She sang and played acoustic guitar and piano. On 28 November 1972 Armatrading appeared on the BBC Radio 1 John Peel Show performing "Head of the Table", "Spend A Little Time", "Child Star" and "Whatever's For Us". These events produced a tension that broke up the partnership. Although Nestor was credited as co-lyricist, Cube regarded Armatrading as the more likely star material. Nestor wrote the lyrics to 11 of the 14 songs on the album, while Armatrading wrote the lyrics to three of them, performed all the vocals, wrote all the music and played an array of instruments on the album. There she met the lyricist Pam Nestor in 1970, and they worked together on Armatrading's debut album Whatever's for Us, released by Cube Records in 1972. In 1968 Armatrading joined a touring production of the stage musical Hair. She then performed her own songs around the local area with a friend from school, and played bass- and rhythm-guitar at local clubs. She only knew her own songs, but her brother asked her to perform something that would be familiar to the audience she chose " The Sound of Silence". Career Late 1960s and 1970s Īrmatrading in concert at the National Stadium, Dublin, early 1980sĪrmatrading first performed in a concert at Birmingham University for her brother at the age of about 16. She lost her first job (as a typist and comptometer operator) after taking her guitar to work and playing it during tea-breaks. Īrmatrading left school at the age of 15 to help support her family. Armatrading then began teaching herself guitar after her mother had bought her one that was worth £3 (equivalent to £59 in 2020) from a pawn shop in exchange for two prams.
At about the age of 14 Armatrading began writing songs by setting her own limericks to music on a piano that her mother had purchased as "a piece of furniture". (The area, now mostly demolished, has been absorbed into the district of Hockley.) Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. In early 1958, at the age of seven, she joined her parents in Brookfields, then a district of Birmingham. When she was three years old, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham in England, sending Joan to live with her grandmother on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a housewife. Joan Armatrading, the third of six children, was born in 1950 in the town of Basseterre in what was then the British colony Saint Christopher and Nevis.
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