As Joni Mitchell's London visit didn't include the time for any interviews, we sent Rob Mackie home to pore and dribble over her albums and try to imagine what he might have asked her if we had done an interview. Anything to get rid of him for an afternoon.

At first I thought Joni Mitchell was a man, I know there aren't too many blonde soprano men looking quite like that, but if you'll just give me a minute to explain …

She began you see, for me at least, as a name in brackets, after a couple of the best songs on Tom Rush's album, "The Circle Game". He did very good versions of "Urge For Going" and the title track; and I'm not as silly as you think.

After all this was 1968, and we'd just had a guy playing around London, and calling himself Jimi instead of Jimmy, so it seemed that some Johnny had picked up the idea for making yourself sound a little more exotic without losing your original moniker.

Besides, "Urge For Going" was one of those restless time-to-hit-the-road songs beloved of male chauvinist ramblers of the time, not getting tied down and all that. Hoboing had a lot of respect in those days. So it had to be a man writing the words that were being sung in that dark brown voice, right? Calm yourselves, I can usually tell the difference, and it was easier back then.

A browse through a trendy record store in Coventry Street, W1, where a loveable old Irish drunk used to come in with roses behind his ears and threaten to kiss all the customers unless he got to hear "Puppet On A String" again, proved otherwise. There was an album called "Joni Mitchell", and there on the cover was this frail wide-eyed young thing maneuvering suitcase, guitar and transparent umbrella in only two hands, newly arrived in the grime of New York's back streets. She looked like she'd last on the road about as far as the next rail station.

Warble

Still, she had a good record there, in fact an excellent one for its time. Frail-looking ladies then were wont to warble in deadly seriousness about the dangers besetting them in the big awful world around, and generally used other people's words to do it. Joni looked at her own situation and those about her, and looked with lot of insight. She had a pure voice like her folky predecessors, but used it in an altogether more interesting way to point up what she was singing about.

The record had a country and a city side and it was pretty remarkable how she managed to conjur up the difference in her voice with only the sparest of accompaniments. "Night In The City" was a mite less frantic but just as full of life as The Lovin' Spoonful's more claustrophobic "Summer In The City".

Freedom

By modern standards, some of it was a little twee, but already Joni's central theme was splashed right there across the tracks. The first track, "I Had A King" was about her marriage, "I had a king in a salt-rusted carriage, who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon." There's no blame laid on anyone, but the split is final! "My keys won't fit the door." she comments with precision and with typical imagery (on "Blue", she's still "travelling, looking for the key to set me free").

So she's free but looking for love AND freedom - the problems are juxtaposed on the last two tracks, "Song To A Seagull" and "Cactus Tree" ("So busy being free"): She seems a little uncertain whether it's freedom or escapism she's in, but she's looking anyway. The sweetness of love, and the bitterness of its passing have remained her constant main theme, pursued with dignity, wit, and extraordinarily bare honesty. Life's illusions have remained constant shady ghosts on the sidelines, which have to be avoided at all costs.

The second album "Clouds" included Joni's own version of "Both Sides Now", even by then a much-recorded song, but Joni's best have rarely been the most popular, and for me, "Chelsea Morning", full of the exuberance of life, and "The Gallery", an imaginative look at yet another creative/destructive relationship with an artist, meant far more than the generalised images of her cloud observations.

Generally, the album didn't really extend Joni's sphere of work, just reaffirmed her as a very special lady in the classic singer-with-guitar tradition. It had rather less unity as an album than her first or its successors, but provided further into Joni with its cover self-portrait. She was still the wide-eyed blonde lady, freckled and fringed, but already the 'ice cream castles in the air' of the first album were on their way out: no attempt at all to prettify a starkly realistic drawing.

In spite of her obvious self-consciousness as a solo performer, Joni has always stayed true, lain herself on the line with all her imperfections and doubts laid out for our perusal. She's never stopped being vulnerable, risking a hostile reaction. In a way, she's pretty brave.

She's always been uniquely aware of the pitfalls of the life she's leading, with its unique privileges and restrictions. The old problem: rock singers who get famous have the choice of either affecting a wording-class consciousness while being a million miles away from the real people, or else writing dull songs about being rich, famous and idolised. Joni got out of it by writing some excellent songs about being rich, famous, etc.

Thus although her third album "Ladies From (sic) The Canyon" began with "Morning Morgantown", still presenting the same free kid of "Sisotowbell Lane" and "Chelsea Morning", the very next song buts the Joni Mitchell of '69 right in perspective with that amazing piece of owning up, "For Free". Her fame's kept on growing since, and the singing in London last week, she changed it to "I've got a black limousine and SIXTEEN gentlemen escorting me to the halls." The contrast of 'star' with street musician was at once a release of guilt and a song that Joni was digging more deeply into the way things were, rather than the way they might be.

It meant a lot more anguish - and some of her inspired phrases come out like a blister bursting: bitter and messy but healing. There was the delightful bitchiness to the other lady in "Conversation", "She removes him like a ring to wash her hands", a weirdly evocative line in "Willy", "He stood looking thru the lace at the face on the conquered moon", paranoia in "The Priest", "Oh, come, let's run from this ring we're in where the Christians clap and the Germans grin".

The album was like a bridge to the more sensually aware person of later albums - the inner struggles and problem of relationships didn't get any easier, and there was this whole new area to come to terms with - the solitude of the artist, the increasing pressure to improve on the last record; the unreality of becoming public property.

"Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock" were successive tracks, and pointed up just how much difference there was in her maturity as a songwriter. Not dissimilar in subject matter they varied totally in style, "Big Yellow Taxi" was worth a dozen "Woodman, Spare That Tree"-type conservation songs, took itself half-seriously. "Woodstock", apparently written in much more serious mood, has proved far more disposable. All that stardust turned out to be just dandruff after all, and the song's best consigned to the dead Sixties. As singles, the two songs have been her most successful here, with "Woodstock" being a number one for Matthews Southern Comfort, and "Big Yellow Taxi" being the lady's only trip to the old hit parade lunch stand, thus far.

Probably it was that awareness of becoming forced into an unreal public persona that led to a long halt to operations at this point. The official reason at the time was that public performances were preventing Joni's songwriting from flowering. At any rate, she was able to use the privileges of the position to escape from the restrictions, and took six months or more off performing, to travel around. It ended up as almost year's Sabbatical.

Self-critical as always, she had spent 1970 in full retreat from stardom; in Greece, Spain, France, and Jamaica, getting herself back to the garden, maybe, living in a cave some of the time, she said. Still the urge for going.

The fourth album, "Blue" was naturally full of the joys of travel and of doing simple things again "I want to get up and jive/I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive". "Maybe I'll go to Amsterdam, maybe I'll go to Rome," she sang joyfully, unaccountably giving Mrs. Mobbs' Boarding House at Bognor Regis a miss.

"Blue" had the feeling of being put together chronologically, because the songs on side two were becoming homesick to a remarkable degree. She sings about California, draws maps of California and of course, comes back - "Hung up on another man".

Come to think of it, having an affair with Joni must be a harrowing experience - imagine waiting for the next album to come out and decide your place in history. I think I'll give her a miss.

Lots of great lines on "Blue" again - my favourite is "The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide" - great evocation of being back on you own again, right, all you enlarged frying pan owners?

Overall, the album showed greater depth in Joni's singing, a more syncopated feel, helped by James Taylor's guitar on a number of cuts and a subdued Russ Kunkel.

Sophisticated

The last two albums, "For The Roses" and Court And Spark" have continued those directions into a remarkably sophisticated musical style. Restlessness and disillusion are still there and so is that old vulnerability but the records have a new toughness with the tenderness emerging from time to time like an inner fire.

She reaffirmed her determination in a surprisingly direct stand at the end of "For The Roses": "You've got to shake your fists at lightning now you've got to roar like forest fire/You've got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky." And the album's full of that feeling of static crackling electricity.

I find "Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire", with James Burton on guitar, the most chilling and effective song she's yet done. But most noticeably, the last two albums have achieved a stunningly high standard of consistency - it's not so much a case of picking tracks any more - they're all potential prize blooms with a life and a mood all their own. Perhaps most significantly, the title track, almost "For Free part two", shows she hasn't forgotten about the false aspects of being a star.

If anything, and in spite of the delightful "Raised On Robbery", which should of course have been a hit, it's the most 'down' album, particularly closing as it does with "Trouble Child" followed by "Twisted".

"Trouble Child", with lines like "So why does it come as such a shock/To know you really have no one only a river of changing faces/Looking for an ocean" is way beyond her usual post-affair depression. "Twisted" you can take how you like, it sounds jokey on the surface, but… we all get a little schizoid sometimes.

Joni's albums show a tremendous progression from a very good start up and up. But it certainly isn't a progression towards happiness. Maybe one precludes the other. The only really comparable American writer singer in the last few years has been Carly Simon, and already since finding True Happiness, she seems to have found only subjects from the past to make interesting songs from on "Hotcakes". On that rather flimsy evidence, Carly's become merely pleasant, while Joni, still out there fighting the world with grace and intelligence.

Maybe it's the refusal to accept anything much short of perfection that makes living so difficult as well as making the music so good, but it's out gain that she doesn't settle for anything less.