Coal Mines ─ Confessions and Dance Halls With Return to the North

The performer is an impassive woman, clad in a scarlet cocktail jacket and short black skirt, poised at the pedals in perilous high heels, looking bored but very correct. Vicki Aram is freakishly young-looking 55: beautiful in a hard, huge-eyed, heavily made-up way. Her voice is high and ethereal. "I was born in County Durham. My parents were music-hall entertainers. I learnt the piano when I was a young girl and, although I hated it, my mother-a remarkable woman-considered it as important a part of my education as cleaning bathrooms and washing clothes." Vicky's CV reads like an A to Z of London hotels, with the occasional, now defunct, jazz venue thrown in. But her voice, which I heard on tape, is pure jazz, fragile, melancholy, tremulous as a softer Billie Holliday. She sings like she's from Harlem, like she's black. Superbly.

The Sunday Times

FEB. 1991