The backstory: “There was no doubt in anyone’s mind what I was going to grow up to be”
Beverley Knight grew up in a strict Pentecostal family in Wolverhampton, where singing was as natural as breathing. “When I was a kid, anything I could grab would be my mic,” she said in 2007. “There’s a picture of me at home in full song – I must have been three – holding a rubber Donald Duck. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind what I was going to grow up to be.”
Her musical education was in church, where her mother, Dolores, would often lead the congregation in song; and the young Beverley sang and sang. Songwriting came next, beginning when she was 13; and she began performing in local clubs from the age of 17. Yet Knight, as a teenager, was always exploratory and questioning, which led her to study theology and philosophy at college. “It gave me a wider understanding of the diverse ways in which people think,” Knight has said of her studies. “It’s useful if you’re going to meet people from all walks of life. These things don’t frighten me in the way they seem to frighten those who have a natural mistrust of people who don’t look or think like them.”
Knight’s inquisitive impulses fed into her songwriting, which was becoming more self-assured. In her early 20s, she signed with the label Dome, which released her debut album, 1995’s The B-Funk. Brilliant yet underappreciated, the record won awards and fans, but success eluded it.
The inspiration: “If ever there was someone who was walking performance art, it was David Bowie”
Dome was a small label, and Beverley Knight was outgrowing it almost daily; by 1997 she had left and signed with Parlophone instead. A major label felt right for Knight: her heroes were some of the best soul singers of all time, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Gladys Knight (who actually inspired Beverley’s stage name) among them. These were not outsider artists, but mainstream acts who had used their pre-eminence to explore the outer reaches of soul voice and feeling.
This label was also the home of David Bowie, who came to Knight’s 1998 show at the Jazz Café, anxious to see this new talent. They became lifelong friends. “If ever there was someone who was walking performance art, it was David Bowie,” Knight said in 2023. “As the biggest star in the world, he showed how to walk around in society as normal as you like.” It was this kind of confidence that suffused the making of Prodigal Sista.
The songs: “All I wanna do is write songs that people will remember”
Knight wrote the lyrics for every song on Prodigal Sista, and, in the three years since The B-Funk, her writing had developed a new intricacy. “All I wanna do is write songs that people will remember for years,” Knight said in 2001. “That’s all I ever wanted.” Sista Sista, which Knight considers one of her personal career highlights, is an excellent example of her craft: an empathetic portrait of loneliness and false hope, it is deepened by Knight’s humane vocal treatment of her subject.
