IT may say “singer-songwriter ” on Joan Armatrading’s passport but one of this nations’s most successful musical exports wants to scream about her history degree instead of her songs.

Joan gained her BA Honours after 5 years of studying through the Open University taking her last examination the day following the last gig of her two thousand tour. For Joan it was more gratifying than receiving her Ivor Novello Award or maybe her MBE. “The degree was the award I wanted, ” she is saying. “I worked for 5 long years, studying really hard and taking hard examinations. Someone told me that they had attempted many times to do an Open College degree course and could not manage it. They exclaimed ‘how do you do it?’ I announced, ‘you start the course and then you ensure you finish it’. “It has given me the most satisfaction.

Not even as much … The most. ” Joan was born in St Kitts but moved to Birmingham as a kid, teaching herself to play guitar and write songs in her teens. “it may have been in my genes, ” she is saying. “My dad was in a band in the West Indies. He had a guitar that he hid from me and that is what got me interested because I was not allowed to touch the one he had.

I saw a guitar in a pawn shop that cost £3 but my mother stated that we had not got the cash but we had 2 old prams and if they might do a swap I might have it. I got the guitar and I have it. ” Joan’s first job was at an engineering works but her love of music cost her that work. “The chief of my administrator had a child and asked me to show her guitar and I’m sure my administrator was not too contented for whatever reason, so I got the sack. ” fortunately, a music career waved and Joan released her first album in 1972, signed for big label AM in 1974 and started chalking up hits like affection and love, Down To 0 , Drop the Pilot and Me Myself I. ” No-one taught me the way to write a song and I had no recommendation, I just did it, ” she asserts. “It was only after my 2nd CD that I believed this should be my career. ” Qt concerned with Joan in Germany at the start of her most recent tour which ends in December and takes in Japan, Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand.

Joan is plugging her new album, This Beguiling Life, a return to rock and pop after a successful expedition into the blues. “I’ve always written heaps of different music, ” she asserts. “It’s only as simple and as hard as the track itself dictates. ” Into The Blues in 2006 took Joan to the pinnacle of the Poster advertisement blues charts, the 1st UK lady to do that and earned her a Grammy proposal. “It debuted at number 1 and that was my 3rd Grammy proposal which was amazing to be designated in the blues category, ” she is saying. Joan has achieved the rare deed of longevity but even she’s not sure why. “I do not know the secret. I only know what I am doing which is to be true to myself, write the songs I would like to write and not to follow trends. “.