Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  Both these books imply that there is a codependent quality to the link between performer and fan, and maybe there is some truth in this. We may all draw the line in a different place in terms of how close we’d like fans to get, or how keen we want them to be, and at its worst, the singer–fan bond can be a scary thing. Nonetheless, it is a fact that in order to sustain a career as a singer you need an audience to be more than just semi-involved, semi-interested. You need to draw them in, make them want to buy those records and come to those gigs, and however ambivalent your feelings about their devotion, it is the lifeblood of any long career.

  14

  MY LITTLE KINDRED SPIRIT

  I

  finished Bedsit Disco Queen by remarking that I felt a bit like Lady Sovereign’s mum, and quite liked the feeling. But really, if I feel like anyone’s musical mum today, it’s Romy Madley Croft’s of The xx. Like me, she started singing and playing guitar while still in her teens, forming the band with her schoolmate Oliver Sim, to be joined by Jamie Smith a little later. Ben and I learned a few years ago that they were fans of ours and considered EBTG a prime influence, and at their request we recorded a cover version of the song ‘Night Time’ from their first album. I met Romy for the first time when she came to one of my book events, at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington. We said hello afterwards, then sat and chatted, and got on like a house on fire, and someone took a photo of us. When I got home and showed the photo to my kids, they said, ‘Mum, she looks more like you than we do.’

  And it’s true: aside from any spiritual or musical connectedness, we look like mother and daughter. We have the same haircut, the same pale skin, the same-shaped pointy chin, and faces which, when we smile, form a slightly embarrassed or apologetic expression. On stage we stare at our shoes, off stage we stare up at you from under our fringes. When we talk to each other I can hear that we both lisp a tiny bit, and have a similar speech pattern, hesitating lest we interrupt each other or tread on each other’s sentences. We’re polite, reticent, innately shy, and yet have both found ourselves inhabiting this least introvert-friendly of professions.

  Born in 1989, she is twenty-seven years younger than me, wasn’t even alive when I formed the Marine Girls, met Ben, recorded A Distant Shore, or the first four EBTG albums. She was only a child, sitting in the back seat of a car, when she heard ‘Missing’ on the radio and fell for my voice, years before she would suspect that she would ever try singing herself, or that when she did she would end up sounding a bit like that voice of mine on the radio.

  Now, years later, she’s more famous than me, and here we are in the Buzzin’ Fly office in Clerkenwell talking about singing. I’ll ask her the important questions first.

  Me: Have you ever done karaoke?

  Romy: Only once, when I was really drunk… I sang Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’.

  Me: I’ve only done it once, drunk, too. Mine was Will Young’s ‘Leave Right Now’.

  She’s already told me that, as a youngster, not only did she not dream of being a singer, or imagine being a singer, but was in fact so reluctant to sing, or to be heard singing, that she would mime when people sang ‘Happy Birthday’. That’s hardcore shy, I think, miming to ‘Happy Birthday’. But this chimes with something I believe about the apparent contradictions in the stories of those who gravitate, sometimes reluctantly, towards singing as a career: there is a type of singer, perhaps a minority but nonetheless a significant number, who sings almost against their will, and despite an instinctive aversion to all forms of public display. These kinds of people sing because they need to more than want to, because it offers an outlet for bottled-up feelings they sometimes don’t even know they have, and in singing, they present an alternative model to the audience, a kind of anti-singer, or at least anti-performer, which is the antithesis of showbiz and showing off. Romy tells me that she never knew she wanted to sing until she found she was a singer, had never suspected there was this person hidden inside her. And yet even now, when it has become her outward, famous persona, still she harbours doubts as to whether this unexpected turn of events is real, whether this is really her. Supporting Florence and the Machine, she talks about watching super-confident Florence on stage, a flamboyant born-to-be-performer. ‘And me and Oliver would be thinking, who are we? What are we doing here? Do we even belong here?… I felt a world away.’ I imagine Florence-style performers, what we might call typical larger-than-life characters, feel like performers on stage, and that this is entirely natural. Romy, like me, says, ‘I’ve always felt like a normal person on stage.’ But do ‘normal’ people belong on a stage?

  ‘But surely,’ I say, ‘audiences like seeing people like us on stage; they wouldn’t come to see us otherwise. So maybe it’s that in seeing us up there, they are seeing themselves reflected and represented, the normal people, having a go, being given a chance.’

  Like me, Romy has been given pep talks about performance, about trying to extend her range, smile more, or not sound so sad. ‘But how,’ she wonders, ‘how do I make myself sound not sad?’

  ‘You really, really shouldn’t,’ is my only advice, and I’m reminded of that old line from our bass player Steve Pearce, who said to me years ago, ‘You don’t go to Frank Sinatra for the disco numbers, do you?’ In other words, your identity is crucial, and for those who like you, it’s what they like you for. If Romy and I both sound sad, because of something in the tone of our voices, or our range, or our tendency to fall off a note at the end of a line, and leave it hanging forlornly in the air, well, so be it, that’s who we are. Though it wasn’t inevitable from the start that she’d sound the way she does: that voice of hers, which sounds so natural and effortless, had to be found and decided upon. As a teenager her first attempts at singing were inspired by The Distillers’ singer Brody Dalle (if you haven’t heard her, she sounds more like Courtney Love than anyone else), but as a fourteen-year-old girl, she was unable to achieve that kind of gravelly, husky voice, and so gave up trying after a few days. Then came a period when, again like me, she began singing quietly at home, deliberately not projecting her voice, trying not to be overheard. ‘I would stay up after my dad had gone to sleep, and barely whisper.’

  ME: And now, now that you have to go on stage and be overheard by the crowd, what do you do before you go on, to prepare yourself, get your voice ready?

  ROMY: No, nothing, it’s quite a comedy actually, our backstage – there’s all of us sitting really quietly, Oliver with his headphones on till the last minute. We get up, have a hug, and go on stage… I play guitar a little bit before going on, but I never sing, and it’s to do with shyness. I couldn’t sing in that room… even going to the toilet, if I sang in the toilet, if someone came in, I’d panic…’

  ME: So it’s less scary to go on stage and sing for 6,000 people than to be in the toilet, where one person might come in and accidentally overhear you?

  ROMY: Hahaha, yeah.

  ME: That’s brilliant, and I completely understand, but to anyone who’s not a singer, it might sound a bit, um, mad.

  ROMY: Well, when I’m on stage I think, yeah, I’m here, I’m supposed to be doing this, I’m here to do this.

  So it’s about context: where singing ‘fits’, or has its place, or is acceptable, or expected. If it’s overheard outside of that context, there’s an awkwardness, a feeling of something being stolen from you, almost, or intruded upon. We both agree that we hate the idea of anyone hearing us in the process of writing a new song; at home, Romy asks her girlfriend Hannah to stay the other side of a closed door and with headphones on while she is trying out new musical ideas, horrified by the thought of being eavesdropped on, even by the person she lives with. Is there safety in numbers, then? Does the crowd disappear a bit; can you make the audience fade out if you need to?

  ROMY: Yeah, if you’re playing to thirty people in a small room, I find that really hard. When you can see them face on, and you know who they are – like when we started, in a pub, where they’re all your
friends.

  ME: Yeah, that’s harder.

  ROMY: In a bigger crowd, when it’s dark, you can always zone out a bit. But then there’s always someone who yawns in the front row, and you’re thinking, oh God, is this really boring? It really breaks the spell.

  ME: They’ve been brought along by their girlfriend, they’re not the one who bought the tickets. What about speaking as opposed to singing, is that easier? Do you speak much on stage?

  ROMY: No, I’ve tried to teach myself to speak a bit, to speak slower, to sound calm. But speaking’s harder than singing.

  ME: I find it difficult, because talking breaks the spell. When you’re singing you’re creating an image, then when you speak you dispel that image, and you have to recreate it with each new song… When Ben and I used to do small acoustic gigs, just the two of us, it worked better, just chatting to the audience. But at bigger gigs, if it’s more of a production, and you’re putting on more of a show, it breaks into that, to tell an anecdote about how you wrote a song. It feels a bit prosaic, when what you’re creating in the songs is more poetic – like you’re bringing everyone down to earth with a bump. Explaining how you wrote a song, or what it’s about, it reminds me a bit of that Robert Frost quote, when he was asked to explain what a poem meant and he said, ‘What d’you want me to do? Say it again in worser English?’

  Of course, the big difference between me and Romy is that she does it and I don’t. Maybe she’s taken over from me, and I’m happy with that thought. She’s inherited my stage fright but, like me, she’s found ways of coping with it, strategies for getting through and carrying on. Touring makes the live experience become a habit, and that eases the nerves, but it can also blur the senses a little so that mistakes creep in. The xx play at a lot of festivals during the summer, which means weekend gigs with a week off in between, and during that week you can forget how to do it.

  ROMY: I walk on and I’m thinking, what am I doing? Recently, I was doing that, and I completely forgot the song, just couldn’t find the chord on the guitar, just kept playing the wrong chord. In the end I had to say, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t remember this’, and we had to go on and do another song. Oliver was laughing into the mic, and the audience were fine with it.

  ME: Audiences are always fine with it; they like mistakes, the moments that make you human. But it’s so hard to believe that when you’re the one up on the stage. Do you forget words ever?

  ROMY: Yeah, I do – I’ll find I’m thinking, what’s the next word? What’s the next word? And if I don’t think about it, it just comes out. I’ve even found myself, before a gig, Googling my own lyrics, ridiculous. I had to do it before Bestival, in 2011, the last European show of a tour, and I had to Google the lyrics to our first single. And I had to do the same thing on the last show of this tour – like I’d hit a wall or something.

  ME: And that’s funny, cos you’d think, the more times you sang it… but it becomes so automatic, you can’t access it with your conscious mind. But it’s weird the way your subconscious mind can do it – I’ve had that, where I’m getting to the end of a line and I’m thinking, I don’t know what the next line is, I don’t know what the next line is, and then it comes out of my mouth – and I’m thinking, I didn’t know what the line was so how did my voice sing it?

  It’s good talking to another singer, who understands all this stuff. We’ve stood in the same place, wearing similar shoes, and looked out at the same view, with very similar thoughts in our head. I need to ask her one last important question, to see if we’re really in tune with each other.

  ME: What d’you think about The X Factor, d’you really, really hate it?

  ROMY: Hahaha, no, I love it. My girlfriend Hannah said, ‘Oh, look, Tracey’s tweeting about The X Factor again’ – this was before we’d ever met, and I thought, this is brilliant, seeing all of the things you said… I find it fascinating… I was going to say in my speech at the AIM Awards that if Oliver and I were on The X Factor we’d never have got past the auditions.

  ME: Yeah, I watch with my kids, and they say, ‘Mum, if you went on would you get through? Would you win?’ And I say no, I can’t do that, what they’re doing! I can’t sing that Whitney Houston song they all have to sing.

  ROMY: Sometimes, there’s like the token mousey girl, and you’re thinking, I don’t know if you’re gonna win, you’re just there for them to try and show a bit of diversity – and then there are the ones who do all that crazy singing that I would just have no idea how to do, so I feel… I don’t feel like a singer when I watch it.

  ME: It always reminds me that there are a lot of people out there who can sing, it’s not that unique a talent. And sometimes, when people are going on at you – oh, you’re such a great singer, you should be so proud of yourself – you can get a bit puffed up about it, and then watching The X Factor, it reminds you that a lot of people can sing.

  ROMY: And a lot of people can sing better than me.

  ME: That’s what I feel too.

  15

  CUT TO THE CHASE

  I

  n my conversation with Romy we touched on the difference between singing and speaking and how tricky it can be on stage to go from one to the other. It made me think how strange it is that these two activities, which in some ways are so similar, actually feel so utterly unalike. On the one hand they are physically distinct, in that something different happens within your throat when you sing as opposed to when you speak. If you put your hand on the front of your neck and speak a phrase, then sing it, you can probably feel your larynx change position for the two activities. In modern classical singing, the larynx is lowered, increasing the length of the vocal tract, and this increases the resonance of the voice and gives it a darker, richer sound – but a sound which is distinct from the normal speaking voice, which usually employs the larynx held in a higher position, as does most pop singing.

  But singing and speaking are mentally as well as physically distinct, and research has shown that the two activities use separate areas of the brain. In his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells stories of patients suffering from aphasia following a stroke, or due to dementia, who have lost the power of speech, yet are still able to sing song lyrics. This is possible only because within the brain there is a ‘speech area’ in the left frontal lobe, and if a particular part of this is damaged, then spoken language can be lost, while musicality, coming from the right hemisphere of the brain, remains untouched. Sacks writes that: ‘Whenever I see patients with expressive aphasia, I sing “Happy Birthday” to them. Virtually all of them… start to join in…’ Music therapy can often be beneficial in restoring at least some speech to such patients, beginning with the singing of phrases and moving towards a renewed ability to speak them.

  However, even knowing about these separate areas of the brain, it remains mysterious and perplexing to us to think that a simple matter of adding a tune to words can so fundamentally affect our ability to voice them. In the most common speech disorder – stuttering – it has long been observed that even those with the worst stutter nearly always have the ability to sing without inhibition or interruption, and again, by singing phrases, or speaking them in a sing-song manner, they can learn to overcome the stuttering.

  The gap between singing and speaking is out of our conscious reach, then; we cannot exert much control over it. In order to sing a phrase, we do something different to when we speak it, but we do it unconsciously. Speech is rarely delivered in a monotone, it is inflected, but when we start to sing we exaggerate the inflection and make it clearly and obviously melodic. We alter our breathing, too, particularly if we have been taught how to sing, and try to project the voice on an out-breath, which comes from as low down as possible. We try not to constrict the voice in the throat but to be aware of using the lungs, even the diaphragm, controlling the breath being the best way to control the strength and quality of the note. And quite often when we are singing as opposed to speaking, we use vibrato in the voice. We take vibrat
o for granted nowadays, particularly in classical, or ‘proper’ forms of singing, but this wasn’t always the case. The use of vibrato wasn’t considered an essential part of singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but by the mid-nineteenth century it had become both more widely used, and somewhat controversial. John Potter mentions in Vocal Authority how Mozart was found complaining in a letter of the singer Meissner, who ‘has a bad habit in that he often intentionally vibrates his voice… and that I cannot tolerate in him. It is indeed truly detestable, it is singing entirely contrary to nature.’ Wagner, who was a singer himself, was a proponent of the idea that singers should sing it straight. ‘The singers need only sing the notes,’ he wrote, believing that the meaning and emotion were all contained therein, and did not need extra embellishment. It seems that lots of critics had a similar objection throughout the nineteenth century: John Potter also mentions how later, George Bernard Shaw complained that vibrato was ‘sweeping through Europe like the influenza’.