Trinity Summer Series Preview: The Indomitable Grace Jones

There’s something thoroughly divine about Ms. Jones who, as Pat Carty recounts, has lived one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most remarkable lives.

Grace Jones really is a force of nature. Twice, she’s lit up Electric Picnic. In 2005, she sang ‘La Vie En Rose’ on a bouncer’s shoulders. Ten years later, in 2015, she topped even that outing with a stunning performance, which really had to be seen to be believed. She was back in the country a year later for two nights at The Olympia, footage of which is included in her documentary, Bloodlight & Bami. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and go do so. Now!

Those gigs – described as transcendental by normally reasonable people – climaxed with Jones hula-hooping for ten minutes. Afterwards, she nipped around the corner to the Workman’s Club to throw a few shapes and have a few jars. Why? Because she’s Grace fucking Jones, that’s why.

Jones had to be tough. As a kid, she was beaten for even the smallest infraction by her Grandmother’s husband – her parents had moved to America without her – as she grew up in Spanish Town, Jamaica, she would later claim it gave her discipline. At the age of 13, she moved to the States, to be with her parents. There, she was raised in her father’s Pentecostal faith but began to rebel once she hit college, moving to Philadelphia to work as a go-go dancer and take acid, as you do.

The early seventies found her in Paris, where her modelling career took off. It’s easy to imagine the splash that her unique looks must have made: work with the likes of Yves St. Laurent, as well as covers for Elle and Vogue, quickly followed. Jones was already long past caring what others thought, turning up at a Parisian party for the political elite naked except for a bone necklace.

Encouraged by friends like Jerry Hall, she began the move towards music, signing with Island Records in 1977 and her disco-heavy debut Portfolio followed soon after. It’s probably best remembered for her seven-minute version of Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’ and ‘I Need A Man’. Two more records in a similar vein were released, before she hooked up with reggae rhythm-section royalty Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare for 1980’s Warm Leatherette, a shift away from disco, and into new wave and reggae.

Jones walks away with The Pretenders/Chrissie Hynde’s ‘Private Life’ as well as blistering runs at Roxy Music’s ‘Love Is The Drug’, and even Tom Petty’s ‘Breakdown’. But it was her next album, Nightclubbing, which properly heralded her arrival as a major star. A proper success, it covered everyone from Bill Withers to Iggy Pop to The Police, and hit single ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’ had enough double entendres to give Kenneth Williams a heart attack. Jones sported a flattop haircut and maroon body paint under her Armani jacket on the iconic cover. Then, as now, she looked like absolutely no one else.

Her next move was into celluloid. She was apparently too tough altogether for poor Arnold Schwarzenegger during the production of 84’s Conan The Destroyer. And it’s impossible to forget her extraordinary, and not a little incongruous, scenes with an ageing Roger Moore in his last Bond outing, 1985’s A View To A Kill. Jones returned to music for the Trevor Horn-produced Slave To The Rhythm, another hit, but not before finding time to pose naked for Playboy with boyfriend Dolph Lundgren. After another two albums, there was a 19 year break before 2008’s Hurricane, which is worth it for the monumental ‘Williams’ Blood’ – a song written with Wendy & Lisa about the maternal side of Jones’ family – alone.

Grace Jones isn’t just a star, she’s an icon. Mortals like us can only speculate on the guise she will assume as she walks amongst us in Trinity. But only the foolish would miss it.