Superstar, music legend, gay icon and Bond film villain: Grace Jones is all of these. The singer, actress, author, traveller, artist and revolutionist has been a shape-shifting trouble-making meta-presence in the entertainment universe since her emergence as a model in New York and Paris in the early 1970s. Grace became one of the most audacious and unforgettable characters to emerge from the legendary Studio 54 nightclub in Manhattan, creating pioneering disco classics such as ‘I Need a Man’ and the enduring ‘La Vie en rose.’ 

A streetwise part of a community of iconoclastic artists that included Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, she was the Disco Queen, but in the 80s her music transformed, putting her at the vivid centre of a new kind of mysterious, eruptive soul music, blending house, reggae, new wave, R&B and electronica. Multiple Grace Jones anthems followed, from her cover of Roxy Music’s ‘Love is the Drug’ to ‘My Jamaican Guy’, ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ to ‘Slave to the Rhythm’. Seeming never to age, in 2022 Jones curated the famous Meltdown festival at London’s Southbank Centre and headlined on Beyonce’s Renaissance album, with the New York Times noting that “pop music has been tattooed with Jones’s influence for 45 years”.