Overlooked Classics: Betty Davis – They Say I’m Different

In her spacesuit collars, hot pants and big boots,prowling around the stage, Betty Davis made Tina Turner look something of a shrinking violet. With her wild, hard -living reputation and unrestrained presence, Davis was allegedly too much for husband Miles, from whom she divorced after just one tempestuous year in 1969.

This second studio album, released in 1974, showcases her yelps, shrieks, roars and purrs, a series of confrontational, filthy funk workouts with Davis front and centre, demanding attention.

There’s a callout to female emancipation on the furious ‘Don’t Call Her No Tramp’, and on ‘He Was A Big Freak’, she claims to beat her lover with a turquoise chain. Cripes! It’s a bit much. It’s like the strutting machismo of seventies funk and soul being completely inverted. She shouts out the blues greats on the title track, an acknowledgement of music history, whilst insisting on staking her own claim, but there’s a softer side, too, on ‘Special People ‘ with its gospel backing vocals and tickles of piano.

The rolling rhythmic thrusts of psychedelic funk and sexually -charged lyrics are complemented by the sheer uninhibited power of this big cat, who wasn’t a commercial success at the time, way ahead of the curve musically.

After her passing two years ago, she definitely deserves reappraisal right now, as funk and jazz re-emerges into the mainstream. Davis was indeed unique, a trailblazer in a music industry who couldn’t handle her sass. Plus ca change.