Between 1986 and 1989 the American singer and songwriter Joyce Sims, who has died suddenly aged 63, was among the most exciting new voices in popular music. Her biggest hits, All and All (1985) and Come Into My Life (1988), were pioneering recordings that merged R&B with electro, and proved to be widely influential.
Immediately recognised as club classics and reissued and remixed many times over the succeeding decades, those hits defined how electronic dance music producers and female vocalists could work together. And while Sims failed to enjoy further chart success, she retained a particularly loyal British audience, regularly performing across the UK.
Sims was a multi-instrumentalist and consummate professional who wrote the majority of her own material. However, she experienced the double-edged sword of working with an independent record label, which allowed her to link up with cutting-edge producers but left her vulnerable to the instability to which such outfits are often susceptible. Partly as a result, she stepped away from releasing new music for almost two decades after her second album had failed to replicate her debut’s success.
Born and raised in Rochester in New York state, Sims was the eldest of five siblings. Her father was a machinist for Kodak and her mother was head chef at a family-owned restaurant. Sims recalled Rochester as “sleepy”, with her parents emphasising that she must focus on her studies. Having graduated from high school, she was already known as a gifted pianist and singer – she had sung in her church’s choir – and so she went to college to study music.
There she mastered several instruments and after graduation in the early 1980s shifted to Manhattan, doing office work while trying to break into the music industry.
Often she worked in the evenings in recording studios, lending her voice for free in return for some time to record her own demos. One of these caught the ear of Ron Resnick, who worked at Sleeping Bag Records, a dance music label that was rapidly signing up youthful talent, including Kurtis Mantronik, a DJ and imaginative electro/hip-hop producer. Sleeping Bag had been co-founded in 1981 by Arthur Russell and Will Socolov, and it was Socolov who suggested Mantronik should produce Sims.
While Sims and Mantronik had wildly differing personalities, they gelled as a creative partnership. Mantronik, who had grown up in the Manhattan housing projects, was the epitome of hip-hop – urban, loud and intense – while Sims was suburban, polite, quiet and personable. However, they respected each other’s talents and worked closely together. Sims sat at the desk as Mantronik mixed the recordings, something he would not normally countenance, and which was a mark of the respect in which he held her judgment.
Sims’s debut single, All and All, released in early 1986, featured a minute and a half of pulsing electro/hip-hop beats before her voice came in. It immediately became a club hit in the US, UK and in many European countries, reaching No 16 in Britain and No 6 on the US dance charts.
A year later Sims’s follow-up single, Lifetime Love, made it to No 34 in the UK and she toured British clubs to promote it, holding her own on stage with various rappers and performing at big-reputation venues such as the Hacienda in Manchester. Her next single, Come Into My Life, which reached No 7 in the UK and No 10 in the US R&B charts, led to a slot on Top of the Pops and was the title of her debut album (of which she composed seven of the eight songs). Both single and album went gold in the UK, and Sims headlined at the Hammersmith Odeon in London – her first performance other than in a dance club.
At that point she looked set for stardom, but Sleeping Bag Records was in strife – Russell had quit the label and, more woundingly, Mantronik had also left, while Socolov was fighting bitterly with another business partner, Juggy Gayles. Thus Sims’ 1989 album, All About Love (again, she composed nine of the 10 songs), suffered from poor promotion as Sleeping Bag fell apart.
As the label’s most successful artist, Sims was unable to get out of her contract, and so withdrew from releasing new music. A 1994 single, Who’s Crying Now, for the New York house music label Warlock, was her only release until a gospel single, Praise His Name, in 2004. Her 2006 album, A New Beginning, found Sims still writing and singing strongly, but suffered from limited distribution.
It was only when she was invited to perform in the UK in 2011 that Sims realised what a loyal audience she commanded in the country. From then on she returned almost annually to perform, and her fourth album, Love Song (2015, released on her own label, August Rose) was made with two UK producers, Livingston Brown and Soul Garden. Her most recent single, What You Won’t Do For Love, was released in August to coincide with a UK tour, during which she announced that she had finished working on a new album.
Sims had used her years away from performing to marry and start a family in New Jersey.
She is survived by her husband, Errol Sandiford, two children and four siblings.
• Joyce Sims, singer and songwriter; born 6 August 1959; died 13 October 2022
