by Tracey Thorn
Dragged out from behind the kit and made to stand centre stage, it was immediately apparent that she lacked the stage presence to do so, and wasn’t a natural performer. Those around her felt that the drum kit was a security blanket, something she hid behind, and so they did her the great kindness of taking that security blanket away and throwing it in the bin. In Randy L. Schmidt’s biography Little Girl Blue, she is quoted as saying, ‘It hurt me that I had to get up and be up front. I didn’t want to give up my playing. Singing was an accident. Singing seriously came long after the drums.’ Interpreted as weakness, maybe her love of playing drums was really an act of self-knowledge, an understanding of what was good for her and where her limits, or her desires, lay. ‘Lead Sister’ she had printed on her T-shirt, which might seem self-deprecating – oh, I’m nobody really, just Richard’s sister – but might also have been a statement of intent: you call me the lead singer but it’s not how I see myself. I’m a team player, part of a group, a family; I can’t quite take this image of myself seriously.
Schmidt recounts how Terry Ellis of Chrysalis Records, whom she became close to for a while, came to see The Carpenters play live in 1975 and was shocked by how unprofessional Karen was on stage, how little stage presence she seemed to have: ‘She hadn’t the slightest idea how to use a stage. She did everything wrong… She’d sing a song, and when the guitar player or drummer played a little solo she’d turn her back on the audience and sort of click her fingers and had no interrelation with the audience…’
In other words, she behaved like a muso on stage, like a jazz performer, like someone more wrapped up in the music than in showing off to the crowd. In a different context this would have been tolerated, respected even. Maybe she was cut out for an entirely different kind of musical career – one where she could have sung from her drum kit, clicked her fingers during the guitar solos, closed her eyes and lost herself, let the audience go hang. But this was light entertainment she was caught up in. Big-time showbiz. And it had rules. She hadn’t known what those rules were, and had never signed up to them, but as time went by, she was reminded more and more that she needed to learn them, and needed to modify her behaviour. She learned that ‘she did everything wrong’. She was taught how to move about the stage, how to reach down and touch the outstretched hands of the front row, how to really be the focus of attention. And this, cruelly, led to resentment from the person she loved most in the world, her brother.
At one point, in an attempt to rectify the attention imbalance between the two of them – to enable Richard to be a bit more the star – they rigged up a mirror above his piano and angled it so that the audience could clearly see his hands flying up and down the keyboard. If they could see what Richard was doing, the thinking apparently went, they’d come to their senses, realise that he was the true talent of the band. Karen herself seems to have partly agreed with this, sharing in the sense that her brother was unfairly disregarded, and that it was by mere accident that the audience loved her. ‘Because I’m the lead singer I get all the credit,’ she said. ‘They think I did it, and all I do is sing. He’s the one that does all the work.’
I agree with her that focus on the singer can be unbalanced, but, as I wrote in an earlier chapter, it reflects a general truth about audiences – that there is only so much of the instrumental music they can understand and appreciate. Much of the detail and subtlety of a musical arrangement can pass listeners by, as they simply don’t have the technical expertise or knowledge to recognise how much skill may be involved, or what level of talent they are witnessing. But singing is different; audiences believe and feel that they can understand singing, and latch onto the singer with gratitude – this we understand, this speaks to us. In the case of The Carpenters, most of us would agree that the audience was right: Karen was so clearly the best thing about the group. The songs are often great, yes, but the arrangements, the settings, the instrumentation, well, they don’t always do her justice. Plus the softness, the sweetness – let’s be honest, the schmaltziness – that kept many of us at a distance for so long, was all Richard’s doing, and I can’t be alone in sometimes wishing we could have heard Karen with someone else doing the music. So when she says ‘all I do is sing. He’s the one that does all the work’, I also can’t be the only one thinking, ‘Honey, YOU were the one doing all the work, it was always all about your singing.’
It’s never easy to define what it is that’s great about a singer, but an observation made by Schmidt in his biography struck me as providing a clue. It’s to do with the length of her phrases before she takes a breath. Listen to the opening of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’, where she sings ‘We’ve only just begun… to live’ before she takes a breath. Many singers would pause and breathe after that ‘begun’, but she holds on and finishes the phrase before breaking.
And in ‘Goodbye to Love’, listen to where she sings ‘Time and time again the chance for love has passed me by, and all I know of love is how to live without it’. Now, that’s all in one breath. It’s a convoluted, twisting piece of melody, so as you get further into the line and begin to be short of breath, it becomes harder to control the pitch of the voice. Try and do it yourself now; it’s not easy. But listening to her, there is absolutely no indication of difficulty, it is the epitome of ‘easy’ singing: deceptive in that all the effort is engaged in the act of hiding the effort. In itself this might be a meaningless technical accomplishment, and not actually that challenging for any singer with reasonable breath control to do, but what’s interesting to me is the fact that she chose to sing these long unbroken lines, almost the equivalent of a cinematic single long take – the passage I quoted from ‘Goodbye to Love’ reminds me of the three-and-a-half-minute tracking shot which begins Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. It’s a style that has an entrancing effect on the listener: you are drawn in as she begins, and then find you are almost holding your breath, waiting for her to breathe, and it’s a long time before she does, so you are held, suspended, hypnotised; just as in the cinema your eyes are glued to the screen, not wishing to interrupt the seamless flow. A pause in the delivery of a vocal while a breath is taken can sometimes release the tension, freeing the listener momentarily (though sometimes it’s true that it can have the opposite effect – dramatic in-breaths can be used to heighten the sense of effort, to build anxiety in the listener), but in so many of her lines Karen takes few noticeable breaths, so you are held captive by the vocal performance, caught in her spell. It’s very effective, and, along with the richness and warmth of her tone – so often commented on as to be almost taken for granted but still, unusually lovely, utterly and uniquely beautiful – it is, I believe, one of the sources of her power as a singer.
Also, you can hear how close she is to the mic; on ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’, at the end of the line ‘white lace and promises’, there is the very clear sound of her mouth opening. Nowadays you’d edit that out, cleaning up the gaps between lines of vocal, but it’s an indication of how intimate she is with the mic. Many who worked with her noticed how much of a mic singer Karen was, how soft her voice was, how little projection she had. All this gave you the sense that you were really getting close to her, getting inside her thoughts, even; and the awful sadness of some of the songs – honestly, there is a Nico-like bleakness and air of futility to some of the Carpenters’ lyrics – is at odds with the cheerfulness of the publicity photos, the flounciness of the dresses. She didn’t write those lyrics, but she certainly sang them as if they came from the depths of her being.
I wouldn’t presume to assign to her tragic early death a simplified reading of her problems with fame or performance; and people who know much more about anorexia than I do would surely point to the relevance of complex family relationships, and deep-rooted issues to do with self-worth and control. But it can’t be wrong to at least acknowledge that for anyone struggling with such issues, the stage is probably not the safest place to be. And it’s a reminder that talent – like beauty, or money –
can’t always save you, or counterbalance the forces that weigh you down.
So you might dream of having a voice like Karen Carpenter’s, imagining it would make you happy, or at least fulfilled. At least you’d be sure of that one thing, wouldn’t you? You’d be secure in your possession of a peerless talent, and that would be valuable, would count in your favour. The possession of something extraordinary, that’s the goal. You could easily believe that having that singing voice would make the difference. And you’d be wrong. Turns out it’s more use in life, or safer at least, to have something we consider ordinary – commonplace, even – to be certain that you are loved by those you love the most.
7
YOU SOUND JUST LIKE YOU
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 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.
A significant part of ‘finding your voice’ is settling on what accent to sing in. But if the accent you choose is not your own, natural accent, have you actually found your voice, or rather, invented your voice? For those of us from the UK who sing pop or rock music the default setting is a US accent, and yes, I am aware of how vague that sounds, and that there are differences between the accents of Tennessee, Brooklyn and the San Fernando Valley. But there’s a generic American accent that has long been accepted as a natural and normal tone of voice for British singers to adopt.
In the early rock and roll days, British singers copied the American music they heard, which included singing in an ‘American’ accent – often an Afro-American accent, in truth. They sang in the way they felt fitted the music, and did their best to sing in what they thought was the correct accent, but of course they were often wide of the mark, having no real experience or understanding of the subtleties of the accent they were copying. As a result, to American ears they often still sounded very British – or at least, not American. From the mid-1960s onwards British singers moved away from this tendency as the idea of sounding British took on its own validity, and then punk came along and said that it was corporate and fake to sing in a US accent, and introduced a whole slew of bands who used not just a British accent, but a very self-consciously working-class British accent, whether or not this was any closer to their speaking voices than an American accent would have been. It was a badge of honour, a mark of authenticity; singing ‘in American’ marked you out as a pop star, whereas the punk accent asserted your street credibility. There were some artists who ignored this, though; The Stranglers proved that they were not ‘really punk’ by adopting US accents, as did Elvis Costello, who in fact took it to extreme lengths. The first song I heard by him was ‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’, and it seemed like a while since I’d heard anyone singing in such shameless American. I loved it immediately, and sang along with him at home, so perhaps it’s no surprise that when I started singing with the Marine Girls, my accent was more American than was the norm within the indie scene at the time. My bandmates Gina and Alice both sang in markedly English accents, so there was an immediate discrepancy between the three of us. When we played at the Moonlight Club in London with Felt, Lawrence from the band came up to me afterwards and said I had ‘sounded great, really American!’ It was interesting to me that he considered this a compliment (although I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that he himself was trying to sound like Lou Reed), but I understood, and I took it as such. It seemed that, despite punk and indie and the idea of being authentic and true to your roots, deep inside some of us still had the feeling that it just sounded better singing in a slightly American accent. When I met up with Ben at university in 1981, and we recorded our first EBTG single ‘Night and Day’, it felt obvious to sing a jazz standard in American. However, Ben still sang in the pastoral-influenced English accent of his early solo recordings, so on the B-side track, ‘Feeling Dizzy’, there are two competing accents. It’s not that this doesn’t work – and exactly the same clash would happen when I sang with Robert Wyatt on Working Week’s ‘Venceremos’ – but still, it’s intriguing to hear two singers, born within only a few miles of each other, adopting accents which originate thousands of miles apart.
Through the years, my accent would shift on occasion. After two years living in Hull and a few months of listening to Morrissey, I went a bit northern amid the American, so there is a line on Eden, during the song ‘Even So’, when in the midst of my usual accent I suddenly sing, ‘It’s joost that I fear you can’t looove as you did before’. By the time of Love Not Money, and on into Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, I’d discovered country music and my American accent drifted further south, closer to the Mason–Dixon line, than ever before or since. I’d discovered how satisfying it is to accentuate the ‘H’ sound whenever it appears at the beginning of a word, particularly if that word is ‘heaven’, and on the songs ‘Are You Trying to Be Funny?’ and ‘Heaven Help Me’ I exploit it to the full, sounding more like Tammy Wynette than anyone born in Brookmans Park really has a right to. Over the next few albums my accent settles a bit, reverting to being more non-specifically US, until on Walking Wounded there are moments when I sing in a more British accent than ever before. ‘Flipside’ in particular, with its glottal stops and London vowels, is a different accent to any I had used before, and it continued on to Temperamental, on tracks like ‘Hatfield 1980’, ‘Downhill Racer’ and ‘No Difference’. The influence was from M
assive Attack, and the way they rapped in their own homegrown voices on tracks like ‘Karma Coma’, and it might even, I’m ashamed to say, have owed something to the mockney accents of Britpop. In the mid-1990s, sounding British went through something of a renewed vocal vogue. But I felt that I had finally come up with an accent that did feel properly mine – a hybrid, admittedly, the American slurring and softened consonants I’d always enjoyed now blended occasionally with harder British endings, closer to the sound of my natural speaking voice.