Chaka Khan, ABC, Emeli Sandé, Jack Savoretti, und Lulu

Raised into an artistic household, when Kjan was young her grandmother introduced her to jazz music and as a pre-teen started her own all-female singing group with her sister Taka named the Crystallites. Whilst still in high school the singer joined the Afro-Arts Theatre through which had the opportunity to tour with Motown star Mary Wells.

In 1967 Khan joined the Black Panther Party and worked on their breakfast program, during her membership she was given a name change by a African shaman to Chaka Adunne Aduffe Hodarhi Karifi. Khan would perform with small groups around the Chicago, U.S., area including the group Lyfe, which featured her then boyfriend Hassan Khan whom she would later marry and change her stage name to Chaka Khan.

Another group Rufus spotted Khan in 1972 and asked her to replace their current singer, the band signed to ABC Records a year later. The 1973 self-titled album from the group had limited success despite a powerful cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Maybe Your Baby”. However, a year later in 1974 Stevie Wonder himself collaborated with the band on the song “Tell Me Something Good”, which he had written for Khan and the band broke out into the mainstream reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The band’s subsequent albums “Rufusized”, “Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan”, “Ask Rufus”, “Street Player” and “Masterjame” all achieved platinum status and highlighted Khan’s vocal talents.

1978 brought Khan’s solo career and her debut album “Chaka” which achieved platinum status in the U.S. largely due to the success of the singer “I”m Every Woman”. Her follow-up album titled “Naughty” was released in 1980 on Warner Bros. Records and went gold with the help of disco single “Clouds”. Khan released a number of albums from 1980 onwards but it wasn’t until 1984’s sixth studio album titled “I Feel for You”, written by Prince, featuring a harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder, and an introductory rap by Grandmaster Melle Mel, that the singer once again came to the forefront of the charts and hearts of people.

The singer has since released the albums “Destiny” (1986), “CK” (1988), “The Woman I Am” (1992), “Come 2 My House” (1999), “ClassiKhan” (2004) and “Funk This” (2007), has won no fewer than 10 Grammy Awards, two Soul Train Awards and has been inducted into the SoulMusic Hall of Fame.

Frontman Martin Fry is the only permanent member of ABC, having never left the band since their formation in 1980; it’s also true that the band themselves have never officially disbanded over the course of their three-decade-plus career, which perhaps beggars belief given the undeniable fluctuation of the fortunes over the course of that time. They enjoyed their greatest success in the eighties - perhaps unsurprisingly, given the popularity of the new wave genre during that decade - and their 1982 debut album ‘The Lexicon of Love’ contains most of their early hits. ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ hit the top twenty in the UK, as did ‘Poison Arrow’, which would go on to feature in the eighties-set video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

It was the 1985 record ‘How to Be a...Zillionaire’ was the group’s biggest success on the other side of the Atlantic, with the single ‘Be Near Me’ seeing ABC hit the top ten in the U.S. for the first time. Since 1990, the group has effectively only comprised Fry, but he continues to use the name to tour - he’s especially popular on the eighties nostalgia circuit - as well as record new material, with ‘Traffic’ released in 2008.

When it comes to songwriting , getting started early is a must if you want to be taken seriously by your early twenties. However, most first attempts at songwriting while still in one’s preteens are usually composed in one’s bedroom, before being consigned to the front of a long-forgotten notebook, never to be looked at again. This was not the case for an eleven year old Adele Emily Sandé, who wrote her very first song expressly to be performed at a school talent show. This either shows some serious confidence or serious stupidity and thankfully enough, it turned out to show some serious, and well placed, confidence.

That very performance made her think that she might want to be a songwriter as a career, and fast forward five years she was on the verge of signing a record contract with Telstar records. However, those five years had moulded Sandé into a very smart young woman, and she turned it down in favour of going to university. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and guess that this was something which her father, a teacher at her secondary school, was pretty psyched about. Soon after that she studied a five year medicine course at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a degree in neuroscience.

By the time she graduated, Adrian Sykes, the same manager that she’d had at sixteen, had waited for her and together they began working on her career proper. Sandé very nearly made it all over again with her very first act after graduating, as her sister made a video of Sandé covering “Nasty Little Lady” on the piano and they sent it to Trevor Nelson’s BBC Urban Music Competition. Of course, Sandé won the show and was offered a record contract soon afterwards, but the deal unfortunately fell through.

Not to be deterred, Sandé and her whole family got to work promoting her music to anyone who would listen, and some of her first radio play on Ras Kwame’s BBC radio show got her a concert right in the heart of Soho. It was at this concert where she met a writer and producer named Shahid Khan, otherwise known as Naughty Boy. The two of them hit it off and began writing songs for other artists together, with tracks going to everyone from Tinie Tempah to Cheryl Cole and Professor Green. After these tracks proved popular, Sandé herself signed a solo contract with Virgin Records, and by 2011 was signed to EMI as well.

Truth be told, Emeli Sandé was a dead cert from the start, and when her first single “Heaven” was released in August 2011, it went straight to number two on the U.K singles chart in its first week of release. Her debut album “Our Version Of Events” went to number one when it was released in February 2012, and later became the biggest selling album of that year in the U.K, with over a million copies sold. Since then, Earth has become Sandé’s world, we just live in it. She performed at both the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, sang for President Barack Obama at The White House and four of her six singles peaked in the top five of the UK charts.

With her masterful songwriting skills and even better performances, we’re going to be seeing a lot of her in the near future, and we should all be very grateful for that. Highly recommended.

After his mother suggested that he channel his teenage passion for poetry into songwriting, Jack Savoretti spent the rest of his teenage years almost obsessively writing songs, describing his process as the way that he conversed with the world at large. The backlog that he created, and the sheer experience that it gave him, meant that he was in a recording studio writing his first album by the time he was 21. His very first single, 2006’s “Without” was almost immediately play listed by Radio 2 and got him noticed by Corinne Bailey Rae, who he toured with over Europe for the rest of the year. At just 22 years old, Savoretti released his debut album “Between The Minds” in March 2007, which was critically acclaimed but a slow seller, at least at first.

Ever since then, he’s continued to record and release acclaimed albums, particularly his 2012 third album “Before The Storm”, an album written after a particularly tumultuous period of his career where he nearly gave up music for good. “Before The Storm” reinvigorated interest in Savoretti and in 2014, he signed to Sony BMG for his follow up record, 2015’s “Written In Scars”. Savoretti is a songwriter par excellence, and with the folk-rock world at his feet, he comes highly recommended.

Lulu developed her love and passion for music at a young age, making her debut stage performance at the age of four. At the age of 14 the singer was invited to join the local pop group the Gleneagles and begun honing her live performance skills by playing shows in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. The group ultimately caught the attention of Marlon Massey who proposed the Lulu moniker and changed the band name to the Luvvers, later securing a record deal with Decca Records. Lulu and the Luvvers’ debut release was the Isley Brother’s single “Shout”, which rose to No. 7 on the UK Singles Chart. The singles “Can’t Hear You No More”, “Here Comes the Night”, and “Satisfied” all followed enjoying chart success, after which Lulu went solo.

After signing with Columbia Records Lulu embarked on a series of tours before making her on-screen debut in the British coming-of-age drama “To Sir, With Love”. The film proved a huge success during which time Lulu released to single “To Sir, With Love” which topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and led to a reissue of “Shout”. Following the release the singer earned a string of successes with the singles “Best of Both Worlds”, “The Boat I Row”, “Let’s Pretend”, and “Love Loves to Love, Love” in 1967. Continuing to both act and sing, Lulu appeared in her own television series entitled “Lulu’s Back in Town” which would air until 1975. More hit singles followed including “Me the Peaceful Heart”, “Boy” and “I’m a Tiger”, after which Lulu won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1969 which spawned the UK No. 1 “Boom Bang-a-Bang”.

The U.S. album “New Routes” arrived later in 1969 making further inroads into the U.S. market, after which Lulu appeared in the cult British TV special “Cucumber Castle” alongside Spike Milligan and Eleanor Bron. The full-length “Melody Fair” followed in the U.S. spawning the hit single “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You, Baby)”. Shortly afterwards the singer recorded the theme music for the James Bond film “The Man with the Golden Gun” after which Lulu recorded a cover of the David Bowie hit “The Man Who Sold the World”, with Bowie on production and saxophone duties.

Following somewhat of a slump throughout the ’80s, Lulu enjoyed a resurgence in the ‘90s with the 1993 full-length “Independence”, featuring a popular duet with soul Icon Bobby Womack entitled “I’m Back for More”. In another collaboration, Lulu worked alongside Take That, topping the charts with the hit single “Relight My Fire”, before making regular television appearances alongside comics Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. In honour of such an impressive career Lulu was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, after which she released the collaborative album “Together” featuring duets with the likes of Paul McCartney, Elton John, Sting, and Cliff Richard.