“Leave your preconceptions at home,” begins one London critics assessment of singer and songwriter Sarah-Jane Morris who straddles blues, rock, jazz and soul with a goosebump-raising three-and-a-half-octave range that rumbles up from the heels of her size nine shoes to the tips of her flame-red mane. Some hear Nina Simone or Billy Holiday while others cite Macy Gray and Erykah Badu, although Morris likes to say Nina Simone meets Janis Joplin! Her idiosyncratic career has seen her charting Number One disco hits across Europe to playing sold-out jazz gigs, singing with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to winning the San Remo Song Festival.

In retrospect, being the only daughter in a family of six boys, helmed by a Walter Mitty-esque patriarch, Morris considers her childhood to have made her very “resilient” and “able to bounce back” which no doubt has shaped her strength and determinism.

In her late teens Morris studied Brechtian theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, moving into an acting career at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Yet, her career and ideologies took a turn when “…socialism entered [her] life and made [her] more aware there was another way of thinking”. The discovery of her voice led her on the tough path of performing at pubs and working man’s clubs throughout the UK, which eventually led her to her first major band with the Afro-Caribbean-Latin twelve-piece outfit, The Republic. The Republic was hip world music before its time but the band’s political message kept them off the charts. Morris moved on to The Happy End, a twenty-five piece Socialist big band who performed in support of the 1985 Miner’s strike where Morris co-wrote the miners anthem ‘Cole Not Dole’.

Morris’ big break came when she met Jimmy Somerville collaborating on the 1986 international hit cover “Don’t Leave Me This Way”. Since then she has forged her career on her own, creating her own record label Fallen Angel and finding great success in a number of European countries, particularly Italy. She has written numerous songs for BBC television, Channel 4 and still manages the occasional acting stint. To date she has released six solo albums.

May it be her childhood, her fire-red hair or the fact that she’s married to former Pogues member David Coulter, Sarah-Jane Morris is one hell of a women!

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