Joan Armatrading: All the way from America

As a successful Black singer-songwriter from the UK, Joan Armatrading was once a phenomenon, in the Seventies, even unique.

I can remember Noel Edmonds playing her records early in the decade (see? we were all young and cool once), but this is the title track from her second album, which came out in 1980.

Americana UK reckons the song is about just what it seems to be about: a woman in a transatlantic relationship that's going nowhere:

The song is from the pre-internet age when it took about a week for a letter to cross the Atlantic. Shockingly expensive overseas phone calls often had a randomly iffy quality with delays, static, and extraneous noise that made a conversation challenging. 

Even timing a call so that the five- to eight-hour time difference could work out required military-level planning. A long-distance relationship with so much unavoidable silence and expense was not for the faint of heart.

A notoriously and unapologetically private person, Armatrading has only provided a sliver amount of information about the song’s inspiration. The subject’s identity has never been divulged. 

She told Songfacts, “That song was somebody who was in America who was trying to persuade me to go out with them and would call all the way from America when I got back to the UK.” 

She added in another interview, “He would phone…nice bloke, but obviously just going to be a friend.”