It started with a photo. Entitled Samurai
Sissy, the stark black and white 1979 portrait by French artist and
conceptualist Jean-Paul Goude depicted steel-cheekboned Amazonian black
supermodel turned actress and disco chanteuse
Grace Jones wrapped in a dramatic padded-shouldered Issey Miyake creation. At
the time Goude and Jones were both artistic and romantic collaborators (he’s
the father of Jones’ only child, Paulo born in 1979. In fact Jones is pregnant
with Paulo in Samurai Sissy). Sinister but sexy, the image is so powerful,
androgynous and alluring it suggested a world of possibilities: Jones as a panther
in human form. Black Marlene Dietrich.
Female Bowie. Space-age
Nefertiti. Dominatrix from outer space. In
her 2015 autobiography I’ll Never Write
My Memoirs, Jones herself describes it as “me as an ominous hard-eyed
samurai filtered through something occult and African, the killer clown
interrupting some mysterious ceremony.” Chris Blackwell, head honcho of Island Records,
had the photo enlarged and stuck to the wall of his deluxe Compass Point
recording studio in the Bahamas, instructing his crack team of musicians, “Make
a record that sounds like that looks.”
The resulting album – Warm
Leatherette (1980), a masterpiece of style and substance – succeeded. And
now – over thirty five years later – Warm
Leatherette is being reissued in a sumptuous digitally re-mastered two CD box
set encased in sleek black leatherette packaging, with rare re-mixes, extended
liner notes and lavish photos.
Call it death disco, Afro-punk or simply black alternative
music, Warm Leatherette probably
invented it. Menacing but sensual, over
three decades later the album still sounds futuristic and bleeding-edge. Considering Jones herself was Jamaica-born,
the album was recorded in Nassau and most of the backing musicians were
Jamaican it’s no surprise the sound of Warm
Leatherette is primarily rooted in reggae. But this isn’t straight reggae in any sense: spiked
with New Wave rock, Warm Leatherette suggests
eerie art-damaged cobwebbed reggae reverberating out of a haunted house.
But ultimately the identity of Warm Leatherette is dictated by Jones’ own haughty, scolding
dominatrix voice. The album represented
a dramatic reinvention for Jones both sonically and visually, jettisoning the disco
frivolity of her earlier recordings for something infinitely scarier, artier and
punkier. From Warm Leatherette onwards, Jones would have more in common with,
say, Klaus Nomi, Nina Hagen or post-Broken
English Marianne Faithfull than Donna Summer or Sister Sledge. (Not to malign Jones’ three disco records,
which are campy as hell and deeply enjoyable; listening to them you can almost
smell the amyl nitrate). On Warm
Leatherette Jones emerges as a woman of mystery from everywhere and nowhere,
a world-weary escapee from the most decadent nightclubs and catwalks of Paris,
Berlin and London. Jones took the template
established by Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt (black female singers as exotic
Continental sophisticates mostly divorced from blues, jazz and soul traditions)
and updated the persona for the post-disco and post-punk generation.
On later albums Jones would write her own lyrics. Here she
(mostly) radically reinterprets New Wave hits by others in her own inimitable
style. The title track sees The Normals’ stark electro-punk minimalism
transformed into lacerating blaxploitation funk. Jones amps up the sexual
tension in Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug.” Just try not to get goose bumps when Jones contemptuously snarls, “Your
sex life complications / are not my fascinations” to a would-be suitor on The
Pretenders’ ghostly “Private Life”. Jones’ take on Smokey Robinson’s 1966 hit “The
Hunter Gets Captured by The Game” – one of Warm
Leatherette’s poppier and more charming moments – uses the sound of
electronic birds chirping to convey an urban jungle realm. French chanson “Pars” confirms Jones is at her
most seductive crooning en francais (think
of her initial 1977 breakthrough hit “La vie en rose” or the accordion-laced “I’ve
Seen That Face Before”). Best of all is
Jones’ deranged rampage through Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” (re-titled
“I’ve Lost Control”), a nervous breakdown set to music.
Needless to say all of this was catnip for a queer audience.
Warm Leatherette turned a lot of
people gay (or at least confirmed it). It certainly consolidated Jones’ status
as a perennial gay favourite. In fact from Jones’ first album onwards she was
deliberately marketed towards a hip gay urban audience on the (correct)
assumption they would get her – an
artist too barbed and strange for mass appeal. Jones is our kinky freak diva and an honorary gay (her reputation as a
joyous and unapologetic bisexual probably helps). She continues to influence queer artists likes
Zebra Katz, Peaches and Christeene.
Warm Leatherette
would be followed by Nightclubbing (the
one with “Pull Up to The Bumper”) and Living
My Life (the one with “My Jamaican Guy”). Jones closed the eighties with
two frankly terrible albums (Inside Story
and Bulletproof Heart – avoid at all
costs) and then – except for the occasional film appearance - vanished from the
pop radar for almost twenty years until her majestic 2008 comeback Hurricane. Jones reportedly has an album
of new material due out later this year. Warm
Leatherette, though, represents the origins of Grace Jones’ mystique.
(The Warm Leatherette boxed set was reissued by Island / UMG on 17 June 2016)
/ Grace on Chilean TV in 1980. This TV show is fascinating for several reasons. Musically it captures Jones in mid-transition: in an odd set, she performs a combination of her new edgy post-punk tracks from Warm Leatherette (“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” and “Bullshit”) with her earlier disco material (“La vien en rose”, “Fame” and a spectacularly dramatic “Autumn Leaves” as the grand finale). On opening number “Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” Jones sings live, prowling and stalking like a tigress. It will gradually dawn on you as the programme progresses that – even though she is wielding a microphone - she is lip-syncing the rest of the time. For all we know, this was standard procedure on Chilean television at the time (certainly all musicians lip-synced on Britain’s Top of the Pops throughout the seventies and eighties). To be truthful, it hardly matters: even lip-syncing Jones makes for dramatic and riveting performance art. In fact, Jones is fragile and intense throughout (during her febrile mood swings she confesses to the host she has the flu). It’s also interesting to compare and contrast Jones with the people comprising the studio audience. They’re wearing earth toned casual lounge wear, flared trousers, have blow-dried feathered coiffures and facial hair (I mean the men, of course) and seem firmly rooted in the seventies. Jones – especially in the sensational dominatrix catsuit and headdress ensemble she rocks at the beginning – looks like a visitor blasted in from the future or another galaxy /
/ Grace Jones performing "Private Life" on Top of the Pops in 1980. (The single scraped the UK Top 40). I love how minimalist this is, And I wonder what the teenage girls in the audience made of it? /
Further reading:
This review already appeared on Loverboy website in summer 2016. I'm posting it here for my archives in case it eventually gets deleted
The time I met Grace Jones in the flesh at a book signing in 2015!
I blogged my account of seeing Jones perform at the Royal Albert Hall in 2010 here.
Check out my photos of Jones performing at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2009 here.
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