Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  I think I’ve settled on this accent now, since I don’t think twice about it when I sing. The solo albums I’ve made in recent years reveal no obvious changes. It seems to me that there are certain songs that require a subtle gradation of accent, and it’s instinctive to blur the line between my real accent and the accent I’ve so often sung in. A little while ago I recorded some songs written by Molly Drake, singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s mother. Her own versions are quintessentially English, her accent striking the now almost lost tones of Received Pronunciation, and this lends the songs an air of inaccessibility. They seem to belong so completely to another era, ensconced in the drawing room with all its politeness and reserve, that the dark emotions buried within them can go unheard. So I tried to sing them in a direct manner, as she does, while shaking off some of the more dated, middle-class features of the diction – and the obvious way to solve this was to subtly Americanise them, in order to gently tease out some of the blues-like inflections of her writing. It was a fine balance – trying not to lose what is distinctive and unique about them, while freeing them from some of the mannerisms that simply sound too artificial or old-fashioned for our tastes.

  Recording a voice is a way of capturing it, and may even reveal to the singer something they didn’t know was there. Wayne Koestenbaum writes of the singer Nellie Melba hearing her recorded voice for the first time and exclaiming, ‘Heavens, it’s me.’ He adds that this aspect of revelation was one of the great claims of the early recording companies: ‘The Victor Company promises, “A mirror may reflect your face and what is written there; but the Victrola will reflect and reveal your soul to you – and what is hidden deep within it.”’ You cannot hide from a recording of your voice, and what is revealed is far more than mere timbre, or range, or inflection. The implication is that the unique voice – whether we believe it to be entirely natural, ‘authentic’, or at least in part a created or discovered thing – opens up a direct conduit to the soul, or the personality.

  Because of this we worry and fret about whether or not a singer’s voice is ‘mannered’ or ‘artificial’, believing perhaps that this is a gross act of concealment or dishonesty, that in attempting to cover up one’s natural voice, or add to it, or improve upon it, we are committing an act of subterfuge which is both sinister and untrustworthy. What are we trying to hide? Why are we trying to pass off mere fakery as the real thing?

  Within pop there is a long tradition of the artificial, ‘put-on’ voice; indeed it’s difficult to locate what we might call genuinely natural or ‘real’ voices, since there’s almost always some element of pretence involved in the singing process. Nonetheless, some singers really do seem to have gone to the ends of the earth to dredge up a distinctive sound, and to have come back with a voice that can only be described as deliberately provocative. With these voices it’s not even the case that they are imitating someone else, more that they are inventing something on the spot, for better or worse. Mick Jagger, for instance, is often accused of emulating black singers, but really, who? Who can you think of who actually sounded like that before Jagger ‘imitated’ them? It’s a cartoon of a black singer, painted onto a balloon and then inflated, then put through a mangle, then through an amplifier. What comes out the other end is patently foolish and ridiculous, and turned him into one of rock’s most admired singers, copied in his turn to this very day.

  Simon Frith, in Performing Rites, says of the early days of rock and roll singing that it is salutary to note that white singers didn’t just steal from black culture, ‘they burlesqued it’. He quotes Bernard Gendron stating in Rock and Roll Mythology: Race and Sex in Whole Lotta Shakin Going On, that rock and roll introduced a lot of black artists to a white audience, but the audience then expected the performers to live up to their notions of authentically ‘black’ style, which they’d seen packaged and exaggerated by white singers. So people like Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Ray Charles, who all ‘began their careers by singing the blues in a rather sedate manner… later accelerated their singing speed, resorted to raspy-voiced shrieks and cries… they went from singing less black (like Nat King Cole or the Mills Brothers) to singing more black’… which was in turn borrowed back by more white performers, in a kind of escalation. We have become used to singing styles that were almost entirely artificial and mannered, and indeed regard them as the foundations of today’s rock and pop music.

  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 number one 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. That in itself is a form of naturalness, in that it’s not about imitation – which you could regard as the ultimate artificiality – but striving for individuality, even if that means employing what might be regarded as ‘mannerisms’. In the case of both Costello and Gartside, you could easily argue that they are mannered singers, with voices that have been artificially constructed; nevertheless, both have a strong sense that the ‘voice’ they have created is entirely their own. Would you like me to do one as ‘Elvis Costello’? How Scritti do you want it?

  8

  A FIENDISH OBSTACLE RACE

  I

  t seemed likely that Green Gartside would have interesting things t
o say about singing. Renowned for being a great pop thinker and theorist, it was from his interviews in the NME in the late 1970s and early 1980s that I learned words like deconstruction and hegemony. I was still at school at the time, and not paying much attention to what was on offer there, so this was an education of sorts, albeit a patchy and piecemeal one. These interviews, though, and the songs that prompted them, were bracing and invigorating, like being dunked in the deep end of a pool of thought without any armbands on, or any real idea of how to swim. In an interview with the Guardian, Green himself admitted that during this period, ‘the ratio of tactically deployed pop banality to smartarse references to Kant and Gramsci was occasionally uncomfortably high’. He gained a reputation for being exceptionally brainy, and for his unusual ability to offer a detached perspective on the music he was making; in other words, to deconstruct his own works and their meanings. Which is why it came as no surprise to me to hear him say, ‘How Scritti do you want it?’ Here was someone entirely aware of the competing elements of artifice and reality within the pop voice; someone who I suspected had given a lot of thought to the concept of singing, both his own and other people’s.

  So I was delighted when he agreed to talk to me about singing, and I thought it would be good to get started on simple terms. Steering clear of any attempt to impress him by asking about Roland Barthes (which I’m sure wouldn’t have impressed him at all), I began with a nice obvious question:

  ME: Did you always want to be a singer?

  GREEN: Well, since childhood I always dreamed of being in a band. Punk made that a realisable aim. I didn’t especially want to be the singer. That really fell to me by default.

  ME: Yes, this is what happens to people, so much of it is an accident. There are the precocious kids who get up on tables at family weddings and sing to everyone, and who spend their lives in front of the mirror with the hairbrush microphone, but I suspect many of them never take it any further. So you end up with people like us at the front of the stage, the ones who got there by default. I often think I might have been happier at the back, maybe the bass player or something. I used to dream of being Gillian in New Order; I thought that really might have suited me better.

  GREEN: Like you, perhaps I’m suspicious of romantic ideas of ‘inspiration’. The voice is really all influences and anatomy. When I was a young boy my favourite singer was Paul McCartney. Other early favourites were Brian Wilson, Paul Rodgers from Free (I know!), Robert Wyatt, Robin Williamson, Martin Carthy, Captain Beefheart… lots, lots more… very varied. Favourites, but not clear influences. All white men (and Joni Mitchell) back then.

  ME: And did you try to imitate them, on the way to finding your own voice?

  GREEN: I’m sure I tried imitating them all on the way to ‘creating’ my own voice. I don’t think my voice or anyone else’s is ‘natural’ or ‘unmediated’ or ‘unaffected’. To a greater or lesser extent I could and can sing in (or with?) voices other than that with which I’m associated. I think we probably all can.

  ME: I think that’s true up to a point, although I’d always be limited in terms of physical strength – I’d never be able to be a shouter, which I sometimes wish I could be.

  But certainly, when I’m on my own and feeling uninhibited, I can ‘put on’ different voices and it’s kind of intriguing to imagine how different you might sound if you used them. But I think once you’ve established yourself with one particular voice, you’re not really allowed to change it much. People would be freaked out, I think.

  (I’m reminded at this moment of a piece I read on a music blog, The Delete Bin, by a writer called Rob Jones, entitled ‘8 Voices of Bob Dylan’. It’s a fascinating piece, you can find it online if you want to read it all, but he starts out by saying that when people object to Bob Dylan by stating that they don’t like his voice, ‘my reaction in recent years is to wonder which voice they happen to be talking about. After all, Bob’s used more than one.’ And then he goes on to provide a clear and distinct description of them all, from the early Guthrie-isms of ‘The Young Man in Old Man’s Clothes’, through ‘The Nasal-Voiced Youth’, who experimented with words being sounds as much as they were messages, then ‘The Braying Beatnik’ of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, via ‘The Country Crooner’ of ‘Nashville Skyline’, all the way to ‘The Grizzled Old Troubadour’ of the present day. Dylan himself has admitted that this is true, writing in his book Chronicles that when he recorded ‘Nashville Skyline’, ‘The music press didn’t know what to make of it. I used a different voice too’. It made me realise that, in fact, some singers do get away with altering their voices, or experimenting with different vocal sounds; and to do that while still persuading people that you have a distinct and settled vocal identity is quite an achievement.)

  ME: So when did you find your own voice?

  GREEN: The ‘Scritti’ voice we mentioned was arrived at almost abruptly when I got sick of British indie guitar music. Abruptly, but only semi-consciously. It’s a voice that returned to early 1960s white pop influences mixed with some American R ’n’ B pop singing from the 1980s. For a bunch of reasons it’s a voice with pretty much no vibrato. Maybe that’s its distinguishing feature? I think that’s because the sugary, white-bread pop music I liked as a boy was sung by men with relatively ‘pure’, unornamented voices. Not much wobbling going on with the Beatles or the Beach Boys, for example. Also a lot of 1960s ‘countercultural’ bands had singers who eschewed earlier more ‘mannered’ stylings. And I had a distaste for melodramatic vibrato, maybe particularly when used by white singers. Listening to contemporary black R ’n’ B then coincided with becoming even more suspicious of the ‘truth’ of the voice and of ‘expressivity’. That came in part from Derrida.

  I’m so glad he mentioned Derrida. See, I told you he’d be good at talking about things like truth and authenticity; I knew he’d have thought about all this. On we go.

  GREEN: I realise now too that I liked the touch of the androgynous and childlike in a voice. I found it… or put it in my voice a little. I’m sure it’s something from ‘the unconscious’. It’s arguably the voice of an other. It’s psychic ventriloquy. I think I remember some critic saying I sang like Violet Elizabeth Bott, the spoilt girl from the Just William books. How perfect! He criticised me for not having the right kind of voice for singing R ’n’ B. That was precisely my point.

  ME: Brilliant. And, in the end, do you feel you have a good, positive relationship with your own voice, or is it complicated?

  GREEN: I had a bit of an unhappy relationship with my voice. I couldn’t really control it. It’s still hard to control. I have no technical expertise whatsoever. My voice lacks ‘wallop’ or ‘punch’. Maybe that has a lot to do with a lack of confidence. But then I did like Simon and Garfunkel and people like Colin Blunstone.

  ME: And did you ever have singing lessons or anything?

  GREEN: I had literally a couple of singing lessons in the early 1980s with a well-spoken lady in a leafy north London suburb.

  ME: That was probably Tona de Brett, wasn’t it? She did everyone.

  GREEN: She asked me to hold her chest while she sang. I pretty much fled in embarrassment. Also I had a couple of lessons with a little old man in Manhattan who taught Liza Minelli (you can hear it, can’t you?). I just did some scales and stuff. No apparent effect whatsoever.

  ME: And so do you prefer studio recording or live singing?

  GREEN: I like singing in the studio… doing it till it’s right. Singing live is like a complicated sporting event for the voice. A fiendish obstacle race. Over this hurdle, around this tricky bend, down for this horrible low note.

  ME: This is the most brilliant description of live singing I have ever heard, and I relate to it one hundred per cent.

  GREEN: It’s pure concentration, and it’s a great feeling when it occasionally goes well.

  ME: Haha, ‘occasionally’. And you suffer from stage fright?

  GREEN: Stage fright stopped me singing live for twenty y
ears. I still get horribly anxious and fuck up, but now I like gigging.

  ME: You’re braver than me – I haven’t done a gig for fifteen years and still can’t really imagine doing one.

  GREEN: Just as a final thought, by the way: you make the voice more or less Scritti by constricting or relaxing some ligaments in your throat, and by varying degrees of smiling.

  ME: Hang on, are you saying we can all do the Scritti voice, just by smiling?

  If you are not now trying to sing ‘The Sweetest Girl’ while experimenting with different degrees of smiling, then you are not the reader I took you for.