Rickie Lee Jones Photo Kirk West/Getty Images

I recently saw the legendary singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones perform at the Union Chapel, Islington. She’s 69, still full of vim, and it was a treat to catch her at such an intimate venue.

'You can't break the rules until you know how to play the game.'
Rickie Lee Jones

Playing acoustic guitar and piano, accompanied by a percussionist and keyboardist, Jones sings soulfully of love and loss; of drifters and dreamers; of ‘sad-eyed Sinatras,’ and Johnny the King who ‘walks these streets without her in the rain.’ And she relates how Chuck E ‘don’t come and PLP with me’. Her vocals are languid and jazz-inflected. Her stream-of-consciousness narratives are fragmented and impressionistic; conversational and colloquial.

'I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies.’

Wearing an embroidered silk jacket, Jones is a luminous presence, a latter-day troubadour, all smiles and charm - spotting a rainbow in the church lights, breaking into spontaneous song, telling stories of feckless boyfriends, New Orleans’ street culture and uncommon courtesy.

Interviewer: Do you think we’re born musical?
Jones: I don’t know about we. I only know about me.

Jones teaches us to embrace life and all it has to offer, good and bad; to translate our experiences and encounters into our work; to be positively predisposed.

'A long stretch of headlights bend into I9.
They tiptoe into truck stops,
And sleepy diesel eyes.
Volcanoes rumble in the taxi, glow in the dark.
Camels in the driver's seat,
A slow, easy mark.
But you ran out of gas,
Down the road, a piece.
And then the battery went dead,
And now the cable won't reach.
It's your last chance
To check under the hood.
Your last chance,
She ain't soundin' too good.
Your last chance
To trust the man with the star
'Cause you've found the last chance Texaco
The last chance!’
'The Last Chance Texaco’

*Jones performs on* Saturday Night Live in April 1979. Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Jones was born into a musical family in Chicago in 1954. Her paternal grandfather, Frank ‘Peg Leg’ Jones, was a vaudevillian who sang and danced, played the ukulele and told jokes. Her grandmother was a dancer on the chorus line. Both her parents had been raised in orphanages, and her childhood was marked by upheaval, as her musician father took the family from state to state, trying to make a name for himself.

‘What were they running from? From cities, houses, and eventually, themselves, but they never got away from their difficult childhoods or their love for each other.’

The family settled for a time in Phoenix, Arizona, where Jones roamed the desert, rode horses and had adventures with imaginary friends. As she played games on the street, she sang songs from the hit show West Side Story.

‘I drew a crowd! Music had built an accidental bridge between me and the world.’

Jones’ teenage years were characterised by recklessness and risk-taking. Ejected from high school, she ran away from home, lived in a cave, hitch-hiked, got arrested, and more besides.

'I spent most of my life in cars, vans and buses… For a long time, my solution to any problem, big or small, was to jump in the car and drive away from it.’

Eventually at 19 she landed up in Venice Beach, California, working menial jobs and singing in local bars and coffee shops to pay the rent. Hanging out with other creative mavericks, like Tom Waits, Lowell George and Dr John, she began to write her own songs.

In 1979 she released her stunning self-titled debut album to critical and commercial acclaim. With her long blond hair, toothy grin and beatnik beret, she was dubbed by Time magazine The Duchess of Coolsville.

'How come he don't come and PLP with me
Down at the meter no more?
And how come he turn off the TV
And hang that sign on the door?
Well, we call, and we call,
"How come?", we say.
Hey, what could make a boy behave this way?
Well, he learned all of the lines now and every time
He don't, uh, stutter when he talks.
And it's true, it's true,
He sure has acquired this kind of cool and inspired sort of jazz when he walks.
Where's his jacket and his old blue jeans?
If this ain't healthy, it is some kinda clean.
But that means that Chuck E's in love,
Chuck E.'s in love.'
'Chuck E's in Love’

A string of other fine albums followed: ‘Pirates’ (1981), ‘The Magazine’(1984) and ‘Flying Cowboys’ (1989). Her work was at once deeply personal and yet also rooted in observed lives. Critically, she seemed to be addressing the audience directly.

‘I always thought about somebody else. I always wanted to talk to you…I want you to feel what I’m saying.’

Sadly Jones faced issues with addiction in the early part of her career. She also resented being boxed in and categorised by record labels, the press and the public. She needed to evolve in her own way.

‘For me in the first ten years I wanted to define myself and to change – both those things. It was a terrible burden for me.’

Having withdrawn from view to raise her daughter, Jones subsequently recorded several albums of sublime covers. She also explored electronica and jazz, and made an angry protest album.

'Some of us are born to live lives on an exaggerated scale.’

From her unstable childhood to her unreliable partners; from her uncomfortable relationship with the music industry to her quest for an independent private life, Jones faced a good many challenges. But she consistently demonstrated a compelling resilience, good humour and optimism.

'I’m an optimistic person. In spite of my recklessness and throwing myself on the fire, my nature is to make something good out of what happens.’

I was quite taken with this comment, which perhaps sums up her resolutely positive outlook:

‘You see things out of your eyes. If you are happy, you see happy. If you're sad, you see sad.’

'She was pregnant in May,
Now they're on their way.
Dashing through the snow
To St. John's, here we go.
Well, it could be a boy,
But it's okay if he's girl.
Oh, these things that grow out of
The things that we give.
We should move to the west side
They still believe in things
That give a kid half a chance.’
‘Skeletons'

At the gig I attended, Jones recounted how she was recently introduced to Elton John at an industry event. Somewhat surprised when he kissed her, on the lips, twice, she burst into tears. At first she was confused by her own response - where did that come from? - and then she understood that, in that particular moment, she had been taken back to the inordinate joy that John’s songs had given her as a teenager.

As Jones told this story, a lump formed in my throat. I realised that I feel the same way about her.

'I say this was no game of chicken.
You were aiming your best friend.
That you wear like a switchblade on a chain around your neck.
I think you picked this up in Mexico from your dad.
Now it's daddy on the booze,
And Brando on the ice.
Now it's Dean in the doorway,
With one more way he can't play this scene twice.
So you drug her down every drag of this forbidden fit of love.
And you told her to stand tall when you kissed her.
But that's not where you were thinking...
How could a Natalie Wood not get sucked
Into a scene so custom tucked?
But now look who shows up
In the same place
In this case
I think it's better
To face it.
We belong together.
We belong together.’
‘We Belong Together’

No. 489