Singing the Praises of Still Another Roberts

“She sounds good--maybe she’ll sing a duet with her husband, Lyle Lovett, next,” said a local DJ recently after playing the No. 1 single on the dance chart, the frisky “I Want You.”

Julia Roberts, the actress, moonlighting as a dance-music singer? Not really. That DJ was just joking about the confusion over the name of singer Juliet Roberts.

The singer, who’s from London, says she never heard about the confusion until she came to this country recently to promote the single and her debut album, “Natural Thing,” which just came out.

“The problem is I’m not known over here,” Roberts explains. “People in England know me and know the difference between me and Julia.”

Roberts is both amused and baffled by it all. “Julia can’t sing--as far as I know anyway--and she’s definitely not black,” says Roberts, who is. “I just don’t get it.”

Did anyone at her label, Reprise Records, suggest she change her name?

“You must be joking,” Roberts chuckles. “It never came up. If it had, I (still) wouldn’t have changed it. My name is established in England. I’m Juliet . . . always.”

And she’s not concerned about being confused with a movie star. “This is my real chance to make it big in the U.S. and I don’t want to blow it,” says Roberts, who’s fairly well-known in the UK but is worried that her album won’t catch on here, despite the potent launch from “I Want You.”

But to hear Billboard magazine’s dance editor Larry Flick talk about her album and single, she doesn’t have a thing to worry about.

“ ‘I Want You’ is an irresistible song with a great vocal,” he says. “The album is not a dance album--it’s a great all-around album, with some dance, some pop, some R&B;, with a jazz flavor throughout.”

Many dance artists are strictly studio creations--no more than mouthpieces for some producer and without much performing talent. According to Flick, Roberts is definitely not in that category.

“She’s not just the instrument of some producer--not some glitter girl who does a lot of shrieking,” insists Flick, who saw her American performing debut in January in San Francisco. “I saw her floor that audience. She had these jaded people sitting there with their mouths open. You don’t get the full impact of her talent by listening to the record. She’s a very commanding presence on stage.”

That’s partly because she’s had plenty of experience. Though new to the U.S., Roberts has been the darling of critics and the cutting-edge crowd in Britain because of her three albums in the late ‘80s with a Latin/jazz group called Working Week. In the ‘90s, she switched the focus to her solo career, which she’s been trying to get off the ground since she was a teen-ager.

Roberts’ interest in music dates back to her London childhood when she was intrigued by her father’s calypso band. She started recording in her mid-teens, working with several groups, bouncing around between R&B;, reggae, dance and jazz. By the end of the ‘80s, Roberts, who’s thirtysomething, had built a name for herself in the UK as a jazz and dance-music artist. Reprise signed her two years ago and launched her in the dance market.

The danger of being pigeonholed as a dance artist doesn’t worry her. “I like to sing and write dance music,” says Roberts, who co-wrote most of her album. “I know some artists are afraid of dance music and are frightened of being associated with it but I don’t feel that way.”

But Roberts, says Billboard’s Flick, is too versatile to be bogged down with the dance-music tag. “I don’t think she’ll be stuck in dance clubs, which happens to a lot of dance artists,” he says. “Every year there seems to be an artist who starts in dance and breaks out big in the pop market. This may be Juliet’s year.”