Tracey Thorn: ‘When I listen to bands, I only really hear the singer’
We love singing, don’t we? Both doing it and listening to it. We sing when we’re happy and celebrating – Happy Birthday to You – and we sing when we’re down, in an attempt to keep our spirits up. We sing when we’re bored, to try to make the time pass faster – silly songs on coach trips, repetitive songs on long walks. Like whistling in the dark, we all sing together sometimes when we’re afraid, soldiers marching in unison to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, and we choose songs to make light of things that are unutterably gloomy.
We sing to elevate sporting events – Abide With Me, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. We sing all together on the dancefloor, and after a few drinks we’ll get up with a karaoke microphone. At big concerts we sing along en masse and like nothing better than being given the chance to join in a call and response with our heroes on stage. We sing at serious occasions too, in church, at weddings, christenings, funerals.
And yet despite the fact we do it all the time, when people are asked what talent they would most like to have they often answer that they wish they could sing. We elevate singing above many other activities, often endowing it with an almost religious significance, and believe that both in singing and in listening to others sing we can experience something transcendent. This elevation of singing can be flattering – if you happen to be a singer – yet also strangely reductive. When we regard singing as an instinctive and wholly emotional act, we narrow down our understanding of what it is and what singers are. I don’t mean to deny the emotional aspect, but what I do often find myself pointing out is: there’s more thinking in singing than you might think.
We usually identify more with singers than other musicians, and we identify them more completely with their songs. The voice is not just a body, it’s also a person, and this makes it unlike any other instruments. Despite it being a performance, containing elements of imagination, acting and projection, we often take singing very literally, imagining that what we hear or think we hear is a direct and faithful expression of the singer’s personal feelings or their personality. We feel we get to know singers by listening to them sing, and if we like the voice, we tend to imagine that we like the person.
I have a confession to make: when I listen to bands, I only really hear the singer.
Tracey Thorn playing with her first band Marine Girls in 1983. Photograph: Leon Morris/Getty Images
People say, “Great bassline on that track”, or “Love the drummer in that band”, and as a teenager, when I was starting to buy records and take them seriously, I simply didn’t know what they were talking about. I was unable to identify what the bass player was doing, or understand what his or her role was. Drumming was more obvious – you couldn’t not hear it, after all – but still, for me it was going on in the background. As for the other instruments, well, they were there to hold the tune together and move it along, to weave a kind of aural net, the purpose of which was to bear the singer aloft and carry them towards you so that they could deliver the true purpose of the music – the lead vocal.
Joining a band provided a brisk Dummies’ Guide to Instruments, and I began to understand what each member was doing. I learned how to join in with the conversation, and trained myself to pay attention to the other things that were going on apart from the singer. But that didn’t mean I ever quite moved on from my earliest perception, and even now I don’t think I hear music that differently. This leads me to wonder, is it possible to like a band, or any record, if you don’t like the singer? Is my way of listening really so unusual, or is it the way most of us hear music?
It can even be difficult to like a band if you have reservations about the singer, or get stuck on some mannerism or other. I’ve always found it hard to get past that whistling sibilance on every “s” that Damon Albarn pronounces, and it stood in the way of me ever having any real affection for Blur. On his more recent projects, some of the intonations and glottal stops have been dialled down, but still, that “s”is a funny little tic. It’s out of his control, obviously, and mean of me to mention it, but on just such minor and apparently trivial points can our feelings about singers snag.
The whistling sibilance on every ‘s’ Damon Albarn pronounces stood in the way of me having any affection for Blur
Tracey Thorn
On the other hand, it’s possible to like the singer but not the band. In the Oasis/Blur wars I was on the wrong side, in that I favoured Oasis. I had a simple singer preference. On those early singles, Liam Gallagher’s singing was spectacular – a sneering engine of a voice levelled straight at your forehead, the first vocalist since John Lydon to capture that underdog spirit of defiance in all its glory. “I’m feeling supersonic/give me gin and tonic” he demanded, not even bothering to take his hands out of his pockets. At the super-slick, stage-managed MTV awards I attended in New York he rolled on to the stage, spat on the floor, sang at us with lazy, contemptuous fury, and made me feel proud to be British. But his voice really was the most impressive thing about them, and once I’d had a few blasts of it via the first three or four singles, I felt I’d really had the best of them.
It reminded me, though, that the singer is almost always the way in to the band. It’s both a pro and a con of being a singer; audiences feel close and connected to you, and you can reach your listeners in a way that instrumentalists have to strive harder to do. On the other hand, someone not liking your voice can feel very much like them not liking you. As well as concern for one’s physical wellbeing that can border on the neurotic, the unavoidably personal element can add to a singer’s sensitivity and self-consciousness; the sense that singing is an exposing thing to do, or at least that an audience, and critics, interpret it as such, and consider themselves entitled to make judgments which, when negative, can feel like attacks on the person.
But a positive judgment can turn into something else entirely: an unrealistic and idealised version of the person doing the singing. It’s not a new phenomenon – in his book Performing Rites, Simon Frith discusses the idea of the star singer originating in classical music, before it was adopted by the world of pop: “The mass cultural notion of stardom, combining a Romantic belief in genius with a promise to make it individually available as a commodity… derives as much from the packaging of ‘high’ artists as from the hype of the low.” In the mid 19th century, for instance, the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind went on a US tour, which was masterminded by PT Barnum, and sold extensive merchandising. What we’d now call a marketing strategy was created around her, which emphasised her virginal innocence, her spiritual purity, her “authenticity”. She was presented as something superhuman but also unreal, sanitised, infantilised; she was more than just a woman singing a song, she was an Ideal, a Symbol. And perhaps this desire to deify the singer, to stress her purity and goodness, reflected something prevalent at that time, namely an anxiety about the moral status of singing, the probity of performance, of The Stage.
Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn – review
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The idea that singing is “good” for us, that it is morally uplifting is an idea that recurs in poems and novels. In Longfellow’s poem The Singers, the job of the singer is to awaken spirituality and godliness in the hearts of those hearing the song: “God sent his Singers upon earth/ With songs of sadness and of mirth/ That they might touch the hearts of men/ And bring them back to heaven again.” There’s a holy, transcendent role to singing; as opposed to singing as entertainment, which can be corrupting and lowering, it’s an explicitly religious interpretation, aligning singers with priests and preachers, charged with saving the souls of their fellow men. A heavy responsibility, you might think.
Even ordinary people can tap into this spiritual uplift when they sing. There is a description in John Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal of a group of carol singers, who look ordinary and mundane in their outdoor clothes, “but the moment they began to sing they were transformed… The carolers seemed absolved and purified as long as the music lasted, but when the final note was broken off they were just as suddenly themselves.” The effect of singing may be short-lived, only lasting as long as the song, but it is transformative and redemptive, and morally uplifting.
This is idealisation, pure and simple, and singers are uniquely vulnerable to it. More than actors, they are seen to be “themselves” in performance; what they offer is a direct expression of their own inner self, or soul, not the portrayal of a character (even though they may in fact be doing exactly that, singing lyrics written by others, or singing the tale of a character not themselves, or singing in character). The audience will tend to assume that the “I” singing is the person they see before them. And as such, their responses to the music, their projections and imaginings, become fused with what they imagine to be the personality of the singer. When reading reviews of my memoir Bedsit Disco Queen, I couldn’t help noticing how often my writing voice was compared to my singing voice. The comments were positive, and lovely, my “voice” being described as warm or approachable; down to earth and likable. But making the link between the two voices was interesting to me, suggesting that many listeners already liked “me”, or felt that they did, because they liked my singing voice, and readily identified my writing voice as belonging to the same person.
As a lyric writer, I am aware that songs written in the first person have more power, and an audience will connect more readily with them. But I am also aware that it will be taken for granted that every “I” I sing represents the real me. Writing a song called Oh, the Divorces! might have been asking for trouble (many listeners assumed I had recently divorced), and following it up with a track about visiting a singles bar in which I sang “I pull off my ring as I push my way in/ Won’t be needing it here” seemed to confirm that, yes, “I” really had ended my marriage and was now out on the dating scene. I’m regarded as a confessional songwriter, but one way in which it is possible to maintain a sense of privacy, or some mystery about the meanings of songs, is to blur the moments when “I” really means me, and when it means someone else entirely.
Some singers and writers are understood to write “in character” – Elvis Costello, for instance, or Randy Newman – because the characters they create are so obviously not themselves, and are either highly exaggerated or satirical creations or, in the case of Randy Newman, a monstrous opposite. I don’t do anything as extreme as that, so the assumption that “I” means “I” is easier to make, but it can be frustrating, and is another way in which the skill or decision-making involved in writing and singing can be overlooked in favour of a romantic belief that the artist is always engaged in the pursuit of self-expression. This simply isn’t the case. Something is being expressed, yes, and it may be something heartfelt and true, but it may not be about me or my own feelings.
Thorn with Everything But the Girl bandmate Ben Watt in 1988. Watt and Thorn married in 2008. Photograph: Steve Rapport/LFI
So when we respond to a singer, often we don’t really see or hear the actual person; we see and hear an imagined version of them, a projection of our own needs and desires. As Virginia Woolf wrote in Jacob’s Room, “Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole – they see all sorts of things – they see themselves…” When we hear a singer, much of the experience is actually happening inside our own heads, and is a mixture of memory, desire, expectation and need. If listeners tend to idealise singers, then the love an audience has for your voice can sometimes feel threatening to the singer as a person. It can make singers anxious that perhaps listeners want too much, more than the singer is willing or able to give. The biographies of troubled artists offer examples that bear this out, and when I talk to other singers there can be a recognition of this kind of feeling.
None of this is to say that singers don’t want or need to be loved – they do, of course – but there is tension in the gap between being loved for yourself and being loved for something that is not real. And an audience’s tendency to idealise can make a singer believe that in order to be loved, the singing has to be perfect, or aspire to perfection; that faults will be judged and the self disliked for them, when of course the opposite can be true. Wayne Koestenbaum explains in his book The Queen’s Throat how he loves Maria Callas above all because she made mistakes and “seemed to value expressivity over loveliness”. I would count Björk as that kind of singer. I remember a television programme in which someone said that, in contrast to many classical singers who strive only to use the most beautiful part of the voice, the “filet”, Björk was prepared to use “the whole animal”. Similarly, Koestenbaum describes Callas’s voice as “a set of sounds on the verge of chaos – but enjoyably so”. He points out a particular moment in a rendition of an aria where she holds “an awkward high note for its full value, even though the tone is unpleasant; she outstares the ugliness… During the harsh high note, we are closer to Callas. We befriend her.”
She reveals her vulnerability, her humanity at these moments, and we want this from singers more than we want their technical perfection.
But oh, how hard it is for singers to believe this, and to feel it to be true.
*****
I was in the loo at a nightclub once, years ago, when I was recognised as I washed my hands. It can’t have been that long after Missing was a hit as the request made of me was not for an autograph, or even a photo, but for me to sing a few lines of the song to prove that I was really that Tracey Thorn. And because I’d presumably had a few drinks – I must have done or I would have run a mile in the opposite direction – I agreed, and standing there at the sink I took a deep breath and sang, “I step off the train, I’m walking down your street again, and past your door, but you don’t live there any more.”
The girls stared and squealed at me, and grabbed each other, and the thing they said, which I took as the ultimate compliment, was: “YOU SOUND JUST LIKE YOU!”
I knew what they meant, of course I did. That my voice really was my voice, the authentic sound that came out of my mouth, not some product of studio trickery and fakery. There’s a naivety to this response, really, the idea that someone’s voice can be manufactured for them in the studio – which is simply not as true as people think – and an old-fashioned regard for the virtues of vocal authenticity. But there’s an important point to be made here, a timeless truth, which is that however much vocals can be manipulated, or fixed, or homogenised, finding your own voice – your unique, personal sound – is still the key ingredient in becoming a singer.
It’s not even the case that your “voice” is necessarily the raw sound you were born with; it may in fact be the “voice” you choose to sing with, and which becomes your defining sound, the style by which you are identified. Richard Curtis once told me that during the making of the film Notting Hill, he visited the studio where Elvis Costello was recording She for the closing credits. Costello apparently did several great run-throughs of the track, and then asked, “Would you like me to do one as ‘Elvis Costello’?” Well, yes, of course they would, and what resulted was a performance of unadulterated, creepy, stalker-ish Costello menace, the last thing they needed for their purposes, but still, memorable to witness.
Similarly, when I worked with [Scritti Politti frontman] Green Gartside recently, recording a duet for my Tinsel and Lights album, he was a little nervous about his singing, and after a few attempts at the vocal, asked me, “How Scritti do you want it?” By which he meant, I think, “How much do you want me to sing it in that apparently artificial and sugary-sweetened tone of the classic Scritti Politti recordings?” But the truth was, I had realised as soon as Green started to sing, that there actually wasn’t much artifice involved in the Scritti vocal sound. He really did sound like that, from the moment he opened his mouth. It was a great example of a vocal style that may at some point have been “created”, but has since become the ‘natural’ way in which that person sings.
The 1970s was a good decade for unnatural voices, giving us, for instance, Elton John’s incredibly elongated vowels and David Bowie’s invented vowels. Bowie’s voice always intrigues and delights me, not least for its unexpectedness. Listening to his hesitant speaking voice, and looking at that slight, fragile body, the beautiful clothes, the girlish bone structure, you’d imagine him having a singing voice as light as chiffon, a mere wisp of a thing. Then watch him take to the stage and bellow Jean Genie at the audience and marvel at his vocal strength and power; it’s a strongly masculine rock voice that comes from this supposedly ethereal being.
But these are voices that make no attempt to cover up their mannerisms, and their made-up nature is fully revealed when you try to sing along with them. How, after all, do you join in with Bryan Ferry doing Virginia Plain? It’s a glorious, swooning concoction, but forces you to confront one of singing’s great perils – the risk of ridicule. Dare to sing in this kind of voice and you throw caution to the wind; it could go either way. If people fall for it, and buy into it as being “your” voice, you’re home and dry, you’ve come up with something unique, which you own. But to get to that point takes courage, confirming the fact that in pop music, self-belief outweighs much else. I try to imagine the first Roxy Music rehearsal, where Bryan Ferry stalked up to the microphone and started singing, and I wonder if there were any startled looks, or if everyone in the room just decided to take him at his word and accept that as his singing voice.
In 1978, when Kate Bush released Wuthering Heights, I was too immersed in my punk records to like it. More than the fact that it featured piano – drippy – and referenced a novel – swotty – I struggled with the singing. That melodramatic, all-over-the-shop approach to vocal melody just screamed “hippy” at me, and seemed to be the aural equivalent of shawls, beads, headdresses and candles, all of which I suspected Kate Bush was wearing or surrounded by while she recorded the vocal. It was this very flamboyance that imprinted itself on people’s minds and made it so appealing to the amateur performer (still imprinted on my eardrums, eyeballs and indeed damaged psyche, is the memory of two friends’ moving rendition at a Christmas karaoke party), but singing in that way, in that voice, steered the song close to the ridiculous. You could contend that the novel itself is somewhat manic and hysterical, so Kate Bush’s vocal is true to the tone of her source material, and yet, what a gamble to take. It paid off, of course – four weeks at No 1 for a debut single about a Victorian novel isn’t bad going – and proved once again that with rock and pop singing it’s probably safe to say that you can never go too far in your quest to find a distinctive voice for yourself.
Listeners will follow you a long way if you keep them interested. The aim isn’t necessarily to feel beholden to your innate voice, or to strive to produce a “natural”-sounding voice, but above all to aim for one that has confidence in itself, and expresses something unique.
*****
Who is my favourite singer? It’s a question I’m often asked, not surprisingly, and my answer is usually the same: Dusty Springfield. I remember clearly the first time I heard her. Elvis Costello was presenting a radio show, playing a selection of his favourite records, and as was usually the case with anything like that on the radio, I was taping it on to cassette. This was 1980, or maybe 1981. He played I Don’t Want to Hear It Any More from Dusty in Memphis, and there was her voice – that smoky, husky, breathy, vulnerable, bruised, resigned, deliberate, sensual voice.
Thorn’s favourite singer, Dusty Springfield. Thorn says: ‘ I’ve always thought if Dusty’s voice was a colour, it was silver.’ Photograph: Ian Berry
Ugh, all the same old words, and they won’t do, will they? Roland Barthes in his 1972 essay The Grain of the Voice touched on this basic problem of music criticism, remarking snidely that “the work (or its performance) is invariably translated into the poorest linguistic category: the adjective”. Words are of course limited and so we all reach for the same ones, and they wear thin from overuse. But where to find better ones, truer ones? If you’d never heard her voice, what words could summon it up in your imagination?
In her biography, Dusty, Lucy O’Brien quotes Jerry Wexler, who produced Dusty in Memphis along with Arif Mardin, talking about the uniqueness of her sound: “There were no traces of black in her singing, she’s not mimetic… She has a pure silvery stream.” Silvery, I like that. I’ve always thought if Dusty’s voice was a colour, it was silver. There is so much air in every note, and although the sound is rich, it has none of the chocolatey-brown of, say, Karen Carpenter’s. It seems to exist higher up, almost suspended above our heads, literally transcendent. You look up to Dusty’s voice, in every sense.
Neil Tennant pointed to the emotional tension in her singing, saying there’s “an intensity and desperation to her voice that’s fantastically sensual”. Desperation: that’s very observant. It’s easy enough to hear the sensuality, of course, but to spot the undercurrent that makes her pierce you as much as soothe and seduce you, that’s getting more to the heart of her. Of course, although she could be melodramatic, particularly on the mid-1960s pop recordings, she was never a belter, and she was a singer who made use of the microphone. When she did project, there would be a fragility to it, and a feeling that she was covering it up with an element of bravado. There was a possibility that the voice might fail her, a note might break, although it never did. The slight huskiness is often commented on, the sound of being on the edge of laryngitis, which she suffered from recurrently.
But here’s the terrible thing; the terrible, true thing that she thought, that maybe lots of singers think, which runs counter to all that we imagine it must feel like to be in possession of a unique and gorgeous voice that people love. This is what she once said: “All I know is that I have a distinctive voice I don’t particularly like listening to.”
In the recording studio, Dusty would be demanding and perfectionist, both admirable qualities, essential for the making of good music, but when it came to the moment of recording the vocals she would turn those thoughts on herself like knives. She would have the volume in her headphones turned up as loud as possible, to the point where it was almost painful, and the effect would be overwhelming. That way she could disappear inside a wall of sound, and so, just as she hid her physical appearance behind the mask of hair and makeup, she would hide even her voice.
Singing in a choir, your voice can vanish among all the others, you are part of one big communal sound and no one is listening to you in particular. But as a solo singer, especially a famous and loved solo singer, this luxury is usually denied. You must be heard, and you must hear yourself. Dusty tried to escape hearing herself as a way of escaping confrontation with that which disappointed her, but I wonder also whether she suffered from that confusion between her voice and her person, whether she perceived doubts about her voice as in fact doubts about her value as a person, even about her existence as a real, authentic person.
As her career moved on, and she left behind the glory of the British pop hits and the magnificence of albums like Dusty in Memphis, she really did begin to get lost, wandering a path with no obvious musical or career signposts to follow. She had matured as an artist, and at the very point when she should have been reaching a pinnacle in terms of success, her audience began to dwindle. Dusty in Memphis, released in 1969 and one of the greatest albums ever made, sold relatively poorly and was fairly soon deleted. Cameo, released in 1973, was a complete flop. It’s one of my favourite records. I sing along with it and wish I had her voice. I fantasise that this is my new album, that all those musicians and backing singers are there for me, and that I am the voice at the centre of it all. I don’t have Dusty’s range, and I wish I did. If I could sing those songs the way she sang them, I’d be so proud, is what I think. I’d be fulfilled. I know it isn’t true; I know it isn’t as simple as that, and yet I fall into the same trap as every deluded listener. It’s what singing does to us. It makes us so happy that we imagine it must come from happiness, mustn’t it? Otherwise, it just doesn’t seem fair. That we should be having all the fun.
© Tracey Thorn 2015. The above is an edited extract from Naked at the Albert Hall, published by Virago, £16.99, 30 April. To pre-order it for £13.59 click here