Janis Ian’s entrance onto the bare stage of the Cadogan Hall is greeted with the kind of fervour usually reserved for a charismatic pastor at a religious revival meeting. It takes several minutes to regain my critical faculties, by which time Ian has completed her opening number and is busy telling her majority-female audience that: “Just to be alive tonight is a miracle of nature”. Diminutive and white-haired, from a distance Ian could herself be a Chelsea pensioner from down the road, were it not for her unmistakable voice, which has, if anything, gained in purity during the almost five decades since the world first heard it.
For the first time tonight, Ian revisits her classic album, Between the Lines, for “When the Party’s Over”. For Ian, the party very nearly ended prematurely in 1967 with her release as a teenager of “Society’s Child”, an early look at romance between a white schoolgirl and her black lover. The song led to Ian being decried as a “nigger lover”. She was booed off stage on more than occasion. It is difficult in the sedate surroundings of the Cadogan Hall to fully appreciate the power her song must once have wielded.
Derided at the time as a one-hit wonder, a lot has happened to Janis Ian since the 1960s. After a fan asked her to autograph a Woodstock poster, “Was I at Woodstock?” queried Ian. She decided to google herself. Apparently amazed by all she discovered she had done, the next step was to write it all down in an autobiography. It’s a nice line in self-parody.
While she may have forgotten many things, she has certainly mastered her guitar. “Bright Lights and Promises” proves she really is mistress of multiple harmonics – a jazz influence picked-up from Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan, both of whom recorded her songs.
A short interval allows Ian, 60, to “change into something more comfortable” and swap guitars, and then it’s back to Between the Lines for “Tea and Sympathy”, a song about “surviving the life you have led”. Ian has more than survived hers, adding to her sum total by recently “marrying’ her long-time female partner in Toronto. At least she thought she had.
“Married in London” is a hilariously comic look at gay rights and how they differ around the world. Ian explains that, while she may be married in Canada and Sweden, she is most definitely not married in New York. After requesting a marriage license in the United States, Ian and her partner were greeted by a dumbfounded silence, before the clerk squealed: “Oh. You’re both getting married on the same day.”
“Seventeen”, Ian’s bittersweet commentary on adolescent cruelty and the illusion of popularity – “I learned the truth at 17 that love is meant for beauty queens” – is rewarded with yet another standing ovation and there’s no denying that she has earned it.
Officially, the evening is at an end, but there is one song Ian is required to sing wherever she goes. Under a single spotlight and with the utmost delicacy Ian performs “Jesse”. There is barely a dry eye in the house.
