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Joni's back as a one-man girl Print-ready version

by Robert Ottaway
RadioTimes
June 18, 1983
Original article: PDF

BBC2/R1 "If you keep your life out of your music," says Joni Mitchell (Joni Mitchell — Wembley 83, Sunday 9.10 pm), "you're just into soap opera, trying to kick life into a formula. For me, my songs are my autobiography. Someone once complained that, in one album, I'd mentioned the word love 50 times. That's how I want to experience it. With non-monotonous regularity."

Joni has returned after a three-year sabbatical that she once called retirement, and her new LP, WILD THINGS RUN FAST, is also a development in expressive power over anything she's done before: "I gave up because I was disappointed about the reception to my Charlie Mingus collaboration. It didn't go high in the charts. I have always wanted to translate the subtlety of jazz into an idiom that reaches a wider public. But the word that hurt in the reviews was "pretentious." It wasn't, and I'm not. I'll take a bet that the album will last longer than anything else I've done."

She married Larry Klein, her bass-player, last November and is cheekily resigned to the fact that "having one steady fellow, with a certificate to prove it, may dry up my source material." And, of course, her amorous enterprise has made many of her lovers famous in lyrics, although those lovers have all not bitten the dust or gone on to quieter things.

And so DON JUAN'S RECKLESS DAUGHTER, title of that potently confessional album, may subside into rocking-chair serenity. I doubt it myself - but at least it will cause most of her men friends, who've included in the past a casting directory of actors and musicians, from Warren Beatty (and how did he find the time?) to Jackson Browne, to breathe one great sigh of relief. As one remarked: "Knowing Joni is all very well, but I didn't want it to go high in the charts."





19 June 1983
SUNDAY tv

BBC2
9.10 pm
Joni Mitchell — Wembley 83

In April of this year Joni Mitchell returned to Britain for her first tour in nine years. BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test and Radio 1's In Concert went to Wembley to record the last night of the tour and tonight's stereo simultaneous broadcast features highlights from that concert.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
19 June 1983
SUNDAY Radio

9.10 Stereo
Joni Mitchell — Wembley 83

Joni Mitchell — Warner Bros. from Wembley Arena
A simultaneous broadcast with BBC2. See also page 29.
Producer Jeff Griffin

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Added to Library on November 6, 2010. (5829)

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