![]() ![]() She was also drinking buddies with James Baldwin and Nina Simone – one of the songs on her new album is about her friendship with the singer whose mastery inspired her: “She led the band, wrote the songs, played the instrument, sang, did the arrangements: there was nobody else.”Īt Seventeen was the last time Ian would have a hit song in the US. Soon she was hanging out in the Bottom Line club in New York with Mick Jagger, Charles Mingus and Stevie Wonder, performing on the first ever episode of Saturday Night Live, and going on tour with an up-and-coming comedian named Steve Martin as her opening act. By 1975, her album Between the Lines – which featured At Seventeen – brought her a second burst of success. “Sooner or later the dark side always gets you.”Īfter releasing five albums in four years, Ian took a three-year break from music in the early 70s. “When you don’t know what else to do, you harm yourself,” she says. Ian’s later teen years were also defined by self-harm – cutting her arms with razor blades and eating so little that her weight plummeted – which she now says was connected with the pressures of fame and the extreme reactions that Society’s Child provoked. Nina Simone led the band, wrote the songs, played the instrument, sang, did the arrangements: there was nobody else She was feted by her heroes – Odetta and Joan Baez became friends and Salvador Dalí offered to paint her portrait for an album cover – but the starry company only told half the story. ![]() Now do it again, but this time sound white’,” Ian recalls. “He said ‘If I wanted you to sound like a, I would have hired a. ![]() During the session with James Brown he stopped her while she was singing. Before Joplin accepted hers she turned to Ian and said, “Kid, time for you to go home.” Ian was invited by Leonard Cohen and James Brown to work as backing singer on their records. She recalls one night at a party with Janis Joplin when a heroin dealer was handing out free shots. It’s an extraordinary anecdote: did she recognise it was extraordinary at the time? “You don’t know you’re hanging out with people who will be legendary,” she says. “I really wanted to try cocaine, but Jimi was way against it because he was horribly addicted to it.” One night Ian and Hendrix went to see BB King in the Village and he stopped the performance to announce that Martin Luther King had died. “In one night you could go see Nina Simone at the Village Gate and then go to the Gaslight to see someone else.” Nine years older, Hendrix was nevertheless a responsible accomplice. “I was 16 and would go club-hopping with Jimi,” she says. The success of Society’s Child, and her debut album of the same name, propelled Ian into a world where her social circle included Nina Simone, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. “I ignored it.” It seemed, at first, as though the strategy had worked. “I did what every adolescent does when faced with an untenable situation,” she says. I wasn’t able to have anyone open my mail without worrying there would be a bomb in it.” In the face of such extreme reactions – people bought tickets to see her perform in order to scream racist abuse as she sang – Ian’s response was simply not to respond. “I wasn’t able to go in the street without somebody spitting on me. “I was dealing with threats all the time,” says Ian. “And when you hold up a mirror, people don’t like what they see.” A radio station in Atlanta was burned down for playing the record and journalists were fired for publishing the lyrics in newspapers. Society’s Child gave Ian her first taste of success. It was released twice but only became a hit when it was publicly championed on television by Leonard Bernstein. Society’s Child was considered so controversial that 22 record labels turned it down. The song was about an interracial relationship, inspired by a couple she had seen holding hands on a bus, even as the other occupants moved away from them. Born in New Jersey to leftist parents who were on an FBI watch list, she wrote her first song aged 12, was signed to a recording contract at 13, recorded her first album aged 14 and scored her first hit, Society’s Child, aged 15. Ian, who has just released her first album in 15 years – and also her last – has been singing to those outsiders for close to 60 years. ![]()
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