Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Devon sent

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Joss Stone is a 16-year-old whose debut album has already charmed the US
music press - and Tom Cruise. Now she's about to unleash her astonishing
voice on us. Polly Vernon meets a barefoot diva
Sunday January 18, 2004
The Observer
I grew up on the outskirts of Exeter, and I have a theory about it, which I
believe I have a right to, because I endured the West Country on a daily
basis for 15 years. My theory is this: traditionally, talent of
earth-shattering proportions does not come from Devon. It might retire
there, once it's feeling a bit burnt out, what with all the endless pursuit
of its art and the ensuing international acclaim. But it isn't usually made
there in the first instance. Talent needs bleak, citified urban edge and
associated desperation to inspire it; or at least, the numbing ennui of the
suburbs to provoke it. Talent (rip-roaring, brave, take-no-hostages, vast)
and Devon (cosy, insular, vowel-elongating, twee) are mutually exclusive
entities.
For a long time, nothing happened to make me reconsider my position. And
then came Joss Stone - 16 years old, resident of Ashill, which is near
Tiverton and generally as definingly Devon as one place can get; with the
kind of voice that inspires shocking cliches, goose bumps, breathlessness,
even - and my theory fell apart.
But then, Joss Stone is all about messing with received wisdom, even,
amazingly, with wisdom received by more people than just me. This is mostly
because Joss Stone should not, by rights, sound the way she does. It's a
constant effort to reconcile her physical qualities (soft, sweet, pretty
blondeness; a faint suspicion of lumbering teeniness; a fondness for
hoodies) and her background (sleepy and state-educated; unmusical parents
with no form in the projected-ambition stakes; one brother; one sister;
Devon) with the sensuous, throaty, aching roar of her singing voice, and the
jaded, fortysomething-divorcee soulfulness of her delivery. Stone's is a
staggering voice, a voice blissfully free of Mariah Carey-aspiring warbling
and artifice. Janis Joplin by way of Mavis Staples is what they're saying.
Juxtaposed against her very white, very sweet, very unjaded youth, it's most
discombobulating. When he first auditioned her, Steven Greenberg, boss of
Stone's American record label, wanted to laugh. 'I thought it was some kind
of joke on me,' he said. But then, of course, he signed her.
That was in 2002. Over these past two years Joss Stone has launched herself,
to considerable acclaim, in the US. The girl both MTV and the Philadelphia
Inquirer have insisted 'comes from the little town of Devon' has sung for
James Brown, toured with Simply Red, appeared on the Letterman show and
collaborated with revered Miami sound pioneer Betty Wright, who assembled
Stone's band for her - an eminent selection of Sixties and Seventies soul
musicians described as 'the Miami soul equivalent of the Buena Vista Social
Club'.
Tom Cruise told Ellen DeGeneres that he loved Stone's debut album The Soul
Sessions, that he constantly plays it in his car. (Stone's mum, Wendy, is
far more excited by this revelation than her daughter seems to be.) Stone
has been to the White House twice. She met George and Barbara, and Colin
Powell, who she'd never heard of, a fact the American press picked up on.
('Like any 16-year-old would know!' says Wendy. 'Anyway, we're calling her
Forrest, now, like Forrest Gump. Oh, you know what Joss said to George the
first time she met him? She said, "Hiya George! Whassup?"' Joss objects:
'Well, what was I supposed to say?' '"Hello, Mr President", I think,' says
Wendy. 'Why?' says Joss. 'He's not going to say, "Hello, Miss Singer" to me,
is he?'
Lenny Kravitz and Lamont Dozier, of Motown songwriting team
Holland/Dozier/Holland, want to work with her. Paul Weller already has. And
now, buoyed by the reaction from the US and signed in the UK by EMI-funded
Relentless Records, Joss Stone is beginning her assault on Britain.
I experience Joss Stone and her astonishing voice for the first time in
December 2003, when she performs a showcase at sticky, authentic,
smoke-filled jazz institution Ronnie Scott's. Stone bumbles into the room,
hiding her face behind her hair, propped up by a Relentless Records rep. She
is quite excruciatingly shy, and patently the antithesis of everything that
is Pop Idol polished. After years of exposure to the prematurely glossy,
overproduced, fame-grasping youngsters of the Heat generation, I'd almost
forgotten that teenagers could be like this.
She walks on stage barefoot. She always sings barefoot, because, she will
tell me later, 'I don't want to fall over, man'. Her set is all slightly
obscure cover versions, give or take a few numbers that Stone has co-written
with Connor Reeves and Jonathan Shorten. She does Joe Simon's 'The Chokin'
Kind', Bettye Swann's 'Victim of a Foolish Heart', even the White Stripes'
'Fallen in Love With a Girl' (reworked as 'Fallen in Love With a Boy'). It's
a smart move, giving her repertoire an established feel, without
overwhelming it with tired familiarity. Stone's performance sways between
deft, masterful, beautiful singing and whispered, stilted, in-between
attempts at audience interaction. She says stuff like: 'Right. Cool. I hope
you like this. But don't listen to the singing on it. Just listen to the
words. All right? Right. Cool,' before she launches herself into a
heart-stopping rendition of 'For The Love of You'.
We meet, a couple of days later, in a glamorous hotel which overlooks Tate
Modern. Stone is a little less shy one-on-one than she was at Ronnie
Scott's, but only a little. She is a marvellously artless kind of nascent
celebrity. She has no back catalogue of slick, pre-considered sound bites to
draw from. Her anecdotes are all new, unrecycled, unused. When she talks
about the grown-up business of producing music, about 'my management deal'
or 'and so she hooked me up with my band', you can tell she isn't quite
accustomed to using the terminology yet. She's trying it out for size.
It doesn't come as a great surprise, therefore, to learn that Joss Stone,
16-year-old soul phenomenon, is not the end product of years of scheming and
burning ambition. She didn't even know she could sing, she says, until her
management team first approached her three years ago. 'And I was a bit
shocked that someone was interested, really.' Didn't anyone overhear you
singing at school, or at home, or in the street, and point out that you
could do it incredibly well? 'No. Well, I 'spose sometimes they were a bit
like, "Yeah, well done Joss". And I was too shy; I didn't do any concerts or
contests, because I was really embarrassed. But I always liked singing;
just, in the privacy of my own home.'
Her main motivation to perform, it seems, was that she hated school and
needed to find a way out of it. 'I was really shit at it. My parents were
like, "OK, but you're going to have to do something, Joss".' So, aged almost
13, she did.
Joss Stone's discovery is the only bit of her career trajectory tinged with
a touch of the Pop Idols. Four years ago, on a whim she can't entirely
explain ('Don't ask me, man. I was 12. I dunno. There was, like, two seconds
of my life when I thought, "OK, I'm going to do it". And I did'), she
entered the BBC's pre-Fame Academy attempt at a talent competition, Star For
A Night. There, a panel featuring Barbara Windsor, Sonya from EastEnders and
an unspecified member of Atomic Kitten, presided over by The Cruise's Jane
McDonald, judged her version of Donna Summer's 'On the Radio' to be even
better than her nearest rival's Robbie Williams impersonation.
'Dunno why I won, actually,' says Joss. 'I thought I was crap.' But she did
win. And, more importantly yet, she got national exposure. After being
courted by a variety of managers, Joss signed up with Steve Greenberg and
S-Curve Records when she was 14. Joss and Wendy started dividing their time
between Ashill and New York, Miami and LA, and Greenberg introduced them to
Betty Wright.
Together, Greenberg, Wright and Stone began working on Joss's debut album.
It was, presumably, a giddy whirl of dream-like opportunities and
astonishing experiences and subconscious ambitions realised. But Joss was
underwhelmed by it all. 'I'm not really that impressed by things,' she says.
'Or I am at first, but then I get over it quickly. It's not that glamorous.'
Isn't it? 'No way, man!' Why not? 'It just isn't.'
She's met some cool people - Ziggy Marley, Angie Stone, India Airie - but
Stone doesn't get starstruck. She had a conversation in a lift with someone
she thought she recognised, the day before. She describes him to me. I
realise he's Jude Law. 'Who's that, then? Is he famous?'
Her mum's making her fly first class, soon, because she's playing two
concerts back-to-back in two different time zones, with no sleep in between,
but she doesn't want to, and she can't understand why anyone would spend
that kind of money on a ticket. The hotels she stays in 'are not that great,
to tell the truth. When I'm in London, I some-times stay with my friend Dee.
In New York, we usually stay at the Plaza 50, which is just a hotel.'
She doesn't like clothes and she doesn't like shopping, and she hasn't got
any tactics for surviving her incipient fame, because: 'I'm not famous, am
I? It might not happen.' But does she feel rich? 'No, because I'm not. My
mum's looking after the money. I don't get it until I'm 25. You should ask
my mum if she feels rich.'
Stone has fully-formed ambitions now, nonetheless. She wants to do
Glastonbury, 'and I think I am, this year, and I've never even been before'.
She's enjoying writing songs, and she's working on an album of original
material, due for release later this year. 'Am I ambitious? Yeah, I think
so. I want to make something of myself.'
We meet up again in Devon, in what I learn, gratifyingly, is still Exeter's
premier destination for teenagers in need of a place to skulk, just as it
was 14 years ago, when I lived here. The Real McCoy arcade is a vintage
emporium, dedicated to flogging second-hand Levi's and army surplus gear to
the teen masses. It's got a caff for chip butties and a piercing parlour, as
well as Hair 'Em Scare 'Em, a hairdressing establishment of the cheap yet
hip variety which oversaw the majority of my more daring and directional
late-Eighties haircuts. We rifle through discarded denim together, and I
tell her that mostly I used to come here to look at the fabulously elusive,
terminally disinterested skater boys who congregated here. 'Oh my God!' she
says. 'That's so funny! That's exactly why I come here!'
I wonder if she experienced culture shock when, aged barely 14, she was
whisked from Devon and transplanted to New York for months at a time, and
she admits that she was, a little.
'The first time I went, I was so like, in awe of it. It was so huge.
Like...' She points out of the window, towards what is, even by UK
standards, only a medium-sized tower block. 'That building is big, but it's
not even half the size of the buildings that are in New York. They're, like,
twice as big. I was like, "Oh my God!" But then I got over that.'
And what about the seedy underbelly of the music industry? Although
chaperoned constantly by the understandably wary Wendy, Stone must surely
have witnessed some dodginess? 'Honestly,' she says, 'I haven't really. I've
seen more dodgy stuff in Devon. People think it's all flowers and sheep -
well, it ain't.' She laughs. 'It's a funny old world, isn't it? They're all
like: "And you come from lovely Devon, and you're an English rose, and so
perfect." And I'm like: "Oh, you don't know..."'
En route to the final shoot location of the day, Dawlish Warren (a seaside
town where I got lost when I was four, and Joss and her brother and sister
completed an assault course when she was eight), Joss reveals that certain
factions of the music press have found her an uncomfortable proposition. Can
a white artist sing black music, they've asked. Can a 16-year-old sing
lyrics laden with life experience? 'For God's sake!' she says. 'I'm 16! My
heart's been broken loads of times. And I think it's kind of patronising for
them to assume that. They don't know my life. And I'm not going to tell
them. Anyway, how can you put a colour to a voice? Soul isn't just black
music - it's music.'
Which is an entirely reasonable statement, from someone who can sing it as
well as Joss Stone.
--
Hoookerrr! su iamr in data 6/1/2004 ha detto:  will oldham e cat power
"creano arte", sinatra e billie
holiday creano soltanto "intrattenimento".
http://www.switters.splinder.it/

partecipa alla discussione...
Ordinato io da 
play.com
. Sono un po' scettico (temo anche che la cover
del Buscadero sia l'ennesimo marchettone, alla faccia della loro
insopportabile aurea di purezza), ma ti dirò...
Andrea
-- 
Andrea Sartorati - Padova - Icq 35853140
andr...@net24.it
 - 
andrea.s...@libero.it
- Cosa leggi Franklin?
- È un libro di psicologia... da quello che ne capisco sembra ottimo...
- Lascia stare: nessun libro di psicologia può essere tanto buono se uno
ci capisce qualcosa!
     (Piperita Patty, Peanuts)


Merita, l'ho ordinata anch'io da 
cd-wow.hk
 ma ho gia' sentito il cd.
Per essere una ragazzina di 16 anni, inglese e bianca, canta da far
paura.
Sembra una veterana dei gospel songs di qualcuna delle chiese "nere"
d'America.
Certo, qualche ingenuita' nel disco, ma una delle piu' belle voci soul
da un po' di tempo in qua (almeno imho)
Su questo link c'e' una biografia in italiano
http://www.virginmusic.it/web/artista_dett.asp?id=323&cat=2
Bye gigi


ohhhhh...finalmente!...pfui.. non ci speravo piu'....;-)