite easy to overlook me, but it’s really nice when you get an award.”

She is particularly proud of her BA in History that she got from the Open University,. especially given the fact that she was travelling all over the world during the course of her studies. “I was up at 4am doing my essays and they wouldn’t let you email your project, you had to post it, so I had to write my essays earlier than the other guys because I was out of the country,” she recalls. “I studied really hard for that – that’s why I’m so proud of it. In the middle of all this other stuff I managed to get my BA Honours degree. It was fantastic when I went to get my degree along with all the other students, I got a big cheer like everybody else, that was one of the best days.”

The album Live At Asylum Chapel and the book The Weakness in Me are out now. Joan Armatrading will be signing copies of her book at Waterstones in Leeds on November 15 at 5.30pm. https://www.joanarmatrading.com/