Since then, I have bought almost all her 70s-80s albums (apart from the first and the third, which I haven't seen in shops). I love them all, although the copy of The Key I got is pretty scratchy so I don't play it much (I'll have to replace it). I don't want to name favourites, and I am personally of the opinion that they are a really fine bunch of pop records. Most of the album tracks - I'm going to say about 70% - could easily have been singles. At the moment I'm really enjoying Walk Under Ladders. It's stylistically diverse, some tracks very new wavey (Thomas Dolby and Andy Partridge play on it) and others more, you know, rootsy or whatever it's called. But it's solid.
The thing I'm thinking about when it comes to JA is about her crappy marketing, then and now. It seems like half the singles she released in the 70s-80s, maybe more than half, didn't have videos made for them. She is notoriously introverted so maybe she didn't want to make videos, I don't know, but when she did do them she seemed to take to it. It just seems peculiar that A&M - a pretty decent, big vision record company in the scheme of things - weren't up for investing heavily in her promotion. What is even weirder to me is she hasn't had the 21st century repackaging/promotion treatment. I read an article from the 70s on her where she said she wrote many, many more songs for each album than she recorded. There must be a huge amount of demos, etc just sitting around waiting for JA to get the box set treatment. She's not some kind of limp pop star, she's a major artist and still has a lot of fans. Why isn't anyone ramping up the retro reissues?
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