Born on July 28: Beverley Craven, a golden voice from another world

Beverley Craven was born in 1963 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, but her family moved to the United Kingdom when she was barely 18 months old.

Her mother, a classical violinist herself, encouraged her from a very young age to take piano lessons alongside her other passion, swimming. However, when she moved to London at age 18, she turned her attention to music without any regrets. In the 1980s, she cut her teeth as a backup singer, notably for Bobby Womack, the American soul legend and composer of “Woman’s Gotta Have It.”

Her very first self-titled album in 1990, which went double platinum in her home country after a shaky start, remains her most resounding success to this day. Even today, songs like “Promise Me” and “Missing You” define the style—somewhere between easy jazz and classical—of this pianist, singer-songwriter, and performer, who has ultimately been quite unprolific, having released only five studio albums over a 35-year career.

Severely affected by breast cancer first diagnosed in 2006 and a painful recurrence eight years later, Beverley Craven became more reclusive before, in 2018, bringing together Judie Tzuke and Julia Fordham—her two musical sisters—for a UK tour followed by an album documenting the experience, Woman To Woman. With three voices, as a positive message in the face of life’s ups and downs, they also recorded the single “Safe” that same year.

Since 2024, after battling breast cancer twice, Beverley Craven has decided to quietly step back from the spotlight to protect her health. She gave her very last concert in Bury St. Edmunds, UK, in 2024 but leaves her fans with “Memories,” an anthology of her first three albums for the Epic label, recorded between 1990 and 1999, thanks to Cherry Red, the British archivists of the ’80s and ’90s.

Photo: Beverley Craven performs “Promise Me” at the Diamonds Awards at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp on October 24, 1991