![]() Happiness might write white on the page for most songwriters but Joan always seems keen for her muses to leap headfirst into a personal nadir. Although she’s on record as stating that none of her lyrics are statements of her own personal situation – it’s hard not to read something into it. A character in an Armatrading song you sense lives most of their life in their own head, shy ears pressed to walls, perpetually dreaming whilst life’s clock runs down unnoticed. ‘Seeing lovers embrace/make you want to find your corner of happiness.’ The rest of the track paints itself as an ode to personal resurrection but there’s a brittleness there. On ‘Goddess of Change’ there’s a more telling refrain. It’s deliberately oblique, troubling, like a wall protecting itself. Take the lyrics for ‘People’: ‘People all around me/ in love/ in pain/ driving me insane.’ Is the songs character yearning for such emotions or rebelling against them. Some have claimed Armatrading’s songs are about the mystery of love or at least the inherent ache of it but actually, there’s a sense of unrequitedness that runs through her work that is hard to ignore. Now collected in a book by Faber, these published lyrics, stripped of their chords and warmth seem surprisingly bleaker without a soundtrack. ‘East or west/ Where’s the best/ For romancing.’ Great prose that basically calls and tells upon itself. Whilst some of her contemporaries have long since waded into more temperament waters, Armatrading still has a glimmer of what novelist Jim Harrison once described as a sense of echo. What has never altered is her love of language. For over fifty years the English/Kittian singer-songwriter has walked a unique path, shimmering between pop stardom and introspective studio albums that have always seemed more of an elegant puzzle than a revelation. Even now to hear it coming from a passing car or as you stride through a modern and faceless shopping centre – it has the ability to stop you dead, a beautiful reminder that the music of the universe will always usurp the latest garish offerings stood idle in a Primark window.įor Joan Armatrading, that sense of sensuality and magic has always been seminal in her canon of work. 158 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.There are certain lines that if you have any interest in the alchemy of music and the sheer magic of its collective verse, it’s impossible not to shiver when Joan Armatrading sang the sublime lines – I am not in love/ but I’m open to persuasion from Love and Affection it went way beyond the trivial boundaries of most contemporary music. Haley's recording nevertheless became an anthem for rebellious 1950s youth and is widely considered to be the song that, more than any other, brought rock and roll into mainstream culture around the world. It was not the first rock and roll record, nor was it the first successful record of the genre (Bill Haley had American chart success with "Crazy Man, Crazy" in 1953, and in 1954, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" sung by Big Joe Turner reached No. ![]() It was a number one single on both the United States and United Kingdom charts and also reentered the UK Singles Chart in the 1960s and 1970s. ![]() The best-known and most successful rendition was recorded by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1954 for American Decca. Myers (the latter being under the pseudonym "Jimmy De Knight") in 1952. "Rock Around the Clock" is a rock and roll song in the 12-bar blues format written by Max C. ![]()
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