The Grace Jones of Jazz: meet the star on a mission

Lady Blackbird has achieved huge acclaim with her politicised power-Jane Cornwell meets her ahead of her London shows

SEATED on a couch in downtown West Hollywood, her elderly white terrier sprawled across her lap, the singer w known as Lady Blackbird is seething. Moments before we had been chatting amiably about her acclaimed 2021 debut Black Acid Soul, a work whose raw power and stripped down beauty have seen her hailed as the Grace Jones of jazz, and a soul sister to the iconic Nina Simone.

But I have just asked Lady Blackbird how she feels as a woman (as it happens, a queer black woman) living in the US right now, what with the overturning of Roe v Wade and the rolling back of women's rights. "I feel as angry as every other woman at having so much taken away. At being told what to do with your body." Her eyes flash. "It's appalling.

Disgusting." Lady Blackbird didn't set out to be any kind of activist. She had recorded her cover of Simone's 1966 civil rights anthem, Blackbird, a year before the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement, channelling the song's grace and despair with a voice all the more forceful for its sense of holding back. But delays around the release of Black Acid Soul - its 11 tracks mostly comprising leftfield Sixties tunes once performed by the likes of Sam Cooke, Tim Hardin and The James Gang - meant that it dropped deep into the zeitgeist.

When the song Blackbird was released as a single at the end of May 2020, two days after the murder of George Floyd, it hit a cultural nerve.

"That song definitely needed a moment," she says. "I used to listen to it on repeat for hours, getting into its bones, imagining myself singing it on stage. It still rings so disgustingly true. I thought, "This has to be done"" So began the transformation of Marley Munroe, the daughter of evangelical Christians from the small town of Farmington, New Mexico, and a long-time professional session singer-songwriter (she wrote and sang backing vocals for Anastacia's 2014 hit Staring at the Sun).