by Tracey Thorn
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.
5
NO SINGING
I make up new notes, ones that don’t belong anywhere near the chords I’m playing, and I sing those. People must think, It’s so nice of them to let that deaf girl sing.
Kristin Hersh, Paradoxical Undressing
I
t was punk that gave birth to the idea of the non-singer. Rock music may have been full of unconventional vocalists before this – from Dylan through to Tom Waits and Lou Reed – but they at least bore traces of previous singers and singing styles, whether it was the nasal twang of country, the semi-speaking of traditional folk delivery, or the small-hours, cigarette-y jazz drawl. And, of course, rock albums have long credited the singing to a ‘vocalist’, or told us who is on ‘lead vocals’ rather than mentioning the word singing. It’s debatable whether this is a form of pretension – it’s more than singing – or deprecation – it’s not really singing – but perhaps it’s both, in the sense that rock’s approach to singing sought, from the very start, to be both more and other. And from the 1950s onwards, parents accidentally watching rock and roll and then pop groups on TV would all declare in unison, ‘They can’t sing!’ and ‘You can’t hear the words!’, pointing out, as though their kids hadn’t noticed – and as though it wasn’t the whole point – the yawning gulf that separated these vocalists from the ones who’d gone before, the crooners, the tuneful serenaders, the sellers of songs.
Punk opened the door to a whole new attitude towards singing, the concept of deliberately not-singing, or not singing properly. Making a vocal sound that could not be described as even trying to sing in a way that would have been recognised as such by previous generations. And not because this era was bereft of talent and spawned a generation of singers sharing a unique inability to hold a tune, but because the performers were making choices that were intended to challenge the very idea of what singing was supposed to be.
Listening to Johnny Rotten, you couldn’t possibly believe in his delivery as a ‘natural’ way of singing. It’s completely improbable to picture an early rehearsal, at which the band started up the opening riff of, say, ‘Pretty Vacant’ and Johnny just opened up his mouth and that was the sound that came out. No, you could be sure that a lot of thought had gone into that sound; that it was a style of singing that embodied a whole attitude towards singing and music. Inspired no doubt by his immediate forebears the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten’s voice nonetheless had none of their more traditional raw masculinity, and in eschewing that apparently central tenet of rock singing he gave birth to something new: a sound that was fairly gender-neutral, expressive without being melodramatically emotional, and rebellious without buying into the rock notion that rebelliousness was inherently masculine. He sounded whiny, more oppressed than all-powerful, and slightly desperate. Every note he sang had ‘I KNOW I CAN’T SING’ stamped all over it, and it opened the floodgates for a generation of boys and girls to experiment and have fun while breaking all the rules about what singing should sound like.
I think of Poly Styrene as an example of someone who would probably never have got near a microphone in any other generation – almost the epitome of the non-singer, she could barely carry a tune, had no vibrato, nothing much to speak of in the way of range, and I absolutely loved her. Sheer force of will and strength of personality meant that she shone on stage, like a creature born to be there, delivering songs about modern society and its oppressive power over the individual with an irrepressible sense of joy. Simon Frith, in Performing Rites, says that her voice was the antithesis of femininity – ‘it is not sweet or controlled or restrained’ – and that this was a very conscious move on her part: ‘its “unmusicality” is crafted. It is necessary for the song’s generic impact.’ In other words, she isn’t just accidentally singing ‘badly’, there’s a point being made. She seemed the embodiment of a free spirit, and as such was inspirational to timid little teenage me. If rules about what constituted ‘good singing’ were rigidly enforced, we would never have heard her, and the world would be a poorer place.
And what about Mark E. Smith? Can Mark E. Smith ‘sing’, in any conventional sense of the word? You’d have to say no, of course not, but in every other sense he can deliver a vocal like no one else, and in single-handedly inventing a vocal tic – an extra syllable at the end of every line, half grunt, half exasperated outburst: ‘AH!’ – that defines and identifies him, he too carved out a singular place for himself in the story of singing.
After a while, the danger was that new-wave non-singing developed its own set of cliches, which hardened and set and became vocal conventions in their own right. Foremost among these was the punk ‘yelp’. A musicologist would have to pinpoint where we heard it first, and I’m not the person to do that, but Patti Smith was certainly doing it on Horses – listen to ‘Gloria’, for instance, where on these lines, ‘look out the window see a sweet young thing’ and ‘oh she looks so fine’, she ends each phrase by concluding with an upward, swooping yelp. Who else? Siouxsie Sioux, obviously, more noticeably on the early tracks like ‘Love in a Void’ and ‘Metal Postcard’; and if there was a tape of it, which thankfully there isn’t, you’d hear me doing it on my infamous version of ‘Rebel Rebel’ from what we might call The Wardrobe Sessions, my first attempt at singing during a rehearsal with my first band, Stern Bops. Pretty soon it had become an obvious cliche, a shorthand way of doing punky singing, and the yelpiness transmuted into a rather arch tone of voice. And when even that seemed too melodramatic, a post-punk style of absolutely deadpan non-singing became more prevalent from groups like Scritti Politti, Gang of Four and The Raincoats.
What this all adds up to is the fact that, just as punk allowed you to learn three chords and form a band, equally it enabled you to take hold of the microphone, position yourself at the front of the stage, and call yourself the Lead Singer, even if you couldn’t sing. And this could be liberating even for those who pre-dated the movement, a good example being Marianne Faithfull, whose 1979 Broken English album is a masterpiece of punk-inspired reinvention. Alexis Petridis reviewed its 2013 reissue and accurately described the sea change in her singing which the album displayed: ‘In the 60s, her voice was prim and weirdly stilted… Damaged by the excesses of the preceding years, her husking vocals on Broken English seemed not merely ravaged, but imperious and defiant… She sounded like she was telling someone to go and fuck themselves even when she wasn’t.’
The changed sound of Faithfull’s voice may have been a result of physical damage wrought by years of a lifestyle that did little to protect it. But that change in attitude, that defiant stance of singing every line like you’re telling someone to go and fuck themselves – that, I think, was inspired by punk; the way that punk’s rebellious style moved on from the old macho exclusively rock and roll cliches made it particularly liberating for female sin
gers.
Paradoxical Undressing, the Kristin Hersh book from which this chapter’s opening quote is taken, is brutally honest about Hersh’s own singing and her approach to performing. Her band Throwing Muses got started in the 1980s and were part of the indie scene that in many ways was really America’s punk rock moment. Kristin’s thoughts about singing place her firmly in the punk-inspired camp of non-singers, and having spotted her on Twitter, I made contact and asked if she’d answer a couple of questions. I told her how much I loved that line from her book, which is so self-deprecating and funny, and asked her if she felt part of a punk generation, inspired by the flowering of a style of non-singing:
KRISTIN: I have one rule in the studio: ‘no singing’, meaning ‘no faking’. Which probably pertains to guitar parts as well: no chops, no imitating, no telling the song what to do. A real vocal is a textural expression. Maybe the kind you croon to your baby, maybe the kind you yell when you drop something on your foot, but it must be determined by the song or it will never resonate with the listener. And if it’s embarrassing? So much the better!
ME: I also love the bits in your book which are your conversations with Betty Hutton, where she stresses the importance of entertaining people, putting on a performance, and you are quite resistant to this. Do you still feel that is true to your ideas about singing and performing or have you come round to her point of view at all?
KRISTIN: I know that people who ‘perform’ out-perform me by music business standards, but I don’t think they’re musicians. Rather, they’re performers. My job is to disappear inside a song, to shake off the outside rather than show it off. I can be practically drooling on stage, with my eyes rolling back in my head, but at least the song is on stage instead of me. It’s never pretty, though.
ME: What is your relationship with your voice? Do you love it? Does it feel like an intrinsic part of you or something separate? Do you worry about it, fear for it, take care of it like a baby? Or are you blasé and carefree about it?
KRISTIN: The most my voice is capable of is telling the truth. I like the truth (sometimes).
For Kristin, singing is about getting at some kind of truth, and if this comes at the risk of embarrassment, well, so be it. Punk was big on notions of authenticity and credibility, and so there’s a somewhat theoretical mindset present in this take on singing. Sometimes I think that my own version of how to sing is more prosaic, akin to the advice Noel Coward gave to actors, namely, ‘Speak clearly, don’t bump into the furniture.’ Applied to singing, I suppose this translates as, ‘Know the words and try to sing in tune.’ But how does it square with my admiration for all this non-singing? What if ideologically you bought into all these concepts, and felt a kinship with Siouxsie and Poly Styrene, and the not-even-trying-to-sing approach of people like The Raincoats and Delta 5, but then, when you started singing, you realised you had a voice which was, well, not like that? When I sang for the very first time, from inside that wardrobe, I made a stab at impersonating the voice of the time, and it was all Siouxsie Sioux swoops and yelps. But after I emerged from the shadows, I never sang like that again. Realising that I could actually sing, it seemed like an act of the greatest inauthenticity to cover it up, to try to sing badly, to put on an alternative voice. And so I started to seek out others who really sang, who were part of the musical world I loved but who imported into it something of the music from outside.
A brief digression on hairstyles: the reason I had all those dark curls in my early 1981 Cherry Red publicity pics was because I had had my hair permed in a vain attempt to look like Lesley Woods, the guitar-toting feminist frontwoman of Birmingham band the Au Pairs. It didn’t quite work because I went to the local hairdresser in my home village of Brookmans Park and he was an expert at the kind of perms requested by my mum and her contemporaries, so the result was a more neat, housewifey ‘do’ than the unruly black mop I’d been hoping for. It looked better as it grew out, and I had it permed several more times, each time believing that it would transform me at a stroke into my current heroine. If the music I was into had been all about proving that anyone could join a band and anyone could sing, then here was Lesley suggesting that, while that might be all very well up to a point, there was still no substitute for someone who actually could sing.
She was the exception that proved the rule. Someone who would and should have been a singer at any point in pop music history. Husky-voiced, sensual, with an almost unheard-of-for-the-times vibrato, she was the second singer after Patti Smith who truly inspired me. I saw the Au Pairs live several times in 1980, and when their first album, Playing with a Different Sex, came out in 1981 I fell for it heavily. Singing along with ‘Headache for Michelle’ and ‘Repetition’ revealed to me more about how I might sound, and I borrowed from her my tendency to end a note with a wavery tremolo of a breath, the first hint of something ‘jazzy’ in my singing. Of course, when required, she could do the mandatory shouty voice too, as on songs like ‘Come Again’ and ‘Dear John’, but even then she had a commanding presence that came from the confidence of knowing what she was doing.
And so Lesley Woods led me to Billie Holiday. Maybe I read a review that made the connection, or just heard some echo in her lazy phrasing, a hint of gravel in the tone. Whatever it was, it meant that I was soon listening to someone who really was a singer. True, Billie Holiday was no smooth-toned crooner, but still, it wasn’t hard to hear the difference between her and Poly Styrene or Siouxsie Sioux. She herself might not have believed in her own legend (music journalist Ian Penman recently sent me an extraordinary snippet of her speaking, captured on a bootleg tape: ‘I’m tellin’ you – me and my old voice, it just go up a little bit and come down a little bit. It is not LEGIT. I do not got a legitimate voice’), but for me there was no doubting her. And it was partly because I was beginning to realise that I too could maybe sing ‘properly’ that I became more drawn to other singers who transcended the limits of post-punk non-singing. I bought a Billie Holiday album in a garish orange sleeve, one of many Best Of compilations and all my budget could stretch to, and discovered songs like ‘I Cover the Waterfront’ and ‘My Man’. From the securely hip world of my punk and post-punk singles, I wandered sideways, off the beaten track and into jazz. Post-punk sort of allowed this, in that it was very welcoming to anything that wasn’t rock, but still, the preference was for the more experimental end of jazz. Billie Holiday wasn’t exactly that. She sang these songs straight, but with a rawness that allowed rock fans to relate to her. Downstairs, my mum and dad had their Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, but I found it harder to admit to liking those. Billie Holiday they weren’t so sure about, and that worked in her favour as far as I was concerned. I learned many of her songs, tried to imitate her vibrato, and by the time I met Ben, I was already wondering if there was a way to combine that kind of singing with the music I’d played up until then. If my singing began to sound more ‘jazzy’, well, that was down to Billie and her influence. But this new direction would raise a whole set of problems to do with questions of ease and difficulty, and the perceived profundity of different types of singing.
Academic and critic Aidan Day – who, coincidentally, was my first English tutor at Hull University – writes (as quoted in Simon Frith’s Performing Rites) about Bob Dylan that he has a voice which ‘at once solicits and rebuffs. The gratifications it offers are uncomfortable ones. It is a pattern of invitation and rejection in which the audience – alienated from easy absorption into the music and denied relaxation – is required to attend closely to the transactions between voice and words.’ The implication is that a difficult voice forces you to listen more closely, make more effort, attend more minutely to what is being sung. You can’t just swoon as you would into the arms of a sweeter, smoother voice: you have to pay attention, and this implies that you will take the singing more seriously and get something deeper out of it. And so, the non-singing style of punk and its aftermath meant that you could immediately impress upon an audience, and pe
rhaps more to the point, upon music critics, the notion that you were serious, worthy of close scrutiny; that your work was demanding, and by implication, clever. If, in contrast, you had a voice which was not uncomfortable, which in fact had at its core a tone that could easily soothe and charm, then you could be accused of being shallow, banal, merely relaxing. Whether or not that is necessarily a bad thing is entirely a matter of opinion, but it has to be said that for a long time in the history of modern pop it seemed to be taken for granted by many journalists that there was something suspect about what might be termed ‘proper’ singing.
6
LEAD SISTER
W
ho embodies all that I’ve just said about a style of singing perceived to be smooth and relaxing more than Karen Carpenter? With her luxurious mink of a voice, all softness and warmth, no sharp edges in sight, she is regarded, for good or bad, as the epitome of the soothing singer – yet you don’t have to dig very deep into her story to see how jarring, how incomplete and careless that description is. I’ve occasionally been compared to her, and while I take that as nothing but a compliment, I’m also aware of darker similarities between us: problems and inconsistencies around singing that exist (or existed) in sharp contrast to all the surface ease. I’ve said before that I used to think of myself not so much as ‘a singer’, as ‘someone who sings’, and delving into Karen’s biography it’s clear that at the start of her career, and possibly even well into it, she regarded herself as The Carpenters’ drummer, who happened to sing. In the early days she sang from her position behind the drums, which I’ve always considered one of the coolest of musical accomplishments, but this wasn’t allowed to last. It’s obvious to us now, but it was a surprise to her at the time, that when people heard her sing they were overwhelmed. Richard’s piano playing may have been fine, her drumming perfectly good, but her voice, well, that was something different. And so of course audiences, managers, record companies, they wanted to hear her sing more, and they wanted to see her sing.