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LISA, 49, recalls a career high note when soul superstar Dionne Warwick came to visit her home town of Rochdale.  "I remember this photo so well as it was such a beautiful experience. It was taken in the early 90s and it was the week that Dionne Warwick came to Rochdale.
We were on Arista, which was part of BMG at the time, and Clive Davis, the president of the company who knows everybody, anywhere, wanted to get us together. He called me up and said, ‘Do you want to work with Dionne Warwick?’ and you’re not going to say no, are you? She stayed at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, but came over to my studio for about three days to record one of our songs and a song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. They hadn’t worked with each other for a long time and it was the first song they’d ever written together for Dionne, so it was quite a privilege to be able to do that. And when she arrived, it was incredible to see the glamorous Dionne Warwick in the town of Rochdale. She was lovely and we just had a really nice time. She’s a proper lady with a beautiful nature and she makes you feel really, really comfortable I almost had to pinch myself to see one of my idols in my home town and I just kept looking at her thinking, ‘Oh My God. That is Dionne Warwick’s voice. And it’s coming out of her in our studio in Rochdale. It’s incredible.’ She made her own tea and very much did her own thing, but we were too busy to give her a tour. I’m sure she’d love to come back, though, to see the sights and go for a kebab or a curry! She also told me off as I smoked at the time, even though she smoked like a trooper. She smoked more than I did and kept reprimanding me for it, but it was good advice. I don’t know whether she still smokes, but I don’t and it’s helped me tremendously. One of the highlights was getting to do backing vocals with her on the track Friends Can Be Lovers and it was quite an intimate experience. When you do backing vocals, the trick is – if you’re a good singer and touch wood I am – to look at each other’s mouths. It’s a very, very close thing to do. In the course of half an hour or an hour doing backing vocals, you completely study the mouth of that person. You’re looking at that person’s mouth because you want every single intonation to be right. It’s a beautiful thing and it was lovely because she said I had a lovely voice and vice versa. It’s always beautiful to be told that you’ve got a lovely voice by an amazing singer. It’s been nearly 25 years since that photo was taken, but I still feel that I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m busy recording my next album, I’m doing a load of festivals this summer and I’m just looking forward to carrying on doing what I’m doing and working with some more beautiful people like Dionne Warwick. I haven’t seen her for a few years, though, as I think she moved to Brazil for a while. But I think she’s back in LA now and we recently bought a place in LA, so it would be really nice to see her. Perhaps we’ll get her round for another cup of tea.” Courtesy of Express.co.uk By NICK MCGRATH
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Lisa Stansfield on her latest album and missing out on a role in Indecent Proposal In the early 1990s Rochdale’s Lisa Stansfield was one of the country’s biggest artists – with her first four albums selling in excess of two million copies in the UK alone. So it seems amazing that until the release of her latest album Seven last year the singer, who takes the main stage at Love Supreme Jazz Festival on Sunday, hadn’t released any new music for a decade. “People assume that you just write an album in a week,” she laughs about the follow-up to 2004’s The Moment. “You sit down for ten years and do f*** all, but it isn’t like that. “There were a lot of other things to think about if you haven’t made an album in a while – you need to get a team of people together as there is nothing to propel it into the world. You may as well flush it down the toilet if you don’t.” Her seventh album has been co-penned with her husband Ian Devaney, who was in her first band Blue Zone in the 1980s and has worked with her on all her albums since her triple-platinum-selling debut Affection. “I have ideas independently of Ian, and he of me,” she says. “Sometimes we will sit down together and write songs, but we generally look at each other’s ideas and work from there. “I write stuff every day, I’ve got stuff on my phone, there’s stuff coming out of my ears. “To get ten songs we might be sifting through 100 ideas. “It’s a beautiful thing to actually analyse what has been going on in your head for the last ten years. It’s quite scary actually. It’s a little bit like a diary entry, but it digs a bit deeper. I could have been seeing a psychiatrist for years and saved so much money!” She admits that when she digs into her back catalogue she can’t remember the origins of the 25-year-old songs. “You make it up for yourself,” she says. “It’s beautiful to write songs – they can mean so many different things in different ways at different times.” Last year saw the release of an 18-disc box set covering her first five albums with the Arista label in double CD and DVD versions, plus remixes and rarities. “I left it all to them,” she says. “The thing I really did look at was the Greatest Hits collection which was quite weird looking back. I never listen back to anything I have done. I found I had written songs that I couldn’t remember. “It’s a nice part of your soul you give away – songs are like children, they go away to college or leave home, and you see them again from time to time, some more than others. Others go away forever.” Recent years have seen Stansfield launch into a parallel acting career, with roles in The Edge Of Love, Miss Marple, and the West End version of The Vagina Monologues. She sees the two careers as different worlds though. “Singing is acting in itself to a certain extent,” she says. “You have to make somebody understand what you really mean. There is a subtlety to everything hopefully, I see them as different things, acting and singing.” Her most recent role was in writer/director Elaine Constantine’s docu-drama Northern Soul, as central character John Clark’s mother. “It’s lovely Northern Soul is being recognised again,” she says. “It was such a powerful medium embraced by the north of England. It went all the way from Detroit – literally from one s***hole to another!” Her burgeoning acting career in the 1990s also led to one of Stansfield’s proudest moments. “When the screenplay for Indecent Proposal came out the director Adrian Lyne wanted me to be in the film,” says Stansfield who contributed the song In All The Right Places to the 1993 movie. “It was never to be – me from Rochdale in a major Hollywood movie. “Viz Comic did a million pound shag tombola where they said as I never got a part in the film they wanted to see how much one of their readers would pay for a night with me. “If it didn’t make a million they would see how much they got and how far I would go. I think it came to about £50!” Lisa will be performing at Love Supreme on the Main Stage, Sunday, July 5th at 6.30pm Interview by Duncan Hall for The Argus  Lisa is proud to announce ‘Live in Manchester’, a 2CD, DVD and Blu-Ray box set, to be released on August 28th through earMUSIC. Recorded at the Bridgewater Hall on September 7, 2014 during Lisa's European Tour, “Live In Manchester” presents Lisa in front of an enthusiastic audience, at ease with herself and her music. Filmed by Tim Sidwell of Toward Infinity and mastered at Abbey Road Studios in London “Live In Manchester” will also include bonus material, with a 25 minute interview giving a great, in-depth insight into Lisa's mind and completes the high quality production that is bound to delight the fans. Pre-order is now avaialble via Amazon UK
As announced a few months back, Lisa will be performing at this years Love Supreme festival on Sunday 5th July. A limited amount of tickets are still available here The stage time details are listed below with Lisa due on the Main Stage from18:30 -19:45pm. Please note that the stage times are indicative and can be altered at the last minute without prior notice.   Lisa will perform at Love Supreme with her band on Sunday 5th July on the Main Stage @ 18:30 -19:45pm To spice up the week, each day from 8th to 14th June we will be adding a different photo of Lisa that you might not have commercially seen before. Share your feedback via Official Fan site community Facebook page or click on any of the images below to leave your comments.
 Sunday's photo - pièces de résistance Lisa is pleased to announce that she will be performing at Rock n Horsepower (Cranleigh Surrey, UK) on Saturday 13th June. The event will feature many musical legends such as Kenney Jones, Mick Hucknall, Procol Harum, Nik Kershaw and many more, which is all in aid of Prostate Cancer UK. The event will take place at Hurtwood Park Polo Club in Cranleigh Click here for Tickets details:  |
