Chart entered : 16 October 1976
Chart peak : 10
Number of hits : 10
The nearest thing we've had to a cult artist so far, Joan's always sold more albums than singles and without going back and doing all the maths I would guess that she has the lowest average chart peak of anyone we've covered up to this point.
Joan was born on the island of St Kitts in 1950 and came to Britain when she was 7 settling in Birmingham. Her father was a musician but didn't encourage her to follow in his footsteps. She taught herself to play on a cheap guitar her mother bought her. She started working for an electric tool manufacturer but was sacked for disrupting tea breaks with her singing. In 1968 she joined a touring production of Hair where she befriended Pam Nestor , a young lyricist. The two began working together and produced a demo tape which the more outgoing Nestor hawked around the publishers until they got a deal with Cube records.
Joan and Pam went into the studio as a duo but from the start Cube saw Joan as a solo artist. They agreed not to title the first album "Joan Armatrading" but from the huge stockpile of songs they recorded, Cube made sure those they selected didn't feature Nestor singing or playing although she co-wrote eleven of the 14 tracks. The album "Whatever's For Us" was released in November 1972.
Joan is the first black artist we can discuss without using the terms "soul" "R & B" "doo wop " or "reggae"; the influences here are Elton, Cat Stevens and Carole King. She wasn't quite the first to break into the all-white world of the singer-songwriter but Woodstock's moany troubador Ritchie Havens never meant anything over here.
Perhaps because of the politics involved the debut LP is very patchy. The songs are mostly short and at least half of them sound unfinished , cutting off after two and a half minutes without resolution. Gus Dudgeon's production doesn't help with loud drums and piano chords often obscuring Joan's guitar work. There are signs of talent in some tart lyrics about family life and Joan's impressive vocal range is in evidence throughout but it's not quite there yet. The critical response was very positive but there were no singles released and it didn't sell.
Nestor was also shut out of the promotional gigs arranged by Cube and that was the last straw. She walked out on the partnership and by the end of the decade was no longer involved in the music business. In July 1973 Cube released a left over track she had co-written as Joan's debut single "Lonely Lady", an impressively fiery rocker reminiscent of Jefferson Airplane. By this time Joan was actively trying to get away from Cube, blaming them for the break-up of the partnership with Nestor though it's hard to believe she couldn't have been a bit more proactive in standing up for her friend.
The legals took some time to come through but eventually Joan was free to sign up with A & M. The sessions for her next album "Back To The Night" were difficult ; without Nestor around ( though two of the tracks were co-written by her ) Joan was wayward and temperamental and had to be bawled out by producer Pete Gage to get the album completed. Nor was she happy with the finished product. Despite these difficulties the album is a big leap forward from her debut , still a bit uneven with not all her genre-hopping ending in success but including some stand-out tracks such as the jazzy "Cool Blue Stole My Heart" with its amazing instrumental break and the jaw-dropping piano ballad "Dry Land" ( one of the Nestor compositions ) which aches with the longing for home of an errant adventurer. The album came out first but there were two singles , the title track which has an FM -radio friendly sheen but no real hooks and then "Dry Land" which was just too raw and rich for daytime radio ( Peelie played it a lot ).
Which brings us to "Love and Affection" . I must say at the outset that I built up some resistance to the song due to the fawning over it by the Radio One jocks, in particular the unctuous slimeball Peter Powell* who cited it as his all time favourite record. It's an oddly structured song that keeps threatening a big chorus which never arrives. It starts, like God Only Knows with an arresting line "I am not in love - but I'm open to persuasion " and then follows Joan's musings on whether it would be nice to have a lover underscored by emphatic strings and Clarke Peters's Barry White interjections of "Give me love". I can see why others might find the stream of consciousness flow and the murmured repetitions - "really love, really love, love love " etc fresh and spontaneous but it just doesn't quite work for me. It remains her biggest hit
* A legend seems to have grown up that Powell nobly surrendered his position at Radio One which comes down to a remark that he no longer understood music when Jack Your Body by Steve Silk Hurley made number one. In fact Powell didn't leave the station until eighteen months after that and three years after being evicted from his tea time slot ( to make way for Bruno Brookes who was actually more nauseating ) and he left to make serious money in talent management including his girlfriend Anthea Turner ( no irony intended ).
I do actually quite like this, for reasons I can't pin down. Clarke Peters would go on to become much better known in recent times for his role in "The Wire" - playing a character occasionally as "smooth" as this song.
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