Pam Nestor

Pamela Agatha Nestor (born 28 April 1948) is a former singer, songwriter and actress who was active in the entertainment industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

Nestor was born in Berbice, Guyana, on 28 April 1948.

While at school in Guyana, she began to write poetry and eventually won a poetry competition.

She moved to England in 1961 and at the age of 14 lived in Muswell Hill, London, with her mother and younger sister.

In 1969 she successfully auditioned for the touring production of the musical Hair and was offered a part.

She is said to have loved being in Hair, 'revelling in the ... hippy philosophy' and the experience informed her lyric writing.

The singer and musician Joan Armatrading also obtained a part in the musical, and the two became friends.

One day in their lodgings while on tour, Nestor showed her some of her poems and Armatrading set them to music, and so their writing partnership was born.

They spent a year on the road writing songs together.

They later recorded some demo tapes on a tape recorder in a bedroom, and Nestor took charge of trying to get the tapes accepted by a publishing company.

Their original intention was to secure a contract as songwriters rather than performers.

Nestor was reportedly a hustler – full of energy, making the connections, doing the talking and arranging meetings, until her efforts were rewarded when the tapes were eventually accepted by Essex Music.

After this the duo were taken on by the Sherry Copeland talent agency, and signed with London's indie Cube label in 1972.

Although Nestor and Armatrading were originally hoping to be songwriters, this was not what the production company behind Cube intended.

The company was Tuesday Productions, owned by Gus Dudgeon, and Cube was their in-house label.

Cube wanted to promote Armatrading as a performer—and also, it later turned out, to expel Nestor.

The songs for the debut album were the choice of Dudgeon and Mike Stone, an American promoter who was jointly managing the duo at the time.

The sidelining of Nestor seems to have been a decision made by both of them, with Stone saying at the time he "also wasn't keen on this duo idea".

The album was eventually titled Whatever's for Us and represented their first recorded work.

It was produced by Dudgeon and recorded at Château d'Hérouville studios (then called Strawberry studios), in the Oise valley, near Paris, as well as two London studios - Trident Studios and Marquee Studios, and released in November 1972 by Cube Records (HIFLY 12).

Tuesday Productions had wanted to call the album Joan Armatrading, but Nestor fought against that decision, saying it was "absolutely not right" to do so, given the work she had done over three years.

The album consisted of fourteen songs, eleven of which were co-written by Nestor, and the duo had written over a hundred songs, with both Nestor and Armatrading taking turns to lead the singing and with Nestor also playing piano.

The later publicity shots for the album were taken in and around Nestor's then flat, which was in St Luke's Road in Notting Hill; one of these was used on the back cover.

Tuesday Productions wanted to focus their efforts solely on Armatrading and decided they were going to market her as a solo artist, despite the collaboration with Nestor.

From the many songs submitted for the album, only those featuring Armatrading singing were chosen, and Nestor later commented: "I got edged out that way."

The album was released as a "Joan Armatrading" record, and the front cover credited it to her alone, factors that caused tension between the two writers, and these, together with the later promotional gigs organised by Sherry Copeland and Tuesday Productions/Cube that excluded Nestor entirely, contributed to the eventual breakup of the duo.

These decisions were also responsible for causing a rift between Armatrading and Tuesday Productions/Cube Records, with Armatrading later devoting some time to extricating herself from the contract with them to sign with A&M Records.

They took out a full-page advert in New Musical Express in late 1972, using the photograph from the rear of the album Whatever's for Us, and completely airbrushed out the shot of Pam Nestor, thus misleadingly portraying the album as solely the work of Armatrading while another promotional advert placed in the music paper Sounds in December 1976 on the reissue of the album, omitted any mention of Nestor's contribution.

According to the Mayes biography, it was Nestor who eventually walked away from the partnership, feeling that she "had had enough", but Armatrading tried to keep the friendship and partnership together.

The breakup and the way she had been treated by music industry people had a marked effect on Nestor: she was later described as being "edgy", "jittery" and "suspicious".

The experience seems to have hurt her and damaged her self-confidence.

She commented: "I got really hysterical about it" and "I was disposable as far as they were concerned".

The album drew critical acclaim but did not sell many copies – mainly because of poor promotion and distribution – selling "only about 2,000 copies", and despite all the praise it received in the music press, it was not a commercial success.

However, it had been Nestor who, in the words of biographer Sean Mayes, "gave Joan the courage to do the impossible", and without her it is likely the album would not have been made.

She was described in 1977 by the music journalist Nick Kent as: "very, very pretty", with a "gorgeous ebony face … warm lively eyes and a contagious smile", and her personality as "effervescent [and] fizzing with drive"; and later, in 1990, by the author Sean Mayes as "pretty" and "petite" with an "infectious, bubbling personality" and "irrepressibly outspoken".

She was a free spirit, in her own words: "crazy, tough, intense, idealistic".

By the age of 16 she had fronted several semi-pro soul bands around London, and was a single mother with two children by the age of 19.

She left the music industry in 1979 and in later life took to academic pursuits, gaining a doctorate in 2009 from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Some years later Armatrading sued Mike Stone, who subsequently returned to America, and although she did not use Dudgeon as a producer again, she later dedicated her 2003 album Lovers Speak to him and his wife Sheila after the pair were killed in a road accident in 2002.

The record label seemed determined at the time to erase Nestor from the picture, despite the contributions, lyrically, musically and entrepreneurial, she had made not just to the debut album but to the development of Armatrading as an artist.