Seldom have those “tips for the top” that newspapers and magazines love to run at the start of a new year displayed such unanimity. Joss Stone is the name on everybody’s lips, and it’s easy to see and hear why. She is 16 years old, looks stunning and has a big, belting voice of precocious soul power that belies the fact that she hails not from a Memphis gospel hall or the wrong side of Detroit’s Eight Mile Road but from Devon. Crystal ball gazing is an inaccurate science, so to be tipped by the critics in January as the next big thing often means that you will be forgotten by December. But with Stone, the pundits have surely got it right.

Refreshingly, she did not come up via the Pop Idol route — although she was first heard singing a Donna Summer song a few years ago on a BBC talent show called Star for a Night. That performance got her noticed and eventually led to an invitation to the Hit Factory studios in Miami, where she was taken under the wing of the 1970s soul veteran Betty “Clean Up Woman” Wright and backed by a bunch of leading R&B session players, including Timmy “Why Can’t We Live Together” Thomas and Latimore. The result is an album of gloriously old-fashioned Southern soul on which Stone delivers astonishingly mature versions of songs by the likes of Carla Thomas, Aretha Franklin and the Isley Brothers. A cover of the White Stripes’ Fell in Love With a Girl (with the gender suitably adjusted) is the one concession to modernity, although even that is done in early-1970s Staples Singers funk style.

With authenticity prized above almost all else in the world of R&B, there will be those who will question how a teenager from Devon can sing deep-fried Southern soul and still be “real”. Stone’s voice may be a freak of nature, but there can be nothing in her life experience that enables her to relate to a song such as Laura Lee’s Dirty Man — or so one would hope. Despite this, she still manages to sound convincingly credible and the album is already selling well in America, where they know a thing or two about soul singers. Stone has yet to record any of her own songs, but she has apparently started co-writing tracks for her next album with Wright. Watching her development will certainly be fascinating. It would be an exaggeration to call her the West Country’s answer to Aretha Franklin, but if you’re looking for an easy comparison, then Devon’s Alicia Keys will do nicely.

Nigel Williamson

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