JOAN covers herself with glory

Joan As Police Woman

Cover Two

Out now

Out of this strange suspended spring, patterns are emerging. If an album isn’t postponed, it’s quite likely to be special. Music, like the sky on a sunny day, seems brighter, sharper, deeper. Joan Wasser, aka Joan As Police Woman, is a late developer. Known first as the girlfriend of a singer ( the late, great Jeff Buckley), then as Antony And The Johnsons’ violinist, she was in her 30s when she went solo.

To see her on stage, radiating charisma in red leather trousers, is to wonder why she was ever a sidekick. She has a southern-soul voice, an art-rock sensibility, and a sideline as a fearless interpreter.

On Cover (2009) Wasser reinvented songs by David Bowie, Nina Simone, Britney Spears and Adam Ant. This time she kicks off with Prince’s immortal Kiss. It’s the most satisfying rendition since the original – minimal and intimate, as if she’d heard Tom Jones’s version and resolved to do the exact opposite.

Next she gets even more physical, taking an ode to male desire, Outkast’s Spread, feminising it by duetting with Meshell Ndegeocello, and adding an exquisite trumpet solo. Then, with Under Control, she converts a chugging rocker by The Strokes into a ballad that could be Al Green. Joan is a musician’s musician, often in demand for memorial gigs. After paying tribute to Mark Hollis of Talk Talk, she fully inhabits his masterpiece, Life’s What You Make It. The same with Gil Scott-Heron, whose poem Running swells into a torch song. To lift the mood, she turns There Are Worse Things I Could Do, from Grease, into doo-wop.

Several choices chime with the times. Blur’s Out Of Time finds beauty in bleakness; Neil Young’s On The Beach contemplates wanting, and not wanting, to be alone; Michael McDonald’s I Keep Forgettin’, stripped of its 1980s gloss, glows with yearning for an ex. This album is a light in the middle of the tunnel.