The Coffee House World: Joni Mitchell at the BBC

by Tom Hagler
Quietus
September 5, 2026

River of Words: Joni Mitchell at the BBC by Tom Hagler is published by Headline Books

In an exclusive extract from Tom Hagler's new book River of Words, the Quietus presents an archive interview between Mitchell and TV presenter Richard Skinner from the BBC's Saturday Live back in 1983.

Joni was in the middle of her world tour, having played in Japan, New Zealand and Australia. Concertgoers in Sydney reported how she'd altered the lyrics to 'Big Yellow Taxi' to support the campaign against the Franklin Dam. It was the country's biggest environmental movement to date and would succeed in halting the project in Tasmania just a few months later.

In this interview with Richard Skinner, Joni says the description of her as a singer-songwriter is redundant, given everyone now wrote their own material, specifically referring to Adam Ant. It's an interesting example to choose, given that Adam Ant's sound was based on the drummers of Burundi. Ant's manager, Malcolm McLaren, famous for choosing a good story over the truth, came up with a version of how he 'discovered' this sound in a Paris library, although in a more prosaic and perhaps truthful version he talks of having heard them on Joni Mitchell's 'The Jungle Line' on The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It's an interesting example of Joni's subtle influence on pop culture.

Joni goes on to say how she loves Van Gogh because she can see his struggles on canvas. At the beginning 'all he had was will', she says. At the same time she talks about her love of Picasso who, conversely, she says, never appeared to struggle.

Richard Skinner
Joni, you're saying just now, before we were on the air, that you're doing the song still but in a very different fashion in the new tour?

Joni Mitchell
Well, not so very different, but different because the personnel has changed and any time I work with a different combination of players, they bring their own original style to it. I don't require that they play the licks that someone else laid down on tape.

Richard Skinner
You're enjoying this tour, because I mean it is world tour, isn't it? Which is a pretty daunting prospect.

Joni Mitchell
It's a very lengthy tour but, so far so good, knowing we're all in high spirits.

Richard Skinner
I think probably the latest thing that people have seen of you live in this country was on the TV special, that was aired in Britain on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Now, that was about 18 months ago or something . . . in America it was put together.

Joni Mitchell
The tour was over three, almost four years ago, and it was followed . . . my girlfriend and I edited a lot of found footage into it, just to give it more character than the pure live concert. The making of that took about seven months and then you got it delayed, so I'm not exactly sure when you saw . . .

Richard Skinner
We got a delayed and edited [version  ] as well. I mean it was down to half an hour by the time we saw it, I think.

Joni Mitchell
Yes, it was 72 minutes when I finished it. But most places wanted commercial interruptions, so we had to condense it somehow.

Richard Skinner
How similar to that show would be the thing that you're going to be doing tonight at Wembley?

Joni Mitchell
To do a lineup of material, with a few exceptions, maybe three or four songs from that show remain in this one, lots of material from the new album and much more retrospective material. I've tried to do at least one thing from almost every album along. It's a lot of material that goes over and puts together a show. The last tour, the one that you saw, was mostly comprised with the most . . . I don't know how to put it; esoteric would you say? Or the most uncommercial, non-commercial material, at that time. I thought, well, I'll just have to run these songs past people again to see what they think about them this time, and it was a very successful tour.

Richard Skinner
Do you find that when you look back over the old, more commercial things that maybe you're doing this round, that you do still like your old stuff, that you get off on it, still?

Joni Mitchell
I'm doing 'Both Sides Now' again in the show, for instance, which was . . . I had to lay that to rest for some years, you know, and it has a lot of vitality, I feel comfortable and into it when I'm singing now.

Richard Skinner
Right, there's a song called 'Free Man in Paris', which is one of my favourite songs of all yours and I know that that is in the show still, isn't it?

Joni Mitchell
Yes, that's in.

Richard Skinner
Do you change that much from the original?

Joni Mitchell
That one is probably the least changed, because it has definite structure to it . . . you can't deviate to it, even the lyric, there isn't that much room for free phrasing in it.

Richard Skinner
That's a song that seems to underline your views about the music business that have recurred throughout the sort of 15 years you've been in the business, that you see good and the bad in the business.

Joni Mitchell
Well, it's a portrait of a company executive really, but it could apply to almost anybody, any facet, any cog in the machine.

Richard Skinner
Including yourself, I guess?

Joni Mitchell
Oh yeah, I could relate to it. Anybody in the business, at some point or another, becomes dissatisfied. They say, 'Oh you know, God, what am I doing this for?' It's just kind of an announcement of needing a vacation.

Richard Skinner
You've been announcing vacations or even retirements for the last 10 years, haven't you, really?

Joni Mitchell
Well, I'm not too fond of timetables. I guess I'm a freedom freak. I like to be able to follow my own inclinations, and touring, for instance, really puts you in the harness. Like if you come to a place where your soul says, 'Oh, I should linger here and explore these feelings that I'm having now; I know there's a song in it' . . . you have no luxury . . . you're shipping out the next day.

Richard Skinner
It's like a road manager saying, 'Come on, there's a car waiting, and you've got to get to the airport.'

Joni Mitchell
[sings  ] 'You're in the army now!'

Richard Skinner
But you haven't regretted staying in that business despite your occasional wonderings or maybe wishing to get out and concentrate on painting or whatever?

Joni Mitchell
Oh no, I have no regrets. The business has been very good to me.

Richard Skinner
Very good?

Joni Mitchell
I have no deep, Earth-shattering complaints. I just have momentary fatigue. I get tired every once in a while, like anybody in any job, but it's a great job all in all.

Richard Skinner
The songs that you've written have always appealed to people on the most basic level in terms of real people and real situations. Does that ever worry you, that in terms of success, success grows greater and greater, that you can lose touch a little with that reality of life, that you end up in a much more rarefied area of people wheeling around the world on Concorde, with lots of money in their pockets and things like that?

Joni Mitchell
There is that danger, except the things that I've always written about up until now anyway - because I don't know what I'll write about next  -  they've spun from the realm of spirit, which is beyond class or race, or it didn't really have that much to do with it. The backgrounds, of course, the landscapes that I've put behind them sometimes were middle-class, sometimes were aristocratic, sometimes were street. I still have the ability to walk through the streets, although celebrity certainly does change the way life comes at you. It's better to be anonymous to be a writer than to be somewhat notorious, because people act differently, like that song of Dylan's, 'People Come Around Me'. How does he put it, 'They don't know how to act.' So, they change up their behaviour, so it's difficult then to read the world in the same way.

Richard Skinner
I've just been reminded of a very bizarre thing . . . when Prince Charles and Lady Diana married, a radio station in Australia had a competition to give them the best possible wedding present, and the winners, who sent in an amazing entry to the competition, they sent in twin gorilla suits, to allow Prince Charles and Lady Diana to go out shopping anonymously. There must be a degree of that in life now for you, that you can't actually go out without being Joni Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell
Well, I don't take it for granted, and there are pockets, of course, deliciously, where you are unknown until some clerk steps up and whispers to the person who you are and then, of course, they're all flustered, embarrassed because they didn't give you preferential treatment, which is peculiar. But, for the most part, I'd say in New York, I insist on wandering around often by myself with a camera or just out snooping, window shopping or . . . I'm sort of a shopaholic. I like to poke around in stores and people approach me on the street, but they call out my name very familiarly and pass on often, so I don't feel seriously impaired in my movement.

Richard Skinner
Sorry, it sounds like a disability when you say that. Let's play a bit of music from Blue, which was the first Joni Mitchell LP that I went out and put money over the counter for back in 1971. This is a track that you're still doing, yeah? This is 'A Case of You'.

Joni Mitchell
Right.

Richard Skinner
'A Case of You', Joni Mitchell, 1971 vintage. We're sort of dotting around the years with Joni this afternoon on Saturday Live. How do you feel about that so-called folk singer-songwriter era, you know, the sort of Woodstock generation?

Joni Mitchell
Well, the term applied initially as a distinction between the folk singer, now folk-rock singer, who sang other people's songs and those who wrote their own, and originally there were only a handful who were writing their own, now everybody writes their own songs, right? You wouldn't call Adam Ant a singer-songwriter, so I think the term should be laid to rest.

Richard Skinner
You moved over from folk to jazz, and I'm wondering how that happened, I mean, on what basis did you see that?

Joni Mitchell
You see, going back again to the folk-rock thing, the lamination of a band to a standup narrative poet, self accompanied poet . . . mine was delayed. All of my friends already had found their bands and were playing merrily along, and I was still searching for a band that could play my music to my satisfaction. Harmonically and rhythmically, my music was eccentric and as it turned out it was only musicians who had a jazz background that could comprehend the voicings of the music, which weren't just majors, minors, or seventh chords but they were, what would you say, they were eccentric, I guess that's it. And jazz musicians could pick up on this, so it was jazz players that I laminated my music with and in the process I became, I fell into a circle of those players and I began to spend more and more time in jazz clubs. It was the beginning of a jazz education, which started back in my teens and it progressed and followed and led along to Mingus' request that I work with him on that project. Which by the time I had finished that, it became apparent to me that the jazz world and the coffee house world of folk music were very similar, in that they were divided into two strong camps and one was the acoustic purists and then those more experimental types. And I always had leaned more to the experimental. Even with Charles, I found myself often in disagreement with him because he only liked acoustic music. He didn't like electric bass or electric keyboards and he was very vocal about why. And I would say, 'Well, listen to this,' so at the end of that project, I took the music on the road and then did that film and then kind of retired away from music in a certain way and in the process of doing that I began to listen to rock and roll again, which in the meantime had started to revitalise and was getting more harmonically sophisticated and more rhythmically sophisticated in fact. So, a new desire to do rock and roll rose up.

Richard Skinner
You've always been very experimental, I mean, I'm thinking in terms of everything that you've done. I mean, you've dallied, initially dallied it seemed, but now even more seriously you got into painting and things like that. It's almost like a parallel career in fact, isn't it? Your artistic thing on the canvas or on paper.

Joni Mitchell
Yeah, they run side by side and they go through similar problems at the same time, craving for bolder rhythms and the music is accompanied by bolder lines in the painting and the appetites for shape, form, colour are pretty similar.

Richard Skinner
Yes, who's your favourite artist, I mean, is there somebody who does inspire the way you're moving at the moment, is there any one person?

Joni Mitchell
Oh, I have a lot of painters who I like for various reasons, but the all-stars I guess would be Van Gogh, who just moves me . . . like I stood in front of his paintings in L'Orangerie and a lump came up into my throat. Also, I saw a lot of drawings that he had done when he was first starting out that were very bad, before he had any style. All he had was will, he didn't have . . . he was just going at it, and at it, and at it and then all of a sudden one day, these rhythms began to occur in his line drawing. So, that gave me a lot of hope. I thought, 'Oh, here's a man who was a powerful master, who started from nothing.' I mean, anything you see on Picasso, he always had great talent, you don't see any of his struggles . . .

Richard Skinner
Yes, even his early stuff, very realistic, straightforward pictures.

Joni Mitchell
Yes, he's so virtuosic. Picasso is my patron saint. He's my Saint Christopher or Saint Patty or whatever, just for longevity and for his curiosity and his constant . . . almost adolescent enthusiasm which he carried all through his life. So, he's . . . I'm a monumental fan of him for that among other reasons.

Richard Skinner
And looking on the middle of Wild Things Run Fast, when you open up the gate fold sleeve, it appears that Gauguin must mean something to you as well?

Joni Mitchell
Gauguin . . . I liked the way he smooshes one colour over another. I like certain aspects of his technique as to paint application.

Richard Skinner
There's a fabulous parody of the Gauguin self-portrait, it looks like, in the middle of the album. Is that a letter or a picture of you, Larry Klein, your husband? I'm not sure which, on the right-hand side. Perhaps you can set my mind at rest.

Joni Mitchell
It's a . . . I painted it from, you know those machines that you get at bus depots or at fairs that you put a dollar . . . and I guess it used to be a quarter . . . you put a dollar in and it spits out four pictures of you and your beloved in black and white? And you have to squish together in the booth to get it?

Richard Skinner
Sort of passport photograph type?

Joni Mitchell
Like that, yeah. So, I painted that from that, which was a good way to paint because not only did I like the composition of that little photo but with no colour as a guide . . . then you got very imaginative, like it's delaying the colours on the face, so the faces are like . . . It reads quite realistically, but if you look at them in blues and yellows and quite Impressionistic or post-Impressionistic, like Gauguin or Van Gogh in a way.

Richard Skinner
But definitely a picture of you and Larry, and no Gauguin in there. Because, it really has . . . I thought it was Gauguin to start with and then I thought, 'No, hang on, I saw a picture of Larry and it's Larry.' I got very confused.

Joni Mitchell
Oh, you thought that was actually Gauguin and me cheek to cheek?

Richard Skinner
Certainly, perhaps it was some sort of deep statement about art. Oh, back to the bus station, here's a bit of music from 1975. The Hissing of Summer Lawns. And this is way ahead of Adam and the Ants. This is 'The Jungle Line'.

Richard Skinner
'The Jungle Line' from The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975 LP. And the Burundi drummers there, Joni, way ahead as I say of either Bow Wow Wow or Adam and the Ants, and things like that. You were well into that sort of African music. What actually got you into that?

Joni Mitchell
Well, I don't remember now, where or when or why I purchased that album, but somehow it mysteriously appeared in my collection and it was one of the best grooving tracks that I ever heard, that Burundi piece. Anyway, the more I listened to it, the more I heard the roots, the origins in this African warring drum possession of Bo Diddley, like my version, what I did was I took just the Bo Diddley lick, I would then loop it and repeat it. I didn't use the whole passage . . . just kind of pulled out one figure, but there are many classic rock and roll patterns in this thing, if you listen to it. It's a great piece of music. Did you ever see Walkabout  ?

Richard Skinner
Yes, what the Australian thing?

Joni Mitchell
Right.

Richard Skinner
Yes.

Joni Mitchell
In a way, do you remember the last scene after she comes through this incredible savage and beautiful and poetic journey, and she's chopping liver or something in the kitchen and her husband is there and there's a sense that they have very little relationship . . . he's going off to work and he says to her, 'Why didn't you stay out there?' In a way, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is that kind of an album. I mean in the movie it's unspoken . . . it's just . . . is that all there is?

River of Words: Joni Mitchell at the BBC by Tom Hagler is published by Headline Books