Karate champ Anne-Marie strikes out for a solo career
PLAYING the role of guest vocalist on other people’s hits is an effective way to kickstart a modern pop career.
Jess Glynne featured on two charttopping singles, Clean Bandit’s Rather Be and Route 94’s My Love, before getting her solo break. Sam Smith paved the way for stardom via cameos with Disclosure and Naughty Boy.
It’s been the same for Anne-Marie Nicholson, who sang on Rudimental’s first album before touring with the London dance act. The Essex singer also appeared, with rapper Sean Paul, on Clean Bandit’s Rockabye, which spent nine weeks at Number One.
But every support act eventually has to step up, and Anne-Marie, 27, does so with assurance on her first solo album.
With six of its 12 tracks having already been issued as singles, Speak Your Mind sometimes has an overly familiar ring, but it still skips confidently between digital pop and reggae with an occasional nod to the jazzier artist that Nicholson could become.
As befits a martial arts aficionado — she was a shotokan karate world champion in her teens — Anne- Marie’s singing is disciplined and punchy. Her songs, put together with co-writers including Ed Sheeran and producer Steve Mac, also get straight to the point.
‘I should have known a cheat stays a cheater,’ she chides on Alarm, and there are further jabs at unreliable boyfriends on Ciao Adios and Then.
The piano- backed jazz ballad Perfect tackles the cattiness of body shaming with sensitivity and humour — ‘I’m not a supermodel from a magazine, but I’m OK with not being perfect,’ she sings — while Machine, more bizarrely, advocates vanquishing any negative thoughts
true feelings behind sci- fi concepts and an android-like alter ego, Cindi Mayweather.
Those futuristic leanings are still there on Dirty Computer, but Janelle is now singing from the heart, forcefully addressing racism and sexism while taking time out to enjoy herself.
It’s easy to detect the legacy of one former mentor. Monáe had been working with Prince up to his death in 2016, and one track here, Make Me Feel, is built around a groove that echoes the latter’s Kiss, with Paisley Park sources hinting that Prince himself played on the song. Another number, Crazy, Classic Life, has a similar spirit. Compared to her two previous albums, the songs are confessional. ‘I’m not the kind of girl you take home to your mother,’ she admits on Take A Byte. TheRe
is innuendo a- plenty on another number, Pynk, although the track is no more risqué than Aerosmith’s Pink, the 1997 single on which Janelle’s song is loosely based.
Backed by a funky band of musicians from Atlanta, Monáe also works with other, more surprising collaborators.
helped by cameos from film composer Jon Brion and Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, she is becoming increasingly hard to pin down.