by Tracey Thorn
From the high emotion of some of the performances, through the tawdry sentimentalism of others, right down to the buffoonery of what we might cruelly call the ‘joke’ acts, it reminds me of what the charts used to be like. Diana Ross next to Wizard. ‘American Pie’ next to Convoy. Great artists rubbing shoulders with one-hit wonders. Pop music in all its glory.
And this is why I refuse to get angry about the voting for the ‘joke’ acts, when it happens. There is often fury at this point, when an ‘unworthy’ contestant scrapes through at the expense of someone apparently better, though what this means is that someone who has entertained you gets more votes than someone who has proved capable of singing in tune, but otherwise has nothing to distinguish them from anyone else who can sing in tune. The fun, silly act trumps the boring, bland one, just like in the real world of pop music.
In pop music the distinction between the amateur and the professional is an arbitrary one. There is no official training to undergo, no moment when you become fully qualified, when you can be called a ‘proper’ singer. Pop singers are simply people who get up and do it. If they’re good at it, and can make a living from it, and become experienced at recording and singing live, then we regard them as professionals. If they become extremely successful, they are stars, and can come to seem distant and unattainable – which is why we then yearn to see ‘amateurs’ again.
I think that is the key. They are given mentors who are supposed to guide them through the weeks, and the makeovers and the singing lessons are meant to mould them into something akin to a potential pop star. But the outcome is always the same. As they get ‘better’, they get worse. In the search for the intangible ‘X Factor’, or the attempt to manufacture it, any hint that might have been present in their early appearances of character, style or individuality is ruthlessly removed.
What we are doing when we watch The X Factor is watching ourselves. Those untrained singers who take to the floor, they are us. It could be me, you might think – or even, it doesn’t have to be me, I can watch you doing it for me. So singing, once again, is both the great leveller and the embodiment of our yearning for transcendence. They sing as us, often not much better than us; they are us. We watch them go on a journey and again, they are going on the journey so that we don’t have to. Often, it’s quite a disappointing journey. We think we want to go there, but look, it’s not much fun really, is it, when you look closely?
It’s the blend of the high and the low, the silly and the serious, and yes, the good and the awful, that makes the show, for me. I know there’s a point, usually about halfway through, when the joke act has to go, and I accept it but I miss them. Then comes the inexorable last run towards Christmas, with everyone starting to take it all too seriously. Even the singers you liked at the beginning you’re now starting to hate because, let’s face it, not many of us want to watch even the singers we love most in the world every Saturday night, doing a cover version of a song we don’t much like, live on TV. It’s too much pressure for any of them to withstand. We reach the end drained and wretched, wondering why we started watching and how this person came to win, out of all that promise at the start, and we vow never to watch again. And then we do. I do. I absolutely do.
24
WHY SING?
W
e can’t end there, though, with me watching The X Factor. You’d never forgive me, would you, dear reader? I think I know where this has to end, and it’s with myself, once again; here with my questions about singing and not singing. Wondering whether I will ever sing on a stage in front of people again. Wondering whether or not I can call myself A Singer if I don’t do that any more, and if it matters at all what I call myself, or what anyone else calls me. Wondering why we sing at all.
In The Smiths’ song ‘Asleep’, when Morrissey pleads for a lullaby, he seems to be singing about singing, though the overarching theme he is more than hinting at is suicide; the desire not to wake up standing in for a more permanent oblivion, the final everlasting sleep, both seductive and dangerous. But it’s the presence of singing at this most crucial turning point, or ending point, of a life that catches my attention. The lyrics describe his subject’s yearning for someone to sing to him, his longing not to wake up on his own, and they suggest that we’re never truly alone as long as someone is singing to us. A voice is there, even as we drift into unconsciousness – whether of sleep or death – and that singing voice is as tangibly comforting as a hand softly caressing our hair, a blanket placed over our weary body. Don’t hold me, don’t just talk to me, but sing. It means so much.
In Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the bird’s song is immortal, yet speaks to the poet’s longing for death. Like Morrissey, Keats seems to feel that one would not die alone if someone, or something – in this case a bird – were singing at that moment: ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain, / While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!’ Birdsong equals freedom, a release from the cares and pains of existence; and the song’s ecstasy is soothing, an accompaniment to life or death which takes away the suffering, or at least makes it bearable. How often we seem to return to the idea that song can ease us from this life, transport our souls to heaven, gently carry us from this world to the next: ‘And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ (Hamlet).
We sing to make ourselves feel better, and we sing for others to make them feel better. In this book, I’ve focused on the trouble with being a singer, in an attempt to balance out some of the idealised cliches I’ve grown tired of. And I’ve looked for stories that mirror my own, and for singers who feel, or have felt, like me. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s all bad, or that we’re all mad, all the time. Take Alison Moyet, for instance. Over the years she has become somewhat saddled with an image which is almost a stereotypical portrait of the artist as a bit of a nutcase. Recent interviews and press articles have seemed to dwell endlessly on her struggles and her demons. When she appeared on Desert Island Discs various newspapers ran short pieces about her, pulling out quotes about her agoraphobia, her smashing of her gold discs, constructing a somewhat pained and painful persona: The Damaged Singer.
Alison would be the last to deny the troubles which have beset her career (many of them related to dealings with record companies and contracts) and the psychological problems which accompanied them, but in many ways she is the complete opposite of the tortured artist; someone who has at times been a tortured person, but for whom singing has always been the escape; not the source of her fears, but the solution to them. Talking to her, I realise that she is the living embodiment of one valid answer to the question, why sing? She’s one of those people for whom singing is actually easier than speaking; it’s more true, and more liberating.
She describes herself very frankly as being socially phobic: ‘I was always quite insular, I was a bit of a loner… and then when I got into this business where everyone was sociable, I was just a bit freaked out by it. I got great invites to go to great places, work with brilliant people, you know, do some amazing collaborations, but the terror of meeting people was always enough for me to turn them down.’
ME: So for you it was not so much musical- or singing-based fear, it was more social.
ALISON: Yeah, social fear.
ME: Whereas for me it’s about the actual singing.
ALISON: Yeah, bizarrely that was the one thing I’m secure about.
ME: See, that’s interesting to me. I’ve talked to a couple of other people who are more like me, who share all my anxieties and angst about singing, and it’s all focused on the performing; but you’re different.
ALISON: Yeah, I’m very hard on myself, and I have anxieties elsewhere, but the singing is the safe place for me.
ME: So, at gigs, do you feel anxious?
ALISON: No, on stage I’m fine, I know what’s expected of me.
ME: And do you need an audience? Do you thrive on the crowd in front of you?
ALISON: No… I just find fewer people more intimidating than many. And you can’t really see the people anyway. You know, I just kind of lose myself in it.
More comfortable on stage than most of the other singers I’ve talked about or spoken to, she is also more rational – less mad, if you like – in her ability to judge herself and her own abilities. Not for her Dusty’s ‘I have a voice I don’t particularly like’, or Sandy’s ‘You’ll just have to put up with this’. Instead she has a core of steel, forged during the years when things went wrong for her, and she learned how painful shutting herself off from the world could be. Now she has an almost fierce determination never to let that happen again.
ALISON: I’m not really frightened of making mistakes. What I am frightened of is not engaging, because so many of my years were spent avoiding engaging. I am frightened of not finding out what I can do. I’m not frightened of finding out what I do badly. And maybe I say that because I know that when I do things well I do them really well. And maybe it’s because I come with that confidence. But I can hear my brilliance, and I can hear my idiocy. My complete failings.
ME: You have the most clear-sighted vision of yourself as a singer. More so than anyone else I’ve talked to.
ALISON: Really?
ME: Haha, yes, you’re the most level-headed of all of us. You win! And I know you think of yourself as someone who’s full of angst and everything —
ALISON: Oh I am, though, I am full of angst.
ME: Yes, but in terms of your persona as a singer, you win the crown for being sorted and sussed.
ALISON: Hoorah!
Talking to Alison is inspiring, but it also can’t help but make me aware of the gap between us, the different arenas in which our neuroses play out. I wanted to include her as a positive voice, but her take on singing doesn’t really coincide with mine. We all have our own reasons, our own motivations for singing, and it fulfils different needs or plays on different fears in each of us. For some, singing can be a form of showing off, done to impress; after all, the voice can be a seductive instrument. I was conscious quite early on that my voice was considered to have a sexy quality, being low-pitched, warm, a little breathy. This was interesting for me, as I had never considered myself sexy. I wasn’t a conventionally pretty teenager; I didn’t meet the mainstream ideal, so I had doubted my appeal. But then the voice seemed to do it for me, and gave me access to a power I hadn’t had before. And yet, still, there was the conundrum – was it me listeners were attracted to, or the disembodied voice? If it was seductive, who was doing the seducing? If someone swooned while listening to a record, I wasn’t even present, so it was hard to see how I was involved in the frisson being experienced. It was as though I poured something into a sealed bottle – a love potion! – which was then opened when I wasn’t in the room, and worked its effects. But how I benefited from those effects was not an easy question to answer.
Set against this egotistical aspect of singing, which exploits the possibility of personal allure, is the concept of singing as a shared experience, something to join us together. Singing can be empowering for an individual, yet at the same time there’s a democracy to it. You may say you ‘can’t sing’, but I bet you can sing more than you can play guitar, or do a drum solo. So you have a stake in it. When you listen to singers, you’re listening to people doing something you’ve done yourself, something you’ve shared in. So the communal, joining together element is there, even when we listen to singers. And when we take part in singing with others, then it becomes literally communal – the sharing of an experience in real time. If we sing at least in part to express our inner selves and our feelings, then perhaps doing so with others amplifies that aspect of emotional self-expression. Our feelings, whatever they may be – joy, despair, passion – join together with those of the other singers, and we’re bonded by the act, the taking part.
The folk singers Rachel and Becky Unthank have started in recent years to host what they call ‘Singing Weekends’, where a group of people take part in singing workshops, communal harmony sessions, a sing-song in the pub – various forms of singing together in a non-professional capacity, for the simple pleasure of joining in. The idea sounded both intriguing and attractive to me, so I decided that I would like to attend one in order both to observe and to take part in this type of communal singing. Booking my attendance with Adrian, Rachel’s husband, I explained to him that I was writing this book, and mentioned that I’d like to include something about the singing weekends in it. He was happy with this, and so I planned to set off for Berwick-upon-Tweed in January 2014.
Anticipating the singing weekend I was about to attend, I began in my mind to build it up into something possibly life-changing, imagining that I might have a kind of epiphany; a moment when I would find myself singing with a crowd of strangers and rediscover the joy of singing out loud in public. I even had the idea that it could provide me with the final trajectory of this book – that all my doubts and questioning would be resolved in some way in this concluding chapter, which would answer some of those questions and provide me with a point of closure.
But as the day I was due to go drew nearer, I realised I was experiencing serious anxieties about it; beginning to dread it, even, fearing that it wouldn’t be what I’d built it up to be – and could in fact be a disaster. That, however much I loved and respected the notion of communal singing, of everyone being equal in a group setting, I was too far gone down the path of being a Professional Singer to easily shed that identity, or expect others to let me shed it. I feared that everyone would in fact look at me, expect something from me, want something from me, and that it might actually be even worse than being on stage, in that we would be up close, eyeball to eyeball, and there would be no escape.
Far from looking forward to confronting my issues around singing, I had to acknowledge that I was no nearer being able to do that than I had been for the last fifteen years or more. Suffering from a winter cold, I worried that I wouldn’t even be able to sing, and so a day or two before the weekend, I cancelled. What was this, I wondered? Was my body trying to tell me something? Had I deliberately, if subconsciously, sabotaged my attempt to sing again? And in fact, was I still just burying my head in the sand by asking this weekend to be a kind of quick fix, like the failed hypnotherapy – an intervention that would provide a solution to something I had unnecessarily identified as being a problem?
Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was even being slightly dishonest, in that I was trying to make something happen which I was then going to present as a bolt from the blue, a moment when I would be thunderstruck by my rekindled love of singing to people. Was there a danger, I wondered, that I was trying to turn this book into a self-help book, involving me ‘going on a journey’ and ‘finding myself’ at the end? That hadn’t been my original intention, and wasn’t what I wanted. And so, with a somewhat heavy heart, I accepted that my neat ending wasn’t going to be provided by a weekend of communal singing – which left me, momentarily, looking at an empty space, a blank page where I had thought my conclusion was going to be.
Here we are, though, with the end fast approaching, neat or not. This book hasn’t been a journey, nor, I realise, have I wanted it to be; rather, it’s given me an opportunity to think and talk about singing in more detail than I had room for in Bedsit Disco Queen. There’s no chronology here, so no obvious place to end, and I’ve asked more questions than I’ve been able to provide answers for; but in exploring my problems with singing, and identifying with other singers who’ve experienced similar feelings, I realise that I have ended up not far from where I started, back with the notion of singing but not being overheard. I briefly wanted this book to contain a sense of a straight line, of an arrow going somewhere, of progress being made. My last book ended with me apparently reaching a point of acceptance of my place within music, realising that I no longer had anything to prove, that I could finally be myself.
Well, that may be true, and in many important respects I do
feel exactly that. But one thing remains – though I have returned to writing and recording songs, I still haven’t sung on a stage since the year 2000, at a concert in Montreaux. What I don’t want to do, however, is carry on implying that this is a great failure on my part. If I’m not going to conclude with a triumphant moment of return, then I am at least going to allow myself the luxury of an ending where I defend my choice, and forgive myself.