This interview by Michael Bracewell was published on the 6 December 1997 issue of the British magazine The Guardian Weekend, with some pictures of the Sixties and a portrait by Joelle Dépont.
Dr Nina Simone is not a woman to mess with. Her anger was born out of the racial brutality of her childhood in the Deep South. Her first love was Bach and classical piano, but she was forced into jazz and soul. Forty years on, her music is as potent a political weapon as ever.
Back in 1987, when the regenerated town centres of boom-economy Britain could each boast a French-style brasserie, where young women dressed in white shirts and black ties served cassoulet and cappuccinos to the credit-wealthy customers for Chanel perfume brought Nina SImone's 1975 recording of Kahn and Donaldson's My Baby Just Cares For Me to the number-seven spot in the British top 20.
From its jaunty piano introduction, descending the keyboard in eight nimble chords to a friendly bass counterpoint, before rallying itself to the defiant ker-plunk, which heralded the smoked-toned vocal, the song was a breathless catchy accompaniment to the fantasy of urban love and luxury living that dominated advertising images in the late Eighties. With a pared-down style and laid-back elegance, and making a minidrama out of the lover's right to luxuriate in blissful self-congratulations, Simone's rendition of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" seemed to speak for the woman who knows the irresistible strength of her own charm, personality and physique. In this much, the song spoke of "girl power" when most of the Spice Girl were still writing their names inside their pencil cases.
"My Baby Just Cares for Me" market the launch-pad of Simone's ascent from cult to legend. As a re-release, it charted all over Europe and sold more than one million copies. Neither jazz nor pop, the song appeared to articulate every white person's imagining of life and love in an east-coast dive bar, where the sound of ice-cubes dropping into tumblers of bourbon is mingled with the strictly black lullabies that are wafting from the smallest of stages. Archive photographs of Simone showed a grave beauty, serious yet sexy, dignified and elegant. Her almond-shaped eyes looked back at the world with an expression poised between vulnerability and defiance. Her image spoke of a much-mythologised era of American history: the late Fifties and early Sixties, when political strife was matched by the drift of cool jazz into pop and soul.
-to be continued-
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