Laureation address: Joan Armatrading CBE

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music
Laureation by Professor Gill Plain, School of English

Tuesday 29 November 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, Joan Armatrading.

This year, Joan Armatrading has been celebrating 50 years in the music business. In that time, she has written, performed, and produced 22 albums, claimed more than 20 Gold Discs, been nominated for three Grammys and two Brit Awards, and been awarded multiple lifetime music awards and a CBE. But ask her what makes her most proud, and you get an unexpected answer. It is the Open University Bachelor of Arts with Honours degree in History that she was awarded in 2000 – a degree earned while touring, posting essays back to Milton Keynes from across the globe.

This degree was both achievement and pleasure. As a songwriter, it was about mastering a different form of writing; as someone who believes in the importance of education, it was an opportunity to study our place in history; as someone with an appetite for knowledge, it was, quite simply, fun. Joan walked across the platform to receive her degree, just as you have today, and this was the beginning of her long-term support for the Open University, where there is now a student award in her name. But this is not the only cause that matters to Joan. She has long mentored new talent in the music industry and she is a trustee of the Prince’s Trust, an organisation she has supported for 40 years. Its work, she says, is phenomenal, offering ‘proper, sustained help’ and the vital commodity of confidence to young people in need.

Education and charity are important to Joan, but the world knows her as a musical legend. Born in St Kitts, she moved to Birmingham at the age of seven, and has remained a fan of the city ever since. Rumour has it, she tried to make it as a comptometer operator, but that didn’t work out and instead she became a pioneer, breaking new ground as a black British singer/songwriter. She equally broke new ground as a woman artist, insisting on artistic control of her songs and the production of her albums. Interviewed in 1974 she said that men in the business expected women to ‘sing pretty’. Her response was powerful: ‘Black women don’t sing pretty because they haven’t been brainwashed into being weak; they have to be strong and just get on with it.’

‘Just getting on with it’ is a succinct summary of Joan’s approach to the music industry. She did what she wanted to do with her music and refused to be stereotyped. In the 1970s her albums showcased voice and acoustic guitar, in the 80s she turned to pop, in 2007 she produced Into the Blues, an international hit, debuting on the Billboards charts at number one. That made her the first female UK artist to be nominated for a Grammy in the blues category. In 2016, she produced the music for Phyllida Lloyd’s all-woman production of The Tempest. She has said that she simply loves writing; and in the process, with songs like ‘Love and Affection’, ‘Barefoot and Pregnant’, ‘Drop the Pilot’, ‘Willow’, ‘Me, Myself I’, she has written the soundtrack for a generation.

These are intimate, powerful songs, but they are not confessional. Rather, they are written from observation, speaking to us all, and bearing witness to the pain of being human. And perhaps this is why they have such resonance, and why, earlier this month, Faber – Britain’s pre-eminent poetry press – published Joan’s collected lyrics. The title she chose was from one of her most beautiful songs, ‘The Weakness in Me’. Personally, I think ‘The Strength in Me’ would have been more appropriate – or the Determination, the Independence, the Generosity, the Talent – and while these might be less poetic, I offer them as alternatives that get just a little bit closer to what matters about Joan Armatrading.

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her outstanding achievements in music, her ground-breaking and inspirational career, and her long-standing charitable work, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, on Joan Armatrading.