It feels a little like we’ve had a lot of coked-up men recently. The perception is a bit skewed, but there haven’t been many solo female artists in the past year (in terms of the album release year). Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris. That’s it. And for a *black* female solo artist, I scrolled back to confirm and you’d have to go back to 1968 and Aretha Franklin. Armatrading is the first *British* black female solo artist on this list (which is quite a lot of check-boxes to combine, admittedly – have we had a British black *male* solo artist yet? I don’t think so).
Armatrading ranks alongside Smith and Mitchell above because she writes all her own material as well – no covers of soul standards here, this is all her own stuff. And how even to describe it? She blends in some soul and funk, but these are built around her acoustic guitar playing, giving it a folky element as well. There are traces of African music throughout, without relying on the usual overlay of African drum rhythms. Add in her expressive voice, usually in quite a low register but capable of going high and plaintive where needed, and she’s got a unique sound. As I said for Kimono My House, Sparks sound like nobody but Sparks. Armatrading sounds like nobody but Armatrading.
The two songs where she strums out a complex funky beat on her guitar (Join The Boys and People) reminded me of the kind of thing put out by the straggly beard brigade today, especially Ed Sheeran. I like hers better. But it does mean that her sound is pretty timeless. A lot of tracks from the early Seventies that we’ve heard sound like they’re from the early Seventies – usually because of the Fairlight or Moog synths. The songs on this album sound sound fresh today, not fifty years old (yes, I know. Scary isn't it?)
Take her biggest track, Love And Affection. It’s got a soul groove to it, but it’s not rooted in soul cliches. In some ways she inverts them – her backing singers are the deep bass of Leroy Champaign and Clarke Peters, not the usual female BVs from Cissy Houston etc., and emphasized by strings (not Stax horns), making for a very complex mix of sounds when she starts into the chorus, one that’s immediately recognisable but maddeningly impossible to replicate, making it an irresistible hook.
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