Present Company

JANIS IAN: "Present Company" (BGO)/"Breaking Silence" (Polydor)

Shirley Temple. Little Jimmy Osmond . . . Michael Jackson. Child protégés have it tough.

Janis Ian - née Fink, began playing the Greenwich Village Coffee House Folkie circuit at fourteen. A year later she was charting high with her own 'Society's Child', a bitter emotion-charged interracial love affair torn apart by adult intolerance and hypocrisy. White-girl-meets-black-boy ("they call you 'boy'/instead of your name"), girl-loses-boy, girl-blames-society, all interpreted through one of Shadow Morton's more sympathetic productions.

By nineteen Janis was already well into her first of many come-backs, in a smoother Joni Mitchell vibe, but still impacting the ills of the world head-on. Present Company - her fourth LP, re-visits her early-'70's trauma; while Breaking Silence brings it all up to date following a bout of violent marital breakdown and her newly-discovered lesbian self-awareness. Remarkably precocious and assured from the start, setting her sometimes precious poesy into sparse sensitive shimmers of instrumentation, with elements of confessional therapy giving it all a tense nervy edge, her albums can be unsettling.

Early titles like 'Insanity Comes Quietly To The Structured Mind' and '42nd St Psycho Blues' betray an earnest fragility she's never quite kicked. She writes tear-jerking self-analysis in the first person, her biggest American hit - 'At Seventeen', is a painfully maudlin paean to acned misery, savagely introspective and to be listened to with the Kleenex handy ("those of us with ravaged faces/lacking in the social graces/ . . . inventing lovers on the 'phone/who call to say come dance with me/and whisper vague obscenities").

That said, Present Company does catch her at something of a melodic low, joyless and humourless, with doses of compensation injected by the near-gutsy drive of 'My Land', against the attractive 'Here In Spain', 'See The River', and 'Can You Reach Me?' (" . . . would you teach me to be free?"). Breaking Silence is stronger, enveloping her predictable themes of cathartic pain and doubt in cracked and muted washes of highly personal acoustics with soft jazz touches. Among the titles is 'Some People's Lives' which she originally wrote for Bette Midler, and a wistful 'Guess You Had To Be There' looking back at simpler Sixties times.

But of course, like the young Michael Jackson, the teenage Janis Ian was very much there, and it could be argued she's still working her way through its consequences.

• Andrew Darlington