Living Doll

Sam Brown, the singer-songwriter behind 1989 Top 5 hit (and attendant LP of the same title) Stop!, is back with a new album despite having lost the ability to sing in 2007. She tells Charles Donovan how she managed it.

-  Charles Donovan

"It's OK to be broken" are the opening words of Number 8, the first album by Sam Brown for 15 years. In some ways, they capture the essence of the project, one only made possible because the artist was able to reach an acceptance of her particular 'brokenness' - the almost-total loss of her singing voice (and primary income stream), in 2007, just as her last album, Of The Moment, came out. Though she'd been an independent artist for over 15 years by that time, her breakout period with A&M ending after two albums in the early 90s, Brown also made an extremely good living on tours with Pink Floyd and Jools Holland. Overnight, it was all snatched away. In the years since, she's been working as a ukulele teacher/bandleader.

Perhaps because of the way she was presented in interviews, particularly during the A&M years when her ravishing voice, with its textures of shale, smoke and sand, was such a welcome addition to the British popscape, I'm half-expecting an ebullient, laugh-a-minute bon viveur - a 'right character' - to open the door when I knock at the pretty Dorset cottage where Brown lives with her partner. Instead, the person who answers is thoughtful, unassuming, perhaps slightly nervous, but with a speaking voice (a little breathier than it used to be) freighted with warmth and good will. She looks great, radiating youthful energy and an understated stylishness. I find it hard to imagine anyone not liking her.