by Tracey Thorn
No, not mine either.
‘I feel now, in my dotage, that you just have to circumnavigate your weaknesses; you know, do something else.’
It seems that it is we the listeners who fret about the occasional silences of these sirens, more than the sirens themselves. Shunning the limelight can be seen as neurotic and unhealthy, but sometimes the desire to sing is simply not strong enough. The need to have a break from it all, to attempt a spell of ‘normal’ life, seems entirely comprehensible to me, but is often overdramatised by those who wish to pathologise privacy.
In their silence, or absence, these women acquired an aura of mystery and great significance. The work they produced before the silence came to be regarded with perhaps more solemnity and reverence than it really deserved. Anne Briggs, certainly, is fairly dismissive of her legendary album – there aren’t ‘any particularly good songs on it’ – and the follow-up she tried to make she ‘really didn’t like’ and refused to let the record company release. We want there to be something weird and wonderful in the reasoning that led them to retreat from a career we imagine as everyone’s dream job. But so often, when we really dig into it, it turns out there is more of the prosaic and the mundane to be unearthed. The events that happen to all of us and interrupt our lives in one way or another. Illness. Heartbreak and divorce. Children. Or even just a sense that other people’s dreams are not our own, that a ladder has been placed in front of us which we have no desire to climb, that there is something at the top we can’t begin to imagine, or want, or need. But what does it mean, to stop singing like this? And can you even call yourself a singer, if you don’t sing?
I asked myself this question occasionally during the years when I was not singing. That is, when I thought about it at all. I didn’t disappear like Vashti Bunyan or Shelagh McDonald, but I had a break of seven years or so when I did no recording, and it is now fifteen years since I have sung live. We all have to fill in forms from time to time which require a job description, and I had always put ‘Singer’ – sometimes ‘Singer/Songwriter’, though I was never quite happy with that as it made me picture a little cartoon of myself holding an acoustic guitar – and I carried on doing so, even while I wasn’t singing. It doesn’t really matter, of course, what I call myself, but still, I wonder, is it a question of quality or quantity? In other words, can you only call yourself a singer if you’re quite a good one, and get paid to do it? Can you only call yourself a singer if you do it regularly, sing live, go on tour? Or is it a role you assume at some point in your life, a costume you put on; once a singer, always a singer?
17
HEADS, SHOULDERS, KNEES AND TOES
D
uring the years when I wasn’t singing in public, I was still busy singing to and with my children. It was a revelation to me, how much singing was involved in childhood. Children sing all the time for the first few years of their lives, at playgroups and primary school – it’s considered natural and normal, one of the first things they learn to do. Like painting, it’s an automatic part of children’s lives at this age, and they sing without inhibition or restraint. Frequently they have no sense of whether or not they ‘can’ sing, or whether the children around them can; it is more a question of who can sing the loudest, or remember all the words. Children are boisterous, ebullient creatures and singing can be a way of expressing or releasing some of that energy; it is joyful and unrepressed. There is an educational element, too, but not focused on the singing itself, more on the fact that singing can be a route to learning things off by heart. Somehow setting a list to a tune enables us to memorise it more readily, and so young children learn the ‘A-B-C-D-E-F-G’ song, and later some of them, my daughter among them, make a party piece out of learning Tom Lehrer’s chemical elements song: ‘There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium…’ For a while at primary school I had an extremely religious head teacher, who thought it would be valuable if we all learned to recite, or in this case sing the books of the Bible. And so I, arch-atheist that I am, can still sing for you the following: ‘Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and Samuel, Samuel, Kings, Kings, Chronicles and Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms and Proverbs.’
So children sing for fun, and to learn things, and even at this very young age they sing to entertain. School concerts start early on, for the simple reason that nothing bonds a parent more fully to a school than the moment when you sit in the hall listening to a class of five-year-olds singing ‘Away in a Manger’. In its innocence, simplicity and unabashed enthusiasm, the singing of young children is moving, reminding us of how we used to be, and of good things we too often overlook, or let slip by. Reminding us of the benefits of having a go, trying our best but not worrying too much, joining in. And so, trying to recapture some of this, we sing back to them, and with them. First, lullabies from the moment they are born, soothing murmurings of songs that we croon to them even through our boredom and exhaustion, the vibrations in our chest as we sing falling in with our heartbeat and adding to the comforting effect. I remember singing ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ to my smallest twin when she came out of an incubator, sitting in a rocking chair, feeling it as the first moment when she seemed more real, safer, with us to stay. I casually sang ‘The Skye Boat Song’ to the other twin one night, and was then condemned to sing it every night for the next year, after it became the only song that would help her drift off to sleep. And during the years when my children were small, this was the only singing I did. It was my period of retreat from the music business and from singing professionally or publicly, and so, having been in the limelight, I faded back into the crowd, realising that in this context singing had another meaning, and was not about how special you were, but about how much you could fit in.
When our children move beyond those first lullabies, we start going to playgroups with them, where it is expected that all parents will sit in a circle on the floor and sing ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ no matter how problematic the tuning. The children themselves can’t even speak at this stage, let alone sing, so we do it for them. Hand gestures are all that’s expected of them, maybe a bit of standing up and bending down as dictated by the lyrics, but we, we poor unprepared parents, who have brought them here just to buy a little time, pass an hour of the day, it is expected that we will sing. No one ever really asks us if we want or feel able to, it just seems to be part of the job description of parent; yet another skill we didn’t know we’d need and now have to acquire on the spot.
As for the children, well, they sing their way through primary school, unselfconsciously, democratically, but as they grow older they are often socialised into accepting and adopting more formal approaches. By secondary school, inclusive singing dwindles and it becomes a specialist subject, not part of the core curriculum. It begins to divide along gender lines, too, so that from the age of around ten or so there starts to be a split – girls sing, boys don’t. Singing starts to be considered a feminine activity. This is the age when boys leave the choir and the girls learn mawkish pop ballads from their singing teacher, like little Jane Austen heroines, picking up a pretty parlour skill. Ironically, at a different kind of school, or at a more ‘serious’ level of singing, this is the age when proper singing is for boys, not girls, and only the pre-broken boy voice is considered to have the requisite purity for serious choral singing. Recent research has suggested this is an entirely sexist tradition – that there is no rational basis for the belief that boys have purer, clearer voices than girls. An experiment carried out by Professor David Howard, from the University of York, consisted of a hundred and thirty people listening to boys and girls singing the same piece of music, to see if they could pick out the boys from the girls. He said of the results, on the BBC website, ‘If you have the music the same, the rest of the choir the same, the director of music the same, the acoustic the same, and you just change the top line – you can’t tell the difference.’ Interestingly, he also conducted further
research to see whether it was possible to define precisely what it was in solo choristers’ voices which made them stand out, and indeed they found frequency peaks in the region up around 8,000 Hz, which create what he describes as ‘this really shimmery sound’. There is an anatomical basis to this sound production, which is to do with how the larynx folds vibrate, but Professor Howard slightly ties himself in knots trying to elucidate precisely what is happening when we listen to this kind of singing: ‘It’s something that communicates with the soul,’ he says. ‘It’s way beyond words, it’s way beyond the music, it’s something about the content going from the brain of a singer to the brain of a listener.’
So the old belief has been challenged, but is proving resistant to change. And meanwhile in schools and playgrounds, at a certain age, boys stop singing. At my son’s school the music teacher cleverly circumvented this; noticing that all the boys were leaving the choir, she formed a boys’ vocal group and got them to perform things like CeeLo Green’s ‘Forget You’ and Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’. At a school gala they took to the stage, a group of six of them, aged ten and eleven, and the girls in their year sat up like meerkats, noticing them for the first time as raw boy material that might yet, unbelievably, mature into something worthy of their attention. The group was considered a cool activity for the boys, and through it they were able to shake off some of the anti-singing prejudice that had accrued around boys in general.
Children who sing too well, though, stick out like a sore thumb and run all sorts of risks. We don’t really know what to do with them, and the worst outcome is when we turn them into child stars. Pop music is an awkward place in which to grow up, and for those who start singing very young – like Michael Jackson – it can prove impossible to move from the rigidly controlled life of a prodigy into that of a fully functioning adult. Starting too young exposes you to the risk of stereotyping; you’ll be given a label, ‘cute’, or ‘virginal’. Charlotte Church, even though she started outside the pop world, was subjected first of all to idealisation, as a child with a voice of perfection and purity, and then later to demonisation as a wild child when she tried to carve out a space for herself as a normal young woman. Neither definition can be comfortable to live with, or come anywhere near the truth of what it feels like to grow up in public. TV talent shows, such as Britain’s Got Talent, often introduce young singers whose voices surprise us – Lena Zavaroni types, barely out of childhood yet with the inappropriately lived-in voices of full-grown adults. This kind of unexpected talent can astonish and impress an audience, yet watching it always makes me uncomfortable, and I find myself asking all sorts of tricky questions – do these children even know what they’re singing, have any understanding of the lyrics? Are they ready for the pressures and scrutiny of this environment? And is this even ‘real’ singing, or more like an imitation of it, a facsimile of emotions not yet experienced or understood?
To go from childhood singing – natural, unforced, communal – into adult singing – more complicated, personal, crafted – you have to pass through the teenage years, when your singing is more likely to be imitative and generic than perhaps at any other time. Glimpses of individual talent can shine through, but often these are the years of searching, of trying to find and settle on a voice of your own. I started singing in my late teens, old enough to have at least some idea of what I was letting myself in for, and emerged into a corner of the music business where individuality and character were prized above technical accomplishment or performance skills. I managed to swerve the packaged pop version of teen singing, that fast track to fame and fortune which can look so alluring but can actually constitute a mild form of child abuse, in which those too young to know any better are thrust into the spotlight. It’s not the best time to embark on a career, or start defining yourself. Perhaps it’s a rare example of a moment when the adage ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ is true, and it would be better if we didn’t hear these kinds of child or adolescent singers. If only for their own sakes.
18
SUCH A LONG WAY DOWN
G
rowing up, I always wanted to impress my brother, who is ten years older than me. So I’d try not to be too much of a generic ten-year-old girl, with all the attendant girlish likes and dislikes, and instead focus on his likes and dislikes: learning to recite the names of the 1971 double-winning Arsenal team, for instance, or borrowing his Bowie and Faces albums to prove that I liked proper music and not the Bay City Rollers. But nothing impressed him as much as his recent discovery that as an adult I had once sung ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ on stage with Fairport Convention. I don’t know where he was when this was happening, or why he didn’t know about it at the time – often families are too busy to keep updating each other with their career progress, and so I suspect I simply didn’t think to tell him, either beforehand or after the event. So it came as news to him when he read about it, years later, in Bedsit Disco Queen, and I felt that for once I had succeeded in impressing him, and then we bonded over a shared love of Sandy Denny.
He must have loved her before I did, of course. I don’t remember hearing her records at the time they were released, and I first became aware of her when Ben and I listened to ‘Autopsy’ some time in the early 1980s. She’s been there in the back of my mind ever since, as a voice with no real equal, and the more I have learned about her, the more she’s joined my list of singers who seem to share and suffer from a similar array of doubts and anxieties as I do, and with whom I unerringly sympathise and identify.
She is frequently described as having ‘the voice of an angel’ – a description that exasperates and wearies me, and secretly I suspect she would also have rolled her eyes at it. Angelic is all wrong for lots of reasons. It makes her sound ethereal, transparent, unreal, or even just pretty and prim, and she was none of those things. There’s an authority to her singing, an almost regal detachment. She is all dynamic range and power – almost as though her voice is plugged directly into a volume pedal. Even at her most gentle there is an extraordinary sense of control, so that her pitch and vibrato are sure and steady even when she’s singing very softly – and then she can ramp up the volume quite suddenly and dramatically. Joni Mitchell has that command to her voice, too – listen to something like ‘Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow’ and you hear a singer in charge of what she’s singing. Dave Mattacks, ex-Fairport Convention, who drummed with EBTG for a while, always told me how loud Sandy sang on stage, and there’s a story that she wasn’t asked to join Pentangle when the group was formed by her then boyfriend Danny Thompson as her voice was just too big for them.
So, I imagine her, with this voice, this extraordinary voice, which we won’t call angelic, but lacking many of the attributes of the natural on-stage performer. I have read descriptions of her being ungainly in performance, laughing off her fumbling with ad-libbed, self-deprecating jokes. It reminds me of Beth Orton, another singer who saves the seriousness for the songs and in between them is all clumsy clown. But everything I have read about Sandy suggests someone never quite certain as to where she, or her voice, fitted in. Veering between self-confidence and its sudden loss, drinking for fun and then not so much for fun, ambivalent about touring, and about success in general. And with a built-in sense of the inevitable descent waiting at the end of every high: in Clinton Heylin’s biography No More Sad Refrains she is quoted as saying, ‘I do appreciate being slightly well known, because I’ve got a bit of an ego. But I never want to reach the top. It’s such a long way down.’
She was insecure about her appearance, and tried to cover this up with an air of bravado. Drinking and carousing with the lads, she was a ladette before the 1990s incarnation of such a thing was even defined. She paid her dues with the folk set, and learned any number of traditional ballads, but never had the purist’s approach to the genre. A huge fan of Dusty Springfield, on Fotheringay she covered Dusty’s early hit ‘Silver Threads and Golden Needles’, but she was equally drawn to ideas of s
inging jazz, or sounding like Janis Joplin. A diary entry from 1969, quoted in Heylin’s biography, has her admitting to an experiment with a mixture of gin and Southern Comfort to discover whether it could help her emulate Joplin’s vocal style. Heylin seems to find this difficult to understand – ‘That the silver-tongued Sandy sought to replicate the “shattered effects” of Janis Joplin’s vocals seems to beggar belief, but, in keeping with many aspects of herself, Sandy didn’t want what she had – this 100% pure vocal tone – she wanted the stripped-raw rasp of a boozy blues singer.’ I don’t find it surprising at all. Many singers yearn for the voice they don’t have, or strive to find ways in which they can stretch the voice they do have, push it further, break free of the expectations of others. It’s not hard for me to imagine the constraints and irritations of being constantly told you have a ‘100% pure’ voice. It’s inhibiting and patronising for any woman to be described as ‘angelic’. When that is set against the boozy, raucous side to her personality you have the makings of The Perfect Cliche, and it then seems obvious why she might wish to emulate someone rougher-sounding, who might be considered more soulful, more authentic, more real, less decorative.
Her ambivalence about success makes sense if we see success as representing not simply a larger audience, more love for her as a singer, but instead a different kind of audience, with different expectations and desires. She herself said that she suffered from a ‘success neurosis’, saying that as it got close, so it became more frightening – she liked the theory, but the reality scared her. I don’t think this is neurotic. Surely as you draw close to something, you see it more clearly, and what you might have perceived to be its qualities when viewed from a distance, or imagined or dreamed, then prove not to be there, or to be distorted. A bigger, more mainstream audience might, for instance, have had views about the way she should look. In 1971 she did her first solo concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and by now there were high expectations placed upon her. Used to performing on stage in jeans and a T-shirt, Heylin recounts that on this occasion she opted for a long, floaty-sleeved dress – only to find, in her nervousness, that it made her trip over, knock over a glass, and then the long sleeves got in the way of her guitar-playing. Leaving the stage, she returned in jeans and a T-shirt to a standing ovation, but still, the gig was far from an overwhelming success. She knew that her ability to ‘perform’ or act the part on stage could not live up to requirements as the stages and audiences got bigger, but what she seemed unable to do was to find a way to fuse all the different aspects of her personality – the informal, humorous, lively character was at odds with her more pained aspects, which she tried to hide, and which only found an outlet in the elusive sadness of her songs.