"I went to a guitar teacher and said I wanna play rock'n'roll. "Initially I tried to take guitar lessons," she remembers. Jett's parents bought her first guitar, an electric from Sears, when she was in her early teens. The tips of her fingers are scarred from decades of guitar-playing. Now 47, she has, this evening, the air of the motor mechanic about her: it's in the sniff, in the easy physicality, in the husky drawl that sounds as if it could readily fall to talking of fuel gauges and chassis systems. "It seemed pretty normal to me, but girls playing rock'n'roll was pushing the boundaries." In 1976, however, the notoriety stemmed from little more than "being teenage girls playing rock'n'roll - because in those days, and even now, it's not really the norm, I suppose." She sniffs. The name of Joan Jett has long been tinged with notoriety the original female rocker, she has not only enjoyed a successful career with hits such as I Love Rock'n'Roll, Crimson and Clover and Bad Reputation, earning herself a place in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time - one of only two women to make the list - but she has also been an inspiration to generations of female musicians, from the riot grrrl movement of the early 90s to Britney Spears, who covered I Love Rock'n'Roll in 2002, and now to the cluster of female fans who wait, flushed-faced, to meet her this evening in Brighton. "It was a time," Jett explains throatily, "when we may have been more notorious than famous." It is, one gathers, something of a reunion: she has known Lemmy since 1976, when she was 16 and her first band, The Runaways, opened for Motörhead in London. Jett is halfway through a UK tour, sharing the bill with Motorhead and Alice Cooper. As the lift ascends to the third floor of the Brighton Centre, its passengers stand in companionable silence: Lemmy in an open-necked shirt, clutching a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, and behind him the tiny frame of Joan Jett, her eyes painted in iridescent wings of colour.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |