In 1988, when Tanita Tikaram was just 19, her debut album Ancient Heart became a chart success, selling four million albums and getting her nods at the BRIT Awards. Ever since, she’s moved in and out of the music business – To Drink the Rainbow (An Anthology 1988–2019), curated and released by music journalist Pete Paphides on Needle Mythology, is an execllent primer. This year, she released LIAR (Love Isn’t Right) earlier this year, an album that combines classing songwriting with elegant strings and piano on songs digging deep into our contemporary political malaise, especially on the wearied melancholy of ‘I See A Morning’ and the pulse of ‘This Perfect Friend’. There are hints of jazz and classic pop, but something gothic too. Tikaram still has a voice that’s utterly distinctive and arguably ought to be more discussed as one of the most unique in British pop – I grew up with Ancient Heart on repeat with Leonard Cohen in the family car, and I count Tikaram as one of those important artists that, when discovered young, can change your appreciation of what the human voice can do.
Texture in the voice was an early interest that stemmed from her own early first listening experiences – borrowing audio plays from the library, “I was quite fixated on how people would say a phrase, even more than singing,” she says. “It was a way for me to discover my own voice”. This came in tandem with a slightly unusual peripatetic lifestyle. The daughter of an Indo-Fijian British Army officer, she and her family moved around various military bases, before eventually settling in Basingstoke. Despite the high security environment she grew up in under the threat of the Cold War, Irish Republican terrorism and German extremist groups, she reflects that she had what sounds like an open childhood. “I was part of that generation that was very free as a child, we were allowed to do anything,” she says. In fact, in that setting the seeds of her musical career were set. “Being military children, you were quite alone all day, kids were organising themselves, and one of the things was singing and making music and putting on little shows,” she says. “It wasn’t like today when one tiny sliver of talent is leapt on, we got to nurture it ourselves.” These early moments of creative experimentation began to coalesce, but at first not with any intention to be a songwriter. It all changed when she saw Suzanne Vega “and I thought ‘wow, you can do this, that’s a job – you can be bookish and wear a stripy t-shirt and it’s fine’.”
Reflecting on the music that she grew up with, Tikaram says “when I was younger the music I was listening to was my parents’ music. I listened to a lot of Black soul music, country, and The Beatles, as my dad was a huge fan.” This changed as she grew up. She says that The Beatles’ White Album was a key moment in the development of her own, while Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s Architecture & Morality features as it was one of the first albums she bought. Mostly though it’s the imperious figures of classic jazz, soul and pop who dominate – Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Dusty – as well as soundtracks, concept records, and Baroque music. Tikaram admits, though, that she’s revisited music that in her teenage years she’d have been dismissive of: “Now I think Wham are amazing and what a great singer George Michael was, but I was more serious, a bit pretentious.”
Tinata Tikarum plays the EFG London Jazz Festival on Saturday 15 November. For more information go here
To begin reading her Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below
