Why Grace Jones was the most pioneering queen of pop

Why Grace Jones was the most pioneering queen of pop Getty Images She may be a style icon and all-round star. “When I first heard Grace’s version I thought ‘Now that’s how it’s supposed to sound!’” she wrote in the liner notes for Jones’s 1998 compilation Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions. After the disco albums, I had decided that I was going to sing in my way, not try and become a conventional pop singer – Grace Jones Still, Jones was never too enamoured with her modelling career, which she describes in I’ll Never Write my Memoirs as “throwaway”, so she soon parlayed her growing visibility into a viable music career. Recalling Jones’s performance at a New York gay club in 1977, three years before Warm Leatherette, music critic Barry Walters wrote in 2015: “She was as queer as a relatively straight person could get. “This tune was a game-changer – she said it loud and clear about her presentation and it was animalistic and sexual and self-aware,” Dijon says, adding: “It made me feel free to be myself in all of its complex dimensions – she gave me joy and hope.” Cleverly chosen cover versions were as integral to the success of Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing as Jones’s new, genre-fusing sound and unapologetic singing technique.