by Tracey Thorn
Rudy Vallée defended himself against accusations of weediness: ‘Most of the so-called crooners like myself are able to sing with considerable volume when the occasion demands it.’ He also pointed out the skill that close mic’ed singing requires: ‘The voice must be brought down to an extreme softness or pianissimo. This is quite an art, as most persons are unable to stay in pitch when singing extremely softly.’ Still they were held in slight disdain, Variety saying of Russ Columbo that he was ‘a freak radio singer, who is not a performer… of the Bing Crosby flash-in-the-pan style of ether exhaler’. But this style of singing was no flash in the pan; it was here to stay. The introduction of the microphone and the growing importance of radio brought about a change in singing and in music, replacing volume and bombast with intimacy and ease.
Lennie Kaye points out that, after its initial heyday, crooning persisted through the decades, via singers like Billy Eckstine, Johnny Mathis and Chet Baker. Even Elvis, with what Lavinia Greenlaw describes as ‘his mansion of a voice’, inherited something from the crooners, and in some respects carried on where Sinatra left off – not least in acquiring, like Frank, hordes of screaming fans. You can trace the influence of crooning through Jim Morrison and Bryan Ferry; and in recent years I’d identify a strand of alternative-style rock bands with a croony male lead singer, as opposed to the rockist shouter of old. For a while, the yearning, mellifluous male vocal became almost the norm, by which I mean singers like Morrissey, Mark Eitzel, Richard Hawley, Stuart Staples, Paul Buchanan, Guy Garvey and Thom Yorke.
Bands with croony male lead singers will always sound perhaps more comforting than they’d like. While that may not be a problem for Elbow or Coldplay, who both seem content with their status as anthemic stadium balladeers, for a band like Radiohead you suspect that the innate loveliness of Thom Yorke’s voice leads them to go to ever greater lengths to subvert it. As with Scott Walker, the constraints of the melancholy but beautiful croon start to become more apparent over time, so that careers which begin in beauty – ‘High and Dry’, ‘Angels of Ashes’ – start to fracture into a denial of that sumptuousness, an overwhelming need to shatter and break free of its imprisoning softness.
I made a comment on Twitter once about Guy Garvey being such a reliable singer, a safe pair of hands. Some people responded indignantly, implying that I was damning him with faint praise, but I hadn’t meant it that way at all. I love the feeling, as soon as he starts to sing, that you can relax into his performance, you’re released from any anxiety about whether he’s going to carry it off. The certainty of his voice envelops you like a strong pair of arms; nothing bad can happen while Guy is singing.
Nonetheless, that in itself is a kind of limitation, and one I probably share. To have a voice which soothes and comforts can be a wonderful thing – Lord knows we all need soothing and comforting – but does it rule out the possibility of danger? We don’t want music to be an entirely risk-free activity; there needs to be some tension, some sense that the safety net is not guaranteed. Can such a voice also inflame and inspire? After all, no one wants to lull all the time; that would be soporific and numbing, a kind of vocal valium. Which is why the calming voice, more than any other, relies on context to give it deeper or alternative meanings, jagged edges, contrasts, unexpected juxtapositions. Some listeners didn’t understand why Ben and I introduced more electronic elements into our music as we went along, but it was at least partly a search for new contexts for my voice, a way of making harder noises, with sharp edges, to offset my warmth and softness. A way of adding an irritant, a little bit of grit.
You know the way you’re shocked by what you sound like when you hear your recorded speaking voice played back to you? People ask me if it’s the same with singers – am I surprised by hearing my recorded voice? Of course I’m not any more, not after all this time. But what I am still shocked by is the discrepancy between the effort that goes in and the apparent ease that comes out. It’s exasperating to me, this contrast. Singing that feels to me so difficult, so full of angst and emotion while I’m doing it, ends by sounding languid, calm, rational. When I sing in the studio you’d be surprised at the obvious effort I’m making: I screw my eyes up, and do funny things with my hands, and frown at the microphone, and lean in close to it, and back off for louder notes, and it all feels very active and slightly out of control. But the result is a sound that people say is easygoing, calming. I saw a great bit of footage recently of Marvin Gaye in the studio, recording a lead vocal, mic in his hand, lying down on a sofa! Now that is what I call easygoing. But Karen Carpenter, did she sweat and struggle? Did she long for more to be heard than just the softness, just the croon? Is it a mistake, all the effort not to let the effort show?
20
SPOOKED BY THE BEAUTY
I
t’s hard not to make assumptions about Scott Walker: few careers have spanned so many years, and encompassed such dramatic stylistic changes. And, for those of us who adore some of his solo records, while finding his later work hard to listen to in the extreme, it’s difficult to talk about his singing without sounding arrogant and presumptuous, without making claims that he might deny vehemently, and without straying into territory that may be pure fantasy and wishful thinking. But it has to be talked about, doesn’t it? The simple fact that Scott Walker, possessor of one of the most gorgeous, luxuriant, enviable voices of all time, made a decision to put that particular voice of his away in a box somewhere; felt that he, or we, had simply had enough of it. It’s not that his voice aged or worsened, was damaged by time or neglect, or any of the other things that happen to singers’ voices over the years, and that he became unable to sing like that, it’s that he chose to stop singing like that.
His performance on David Arnold’s ‘Only Myself to Blame’ in 1999 shows his voice still intact, still lovely, but on his own recent records he has definitively left behind that overwhelming beauty. I can’t help but wonder why, and sometimes think I know the answer, and sometimes – presumption above all others! – feel I might even understand and sympathise.
Did that voice of his get in the way? Was it a barrier to seriousness, or being taken seriously? Was it always going to confuse people to be coming on like Bertolt Brecht while sounding like Jack Jones? If you have a ‘difficult’ voice, you can sing easy songs. The kind of non-singers I wrote about earlier – they can sing covers of Burt Bacharach songs and make them sound edgy, get kudos for their reinventions of classics. As if they have cleverly dug deep and found previously unrecognised qualities within these simple tunes. If, on the other hand, you have a beautiful voice, it is not always so easy to make those songs sound fresh. Simon Frith writes in Performing Rites that ‘the “difficult” appeals through the traces it carries of another world in which it would be “easy”’. In other words, it allows us a glimpse of an alternative mainstream culture, one perhaps with greater depths, or wider boundaries, in which more was possible and more was understood. Scott Walker is perhaps the greatest example of how far you may have to run to explore those depths and escape the confines of your beautiful voice. It’s possible that he would have wanted to make his later records exactly as they are, whatever voice he had. But I would argue that there is something about being in possession of that particular sound that drove him to go as far as he did.
The old Scott Walker voice was a smoothly delivered baritone, with elegantly slurred vowels and few rough edges. In an interview with Simon Hattenstone, Walker commented that ‘People do feel a warmth with baritone voices that they don’t feel with others. It’s like the sound you get from a cello, and people love that sound straight away.’ He was gifted with extraordinary breath control, making his singing sound effortless, with no hint ever of strain or stress, the long, held notes seeming to glide along on one intake of breath; certainly you never heard him take another. No high drama gasping from Scott Walker. His voice was always placed very up-front in the track, putting him solo in the spotlight, a completely un-rock-and-roll vocal plac
ement. In other words, it was an MOR voice, but often singing non-MOR content. In the book No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker, editor and contributor Rob Young says Walker had ‘the loungey, laidback showmanship of Jack Jones and Frank Sinatra’; but even at his most MOR there was always more going on with him than was immediately apparent.
There’s a deceptiveness about it all, an illusion of ease, as he lures you in, only to deliver the sucker punch of challenging content. Jarring lyrics within soothing arrangements, a juxtaposition that I’ve always liked. A sense of having it both ways; ease and its opposite all at once; pleasure and pain; the lovely and the not lovely. I can’t think of another singer from the world of pop who sounds more like a grown-up than Scott, with all the richness and complexity that implies. In that, of course, he owes more to the world of pre-rock showbiz than to the other young men who were his contemporaries. He sings to you in that baritone, adult to adult. It’s flattering, comfortable, such a relief to come home to. And yet, that voice doesn’t truly relax or soothe me. In fact, it stirs me up a bit, sets off intangible yearnings and longings. It’s the romanticism of the setting – all those searching strings – combined with the almost detached vulnerability he conveys. There’s something lost about him. The songs often sound almost like dream sequences – sleepy, warm, but a little disconcerting. And in interviews now he talks about his voice with detachment, bemusement even; yet another revered singer who can’t quite feel at one with their voice, can’t quite understand it, or understand what all the fuss is about. ‘It’s a beast all on its own,’ he said in the interview with Simon Hattenstone. ‘I think of it as another thing, another person. When it’s working well I couldn’t wish for anything better. But it’s temperamental. Sometimes you get up and he’s just not ready to go.’ In a 2006 interview quoted in No Regrets, he says, ‘Singing is a great terror for me anyway, so it’s something that I’ve never wholly looked forward to. When I’m home, I’m just singing for myself, it’s OK, it’s relaxing sometimes. But if I’m actually going to do it… it’s very worrying.’ Famously, he doesn’t sing live any more, having struggled in the old days with poor sound systems, and all the problems of live amplification, and now perhaps – even though technological improvements would probably have done away with at least some of these issues – simply can’t imagine revving himself back up, getting back on that stage, and performing… well, what? The new stuff or the old stuff? Which Scott would people want to come and see, which voice would they be paying to listen to?
Just imagine, one of those nostalgia gigs, playing the old, beloved album in its entirety on some London stage. Scott performing, but which one – Scott 3? Scott 4? The whole music industry would be there, wouldn’t they? Everyone in England who’s made a record in the last thirty years. I imagine there’s nothing he’s less likely to do. I would be there in a shot if he did, and I don’t blame him for a second for not wanting to.
21
WE ALL SING
T
here is a lovely quote from Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto which is a very simple and sincere description of what listening to singing can feel like. It’s one that I find moving and, perhaps more importantly, am comfortable with as an idea: ‘Her voice stays inside him, becomes him. She is singing her part to him, and to a thousand other people. He is anonymous, equal, loved.’
What this suggests to me is connection. Not the singer being elevated above the listener, and above the crowd, but becoming as one with the listener, at the same time as the listener is joined to all other listeners. It’s about singing as a communal, shared experience – something inevitably human and humble. Perhaps this is more what we want; less of a separation, more of a joining together. A feeling that we are all in it together.
I’ve been asked: What’s it like when you join in at moments of group singing, for example, ‘Happy Birthday’, when the cake is brought to the table? Does everyone gradually stop singing, shamed into silence by the presence of your beautiful voice? No, of course not, is the answer, although it is true to say that I have been in situations where I think I can sense people at least looking at me, and wondering, is she going to sound better than us when we all start singing this, or not?
And the truth is, not. No one sounds any better than anybody else when singing ‘Happy Birthday’, unless you’re the kind of idiot who starts doing Mariah Carey trills at the end of each line, and then veers off into a harmony on the chorus, in which case you’re going to sound worse than everybody else. There is basically nothing you can do to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’ that will demonstrate your singing prowess, and as for doing a Marilyn Monroe impersonation – please, this is not the place.
The only thing I do try to do, whenever a round of ‘Happy Birthday’ is called for, is to be the one to establish the opening note, because if you leave this to others, someone (a man) will start it too low for everyone, or someone else (a child) will start it in a range that ends in a region only audible to dogs. So I loudly pick a note somewhere central, and hope everyone will join in and it will sound at least reasonable. They never do.
I wish you could do this in church, but of course there you are thwarted by the organist, who is the one picking the note you all start on. I go to my kids’ school carol service every year, because it’s Christmas and I disapprove of all Scrooge-like behaviour at Christmas, and that includes refusal to sing carols just because they go on about the virgin’s womb and the incarnate deity. And I enjoy singing the carols, but the one thing that makes this almost impossible is the keys they are pitched in. Sing with the ladies and it will be assumed you are a soprano, so pretty soon you’re warbling away in your flutiest head voice and sounding like the Queen Mother. Join in with the men instead and it’s a Barry White impression all the way. I end up doing that awful thing of singing one section in the ladies’ octave until it gets way too high for me, at which point I drop to the range below, joining the guys but sounding, in the process, like a thirteen-year-old boy whose voice is breaking. It’s humiliating, and anyone standing nearby thinking, This’ll be good, I get to hear Tracey Thorn singing ‘Adeste Fideles’, is in for a major disappointment. The truth is, when singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, I don’t sound any better than your nan.
What about karaoke, then? Surely that’s an opportunity to shine? To really show off and show them how it’s done? Well, I’m no karaoke expert, having done it only once in my life, but in my experience – limited, yes, but accurate nonetheless – karaoke is only ever performed drunk, and we all know how people sing when they’re drunk. You’ve seen that iPhone footage of Kim Wilde on a train after Christmas drinks, performing ‘Kids in America’ to a startled carriage with a look on her face of someone who has a song in her heart and not a care in the world? It’s a magnificent thing, and the only correct response is to love Kim Wilde for it, but the singing? That’s how we all sound when we’re drunk. All of us.
So when I went on a karaoke evening a couple of years back, with some women friends from Twitter, I soon learned that it wasn’t going to be about me seizing the mic at some point and moving everyone to tears with my version of a Leonard Cohen song. No, it was all about Grace Dent’s poignant interpretation of ‘Wuthering Heights’, Sue Perkins’s faithful and respectful Scottish accent on the Proclaimers’ ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’, and finally, me plucking up the courage to duet on Will Young’s ‘Leave Right Now’ with Radio 4’s Alice Arnold, spicing it up with the sudden and unexpected addition of a tambourine solo. Was anyone impressed, or even interested in whether I sounded any good? No, of course not, they were looking round the room to see where they’d put their drink and scrolling through the list of songs to cue up ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
Still, communal singing is an activity that we value; it’s popular, perhaps more popular again now than it has been for a long time. A hundred years ago it was taken for granted that people sang, in that ‘make your own entertainment’ kind of way around the piano in pubs, or more seri
ously every Sunday in church. But as Will Hodgkinson writes in The Ballad of Britain, in the twentieth century, with the birth of the music industry, people began to leave music to the professionals: ‘The average Briton accepted they were rubbish at singing, as they were at most things in life, and simply stopped doing it.’ Recently, however, it seems to me that people have rediscovered how much they enjoy singing, and the growing popularity of secular choirs is evidence of this – as also, perhaps, is the willingness of thousands of people to take part in auditions for shows like The X Factor. The show is held up as an example of our passivity – like vegetables we loll in front of the telly, watching the bland and the talentless, music becoming nothing more than aural wallpaper. But this is to ignore the countless numbers who turn up to try and be on the programme, people who clearly don’t regard it as an excuse to be passive, but an opportunity to join in, to participate in the business of music, to seize it back from the professionals. Noel Coward quipped that television was for appearing on, not for watching, and via the medium of the talent show it is possible nowadays for the non-celebrity to live up to his maxim.