Joan Armatrading

Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, MBE (born 9 December 1950) is a British singer, songwriter and guitarist. Armatrading is a three-time Grammy Award-nominee and has been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She also received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996. In a recording career spanning 40 years she has released a total of 17 studio albums, as well as several live albums and compilations. Joan Armatrading was born in Basseterre, on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, in 1950, as the third of six children. Her mother was born in Antigua and her father was from Saint Kitts. When she was three, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham, England, and she lived with her grandmother on Antigua. She joined her parents in a district of Birmingham in early 1958, at the age of seven. Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. Armatrading began writing lyrics and music at the age of 14 on a piano that her mother had purchased as "a piece of furniture". Shortly thereafter her mother bought her a £3 guitar from a pawn shop in exchange for two prams, and the