The Undoctored Ms Stone, I Presume: Joss Stone

MEETING JOSS STONE in the Electric Lady recording suite in downtown Manhattan feels curiously appropriate. Set up in 1968 by Jimi Hendrix, who named his third album, Electric Ladyland, after it, the studio still houses a surprising amount of the late great's stuff, from the giant sci-fi canvases on the walls to the white grand piano in the main room. The ghost of the late 1960s looms large here – as it does, or has done until recently, in the music of Joss Stone. Of the many pretenders who have been compared over the years to the "queen of soul", Aretha Franklin, the only one to have made significant headway with a global audience is a white teenager from Devon who released her first record shortly after passing her GCSEs.