Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  And growing success could mean a more ‘pop’ version of success, which threatened her sense of authenticity and belonging. We tend to think of folk singers as inhabiting a separate musical environment, distant and sealed off from the shallow ambitions of the pop marketplace, but there are moments when the two worlds collide, and it’s not necessarily a comfortable experience. I was astonished to learn that in September 1972 Tony Blackburn made Sandy’s song ‘Listen, Listen’ his single of the week, and it reminded me of the time in 1984 when our EBTG single ‘Each and Every One’ became a favourite of his, and of the awkwardness we felt at being catapulted out of our safe indie surroundings into the glare of pop radio. Sandy Denny apparently had similarly mixed feelings: not simply uncomplicated celebration of scoring single of the week, but also apprehension that it either would or wouldn’t succeed. In fact, the single failed to be a hit, and when the album it was taken from flopped she began to worry that her moment had passed.

  Along with anxiety about career success, she had to deal with the fact that many around her wanted her to pursue a career as a solo artist when she preferred the safety-in-numbers and the camaraderie of being in a band. Feeling that she wasn’t cut out to be a solo performer but under pressure not to hide behind a band, she started to rely on drink to calm her nerves and then gave flawed performances which attracted criticism and as a consequence worsened her stage fright. This is how neurosis can take hold – experiencing reasonable fears and inhibitions, encountering practical problems that lack easy solutions, and then spiralling into uncontrollable fear.

  Audiences, record companies and band members often wanted one thing from Sandy while she wanted another, and when a set of reviews criticised her arrangements, strings and brass, and suggested she should record more pared-down tracks, she performed a BBC In Concert completely solo, despite obviously feeling self-conscious about it. ‘As you’ve probably noticed I haven’t got my band with me tonight,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d try and do it on my own… I don’t know much boogie-woogie, so you’ll just have to put up with this.’

  Self-deprecation can be endearing, of course, and it’s really the only available stance for those of us too aware of flaws and failings to be able to tough it out, but imagining oneself in the audience at that gig, you can only wish it were possible to convey to a singer exactly how much they were loved and forgiven. But so often all they can see is, I can’t be everything to everyone, I can’t possibly fulfil these expectations. This is all I have, and it’s not much, is it? You’ll just have to put up with this. Oh, Sandy.

  19

  ME AND MY MICROPHONE

  T

  here’s nothing quite like the bond between a singer and their microphone; it’s symbolic, visually representative – hold up a hairbrush to your mouth and everyone will know you are ‘singing’ – and it’s ritualistic: like holding a cigarette, it gives you something to do with your hands. Your relationship with the mic at a live gig is an intimate one. You can handle it, for a start, either gripping it and its stand, whole kit and caboodle, entering into a kind of dance or embrace with an object that is as tall as yourself, almost another body to cling onto; or you can unclip it and hold it in one hand, drawing it in close towards you, something small now, just a prop, a tool. Since the mic was invented singers have vied to come up with new ways to hold it and its stand. In his great book about the 1930s crooners, You Call It Madness, Lenny Kaye (writer and also Patti Smith’s guitarist) describes Russ Columbo’s casually intimate stance: ‘He holds one hand on the microphone stand, and puts the other in his pocket. It looks curiously as if he is dancing with himself, using the microphone as partner.’ Young Sinatra famously clung to the mic stand, twining his skinny body around it as if for support, or as if he were clutching at a lover. Rod Stewart would take hold of the mic and kick the bottom of the stand up towards himself, catching it in mid-air, then holding onto it like a soldier with a pike, and Freddie Mercury adapted this move with his horrible little half-stand, that ugly truncated stick that managed to look both aggressive and weedy.

  On stage, your mouth can actually make contact with the mic, your lips touching it. Every note you sing comes out on an exhaled breath, a sigh carrying tiny droplets of water, so as the evening progresses, the mic gets wet, and now your lips are brushing against moist metal. I remember that feeling, the closeness, just you and your mic, it’s your best friend up there. And then, at the end of the evening, you leave behind physical evidence of your presence and your closeness; lipstick traces and DNA, you’re all over that thing.

  In the studio it’s different – the microphone there has to be treated with more respect, it keeps its prim distance. Suspended in an elastic cradle at the top of a mic stand, it is not to be touched, and definitely not to be removed. It sits behind a nylon pop shield, whose purpose is to soften any over-emphatic consonants, and in the old, basic days, would be made of a leg from a pair of tights stretched over a bit of coat hanger. Later, in proper studios, it was replaced by an altogether neater, purpose-built gadget, made of black metal and black nylon. But still, the mic is at one remove from you; you’re here and it’s over there, your lips can’t touch it, and the sensation you’ve got used to, of breathing words directly into its ear, you can’t have that here. You have to sing politely towards it from behind an invisible line. It’s a smouldering look rather than a full-on snog.

  But what you’ve lost in oral intimacy you get back via the headphones. In the cocoon of the studio, with every sound separated and under complete control, you can have your voice as loud as you want it with no extra effort on your own part. On stage you use a near-field microphone, so that as far as possible it picks up only what’s close to it – your voice – and less of what’s further away – the drums, the audience. But in the studio, where you’re the only thing making a sound, the mic will be wide open, ready and eager to receive the slightest sound that falls, the smallest whisper. It’s like a magnet, attracting every little iron filing of your voice, sucking up sound from the atmosphere. Listen: before the track starts, in that silence before you begin, there’s not even silence. You can hear every breath you take. Your lips part with a faint click, you can hear your tongue brush against your teeth. It’s disconcerting at first, inhibiting even, but soon you come to love it. Imagine – if your breathing sounds that loud and close, how huge your voice is going to be. You can try not to make too much in the way of mouth-noise in between each line, but don’t worry either way, it can all be edited out. And you can even go in the other direction, and use the microphone’s attention to each sound to your advantage – make it hear and record every breath, amplify that breath, show them how hard you’re working. I did this on the track ‘Shoot Me Down’, from the Love Not Money album. We took a sharp intake of breath, and ratcheted up the volume, using it at the beginning of the track before I start singing to create an atmosphere of tension and anxiety. As the track progresses, the vocal is heavily compressed, which again emphasises every in-breath, until by the end it’s as though I’m gasping for air, half drowning in the pool of the song. Rufus Wainwright does this all the time – deliberately or not, I’m never sure. But you can certainly hear each breath, drawn in tightly through gritted teeth. Listen to a song like ‘Dinner at Eight’, and the drama of the in-breaths, every one as audible as the words he is singing. The effort is palpable, no false impression of ease here. Some have commented on this, criticising his breathing technique. Me, I like it, the way it adds a layer of repression to even his most expressive songs, the implication being, ‘I am singing this against my will, that’s how much it costs me.’ Oh, what a little microphone can do.

  How on earth did singers manage without them, before them? Although invented in the late nineteenth century, microphones weren’t developed until the 1920s, and given that no electric instruments had been invented at that point, the microphone was the starting point for all that followed. Singers who pre-dated the microphone had of course to rely on their own vocal
power for amplification, or made use of whatever they could find to give them an edge over the volume of the band. Rudy Vallée, for instance, became famous as The Man with the Megaphone, using a cut-down half-megaphone to reach an audience. Lenny Kaye talks about how certain singers responded differently to this new invention. Rudy Vallée embraced it, unlike certain other performers who were spooked by it and couldn’t understand how this piece of machinery could possibly do their voices justice. ‘Early on, Vallée recognised it as another instrument… When he saw the effect his voice had on radio, he cobbled together one of the first in-concert amplification systems, complete with carbon microphone and several radio receivers. It was even more sensuous than the megaphone in its ability to reach out, to throw his voice like a ventriloquist so that it seemed to emanate from right next to the listener…’

  This was the key to the new invention, its ability to deliver the singing voice seemingly right into the ear of the listener, and it was a gift to the crooners, fostering their technique of vocal intimacy. Bing Crosby famously made good use of the microphone, as it suited his natural ease and expressiveness. He even adjusted his voice to suit the mic – he’d always made use of both his upper and lower ranges, but gradually, as Lenny Kaye put it, ‘his baritone seems to expand in sonority, catching the resonance and warmth of the microphone’s condenser’. Sinatra, too, understood the mic and, as Simon Frith mentions in Performing Rites, in later years said, ‘Many singers never learned to use one… They never understood, and still don’t, that a microphone is their instrument.’ He was a great believer in using the mic carefully, moving away and back in again as necessary, and deliberately avoiding any excessive breathing sounds. What he was aiming for was mastery and control; the opposite approach to Rufus Wainwright’s drama and tension.

  The introduction of the microphone, and the growing importance of radio, brought about a change in singing and in music in general. Previously, singing required power and volume, an extrovert approach that allowed communication with a large group of listeners. But now, singing could become more personal and draw the individual listener in close. It might sound obvious, then, to observe that the microphone allows for a ‘truer’ representation of singing, one which doesn’t need to rely on sheer vocal volume in order to impress. And yet, for quite some time there were still those who distrusted the mic and perhaps saw in it the first example of studio trickery: a gadget which allowed charlatans to pull the wool over people’s eyes – or ears, we should say. In Vocal Authority, John Potter describes a 1947 singing manual by George Baker, which has a chapter on ‘The Voice and the Microphone’: ‘He does not consider stage performance at all, confining his remarks to broadcasting and recording except for a swipe at crooners, whom he describes as “fakers” and “vocal cheats”, with the majority of them not having “voices, as such”’. It’s as though the invention is doing too much of the work, and some of the human effort has been lost. The belief is that those who make use of this new invention, benefiting from it and exploiting its advantages, are in fact not ‘proper’ singers at all. There’s definite suspicion and even disdain on the part of this listener. Comparing this with modern attitudes towards Auto-Tune, you realise that the distrust of technology which enhances or ‘helps’ the voice has been around for as long as the technology itself.

  The new microphones affected performance in another way, too, in that they enhanced what the singer heard, just as much as what the audience heard. Instead of relying on your own instinct about how you sounded, and responding to the audience’s mood and reaction, now you could clearly hear your voice out there in the room, amplified and enhanced. And hearing your own voice in this way, you cannot help but respond to the sound, and the volume – so that in fact you’re not just singing to the audience, you are singing to yourself. Every singer knows the effect this has on you. Once music moved into the era of complete amplification, with singers singing into a microphone in front of amplified electric instruments, the issue of what the singer could or couldn’t hear became paramount. Initially, pop and rock singers operated with monitors on stage – speakers shaped like a wedge of cheese, angled towards you, that provided you with a mix of your voice and the band, ideally set at a perfect balance, and loud and clear enough to be heard even over the sound being projected out in front to the audience. This is the ideal world scenario, though, and in the real world, in small sweaty clubs or in awkward large auditoriums, on-stage wedges, often so chewed up and knackered as to be worthless, failed to deliver anything to compete with the sound in the room, or worse still, the sound echoing back at you from the hard rear wall of the venue.

  The invention of in-ear monitoring, which like most singers I began to use in the 1990s, changed all this. I had moulds made of the inside of each ear, which were cast into plastic hearing aids containing tiny speakers – a more sophisticated, personalised version of your iPod earphones. Attached to a power pack, which in turn had to be attached to your body somehow – awkward with certain outfits, since it required waistbands or belts to be clipped onto – the in-ear monitors would then remotely receive a mix of whatever you wanted to hear: maybe a blend of the whole band, or just your vocal and some piano or guitar to tune to, or – and this could be really tempting in certain circumstances – just your vocal. From barely being able to hear yourself on stage, the situation was transformed into a whole new scenario, in which you could hear yourself all too clearly. At first this seemed ideal, and the downside only became apparent later: that it was all too easy for the singer to be hermetically sealed off from the surrounding music, existing in a sort of bubble of vocal clarity, hearing something that no one else in the room was hearing – the voice in splendid isolation. In the technical sense this problem is usually one of tuning – hearing too much vocal at the expense of any instrument means that you can be singing in tune with yourself, but not with the rest of the band. Also, the clarity of the sound in your ears can make you reduce the projection of your singing, encouraging a singer like me to sing even more quietly than usual; great for saving the voice for the duration of a gig, not so good in terms of providing enough volume for the out-front sound engineer to work with. But perhaps even worse, it creates a performance problem, an attitude problem. Hearing yourself with this degree of fidelity, you can become overcareful, pernickety, singing more to impress yourself, or at least to avoid mistakes, than to communicate with the audience. Live performance should always have a sense of immediacy, of living for the moment, which comes from the belief that the sound you are making is essentially impermanent: it appears, is heard and then immediately lost. Your voice goes out there into the crowd, into the ether, and if you can’t hear it too well it is much easier to immerse yourself in this idea of it being ephemeral, fleeting. For me, with in-ear monitors, live singing began to take on some of the quality of singing in the recording studio, with headphones on, your vocal way up loud, the balance just right. But this is a different kind of singing, this is singing on the record. Everything you sing is being taken down and might be used against you. It makes you feel that every word, every note, really matters, which weighs heavily. This might be a good thing, but it’s the opposite of the abandon, the giving yourself up to the moment, that is the hallmark of the really great live experience.

  It’s ironic: I longed to be able to hear myself on stage, and then when I could I realised that it was a mixed blessing, that something chaotic and uncontrollable had been lost for ever. I had thought I wanted it all to be perfect, but when perfection became a possibility, it brought with it new demands and expectations, new things to fear, new ways to worry. Or perhaps that was just me.

  As we’ve seen, this new era of amplification that dawned with the development of the microphone in the 1920s coincided with the story of the crooners, whose intimate style it facilitated; and I guess my interest in them is enhanced by the fact that I’m something of a crooner myself. Often regarded as sissy – the crooners’ songs were seductive, aimed directly at women, a
nd sympathetic to female dreams and desires – these men didn’t perform the songs in any expansive or assertive way, they just stood there, calm, passive, murmuring their gentle sweet nothings.