Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  By Tracey Thorn

  Bedsit Disco Queen

  Naked at the Albert Hall

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Virago

  978-0-3490-0525-6

  Copyright © Tracey Thorn 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  VIRAGO PRESS

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Naked at the Albert Hall

  Table of Contents

  By Tracey Thorn

  COPYRIGHT

  Foreword

  1: A Handful of Notes

  2: Tissue and Skin and Bone

  3: A Wonderful Toy

  4: Singing into a Void

  5: No Singing

  6: Lead Sister

  7: You Sound Just Like You

  8: A Fiendish Obstacle Race

  9: A Window Pane

  10: Looks Like an Elephant

  11: Rufus Wainwright’s Trousers

  12: Naked at the Albert Hall

  13: Little Monsters

  14: My Little Kindred Spirit

  15: Cut to the Chase

  16: Song to the Siren

  17: Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

  18: Such a Long Way Down

  19: Me and My Microphone

  20: Spooked by the Beauty

  21: We All Sing

  22: The Empty Vessel

  23: THE X FACTOR

  24: Why Sing?

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Song Credits

  Playlist

  FOREWORD

  W

  e love singing, don’t we? Both doing it and listening to it. We sing when we’re happy and celebrating – ‘Happy Birthday to You’ – and we sing when we’re down, in an attempt to keep our spirits up. We sing when we’re bored, to try and make the time pass faster – silly songs on coach trips, repetitive songs on long walks. Like whistling in the dark, we all sing together sometimes when we’re afraid, soldiers marching in unison to ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’; and we choose songs to make light of things that are unutterably gloomy – I’m reminded of the end of the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, when Gladys Aylward (Ingrid Bergman) leads her orphans over the mountains and to safety, all bravely singing, ‘This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb…’

  We sing to elevate sporting events – ‘Abide with Me’, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’; we sing when we’re winning – ‘We’re on our way to Wembley’; and when we’re losing, others remark on our silence by singing themselves – ‘You’re not singing any more’. We sing all together on the dancefloor, even if you can’t hear us, and after a few drinks we’ll get up with a karaoke microphone and sing so you can hear us. At big concerts we sing along en masse, and we like nothing better than being given the chance to join in a call-and-response with our heroes on stage, echoing them, copying phrases they give us.

  We sing at serious occasions, too; in church, at weddings, christenings, funerals. We form choirs, to sing either hymns and classical pieces, or vocal arrangements of rock songs. We’re encouraged nowadays to join in, whether or not we feel we can ‘really sing’. It’s good for us, apparently; a recently published piece of research suggests that, like meditation, singing has a relaxing effect on the body, lowering blood pressure and thus helping us along the path to a longer, healthier life. Another study claims that singing exercises could strengthen the throat muscles and somehow ease snoring. And it’s ‘good’ for us too: morally uplifting, an improving activity. Classical music has been linked with ideas of morality since the eighteenth century, and the teaching of singing became at least in part an exercise in fostering good behaviour. ‘Music as morality and singing as discipline were at the very root of Victorian church music’, writes John Potter in his book Vocal Authority, and singing became an important part of infant school education. Along with jam-making, the Women’s Institute became famous for its communal singing of ‘Jerusalem’ at meetings. A bit self-important, a bit goody-goody, it was what put my mum off for life the first time she went. Unable to take seriously the sight of a group of housewives solemnly intoning William Blake’s hymn, she got a fit of the giggles, and never returned.

  And yet, despite the fact that we do it all the time, when people are asked what talent they would most like to have, they often answer that they wish they could sing. It’s a shared dream, a fantasy talent. A skill, like being able to speak another language, or paint, which we feel would free us, define us, make us more entertaining and interesting, and more able to express ourselves. We elevate singing above many other activities, often endowing it with an almost religious significance, and believe that both in singing, and in listening to others sing, we can experience something transcendent. So we mythologise and romanticise singing and singers, seeming to hold it up as a skill both more difficult and rarer than it actually is – talent show auditions reveal that in fact quite a lot of people can sing; it’s not as unique as we tend to assume. This elevation of singing is a romantic notion, and can be flattering – if you happen to be a singer – yet also strangely reductive. When we regard singing as an instinctive and wholly emotional act, we narrow down our understanding of what it is and what singers are. If we think of it as simply a primal outpouring of feeling, then we miss the elements of conscious control and decision-making that go into singing, and which can make the difference between boring singing and interesting singing. I don’t mean to deny the emotional aspect, but what I do often find myself pointing out is: there’s more thinking in singing than you might think.

  These are the thoughts that have led me to write this book. It’s not intended to be Part Two of my memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, in which I described much of my career in music, but it is connected. In writing an autobiography there is inevitably a certain amount that gets left out. You have to settle on a tone of voice, and a stance, in order to avoid merely compiling a long list of things that happened; and with Bedsit Disco Queen, my chosen stance was all to do with my attempts to make myself fit in a world – the music business – which I more or less stumbled into. It was a book about ambivalence, and the quest for personal identity; about love of music and awkwardness with music; about fame and strangeness and the attempt to cling to some kind of normality. What it wasn’t, particularly, was a book about being a singer, and after I’d written it some people asked me why I hadn’t said much about singing – in places skating over the very aspect of my life that has publicly defined me, and often referring only in passing to how I feel about singing and what it means to me. I left certain details out, because I wanted to write a book that was pacy, and funny, and kept moving forward, and had moments of introspection without getting bogged down in them. But having written that book, I feel that I can step back and slow down, and take a longer look at some of the thoughts that I filed away in a corner of my mind, hoping to come back to them later. Some of the things I want to say in this book are almost footnotes to Bedsit Disco Queen, or digressions on subjects that it briefly alighted on. Conversations that I half started, or alluded to, but raced past without finishing. Or thoughts that only occurred to me later.

  This book might seem personal and idiosyncratic, but that’s because it’s not a journalist’s investigative exploration of the story o
f singing, or an academic’s all-inclusive encyclopedia. It’s more a compendium of insights which I haven’t often seen recorded or discussed; alternative takes on aspects of singing which are taken for granted. The fact, for instance, that as the person doing the singing, you can drift towards feeling resentful of the idea that you are simply in possession of a natural gift, and that there is an artlessness to the occupation you are known for. Singing is a physical activity as much as an emotional one, and though the sound is produced in the very core of your body – from the lungs, right next to the heart – the brain is always involved too. Decisions are being made all the time, ones which require attention and focus – settling on the range in which you’re going to sing, which part of your voice you’re going to use, your pronunciation, accent, inflection, sense of rhythm, volume, dynamics… These are constants – ongoing operational decisions which may feel instinctive, or become second nature through practice and habit, but which are nonetheless mental and intellectual activities, not simply happy accidents. There are technical choices, too, involving microphones and headphones, setting up volume and balance, and moving in and out from the microphone to alter the sound. All these things have an effect on performance. And the question of ‘taste’ – not only in what songs to sing, but how to sing them – brings an aesthetic consciousness to the process of singing. Again, this is a mental process, not a mere outrush of emotion.

  I don’t often hear people say these kinds of things about singing, so this book will, in part, be an insider’s view, an uncovering of secrets about singing, things that are known only to those who have sung for their supper. However, since I’m writing from both sides of the fence, as a listener as well as a singer, I want to include my point of view as an enthusiast, talking about voices I love, trying to get inside them. I’m writing as a book-lover, too, drawn to those points where my love of singing and my love of literature overlap; where novels or poems articulate deeper truths about singing, and its significance. There are characters in fiction who embody different aspects of the singer’s role and life, and I want to look at them as a way of exploring the singer as a symbol, as well as a living, breathing human being.

  With all these goals, and my wish to hang onto a very personal viewpoint, I’m aware that this book will be neither chronological, like a memoir, nor will it follow the arc of an argument. I have no particular point to prove, or specific conclusion to reach. I plan to follow stories that particularly interest me, wherever they may lead; sometimes one idea may lead to another, sometimes a new train of thought might interpose itself. There’ll be a playful element to some of it, as I make what might seem to be fanciful connections between apparently unlikely things: a lyric by The Streets leading me to a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, or a Franz Kafka short story making me think of Vashti Bunyan.

  But I will also talk about my own singing and how I feel about it; about books and talent shows, microphones and Auto-Tune; about the debate between artifice and authenticity. I will ask a few other singers what they think, and try to work out what it is we want from them – and whether it is anything they can possibly provide. When we talk or write about singers, what do we say? And how much do we really understand what it feels like to be a singer? We love listening to singers, and sometimes we dream of being one ourselves, so we assume that it must be an uncomplicated source of fulfilment and joy to sing for a living. And yet, having been a singer for most of my adult life, and having read many biographies of singers I love, I’m all too aware that this isn’t always the case; that singers can be bundles of neuroses, tormented by anxiety about their vocal inadequacy, fears about losing their voice, about it failing them – or, equally, about it defining them too much, at the cost of their personality. Being loved for your voice can be great, but it leads to the question: does anybody love me for myself?

  For you may feel that you’re nothing special. That in fact, you’re a bit of a bore. And it may be that, if you tell a joke, we’ve probably heard it before. But if you have a talent, and everyone listens when you start to sing, is that really nothing more complicated than ‘a wonderful thing’? Or is it perhaps more of a mixed blessing, and one that should come with a clear warning sign: ‘This way danger lies’?

  1

  A HANDFUL OF NOTES

  I

  don’t do nostalgia gigs. And by that, I don’t just mean I don’t perform them, I mean I don’t attend them either. I don’t believe in them. I really don’t want them. For one thing, they make me feel old in a way that it is wholly unhelpful and destructive. I don’t mind being the age I am – I’ve reached a level of achievement I’m happy with, I enjoy my daily routines, I feel comfortable in my own skin. I don’t long to be eighteen again, or twenty-five, and it was between those ages that I experienced most of my gig-going high points. So going to a gig to watch a band I loved years back, playing an album I loved at the time, just seems masochistic – nothing more than an exercise in pointing out to yourself that it was all a long time ago, that they’re old and we’re old, and all of it is over. Which isn’t really what I believe. The great things about that record you loved, they’re not over. You carry them with you, they’ve shaped you, they’re part of you. As my old friend Peter Walsh, from Australian group The Apartments, never tires of quoting at me, ‘The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past’ (William Faulkner), and this is precisely why I don’t feel any need to have my nose rubbed in a musical history which has never really left me.

  And yet. Here I am, it’s June 2005, and I’m in a seat at the Royal Festival Hall. I’ve broken my own rule and come to a nostalgia gig, a performance of a seminal album. I’ve bought the ticket and I’m here, and now, in truth, I’m excited, getting in the mood. It won’t be as bad as you fear, I reassure myself. Come on, it might be good, you might enjoy it. Relax.

  The lights dim. Onto the stage walks the singer. She’s wearing the jacket from the cover of the album, and that’s good. She looks older, sure, unashamedly older, and that’s good too. Of all people I would have hated her to buy into a desperate chasing of eternal youth – nipping here, tucking there. Now she’s appeared I’m feeling a frisson of proper excitement. Maybe I’m going to be completely won over after all. The piano line starts up – and yes, it’s true, it sounds exactly right. In she comes, with that opening line, maybe the best opening line ever, and suddenly – without me even knowing how I got out of my seat – I’m on my feet, my arms are in the air, I think there may even be tears in my eyes. And more than that, I’m transported, I’m whirling through the air, through time and space, and I’m back in my little orange-painted bedroom at home, and I’m tipping the album out of its sleeve and slipping it onto the spindle of the blue Dansette I inherited from my brother, and she’s singing that opening line. And the line is… And the line is…

  ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.’

  When did you know you could sing? people ask me. How did you even start? Where does your voice come from, is it from inside your head or inside your body? It’s not like other musical instruments, is it, and because of this there are aspects of what we sound like which will be for ever out of our control. The moment when we first encounter the sound that comes out of our own body can be a profound and decisive one. I’ve written before that it was a disappointment to me when I realised I wouldn’t be Patti Smith, but that was a little way off in the future when I first heard her in 1979. The introduction was made by Mike Harris from down the road, who’d lent me her album Horses, along with Stiff Records’ The Akron Compilation in a scratch ’n’ sniff sleeve smelling of rubber. My first reaction to Patti was one of possibility. I wanted to be her because a) on the cover of the record she looked like a boy, and I felt that I pretty much looked like a boy, and she made looking like a boy seem a beautiful thing; and b) the first time I tried to sing along with those opening lines on Horses, I realised in fact that I could sound like her. I was sixteen, the idea of singing had barely entered my head, and yet somewhere inside me
vague imaginings, unformed desires, were beginning to stir and take shape.

  That record’s opening lines, from her version of ‘Gloria’, have now passed into rock mythology, but I can still recall the visceral jolt of hearing them for the first time. And not just the audacity of the words, the defiant sneer, but the tone of the voice – worldly, dismissive – and beyond even that, the pitch of the voice. Low, dark, boyish, it existed in a space that seemed familiar, and contained echoes of the sound I was tentatively exploring in the privacy of my bedroom. Joining in with her I found that we did indeed occupy the same ground, and without knowing how or why I had an immediate sense of my voice ‘fitting’. Imagining this to be an entirely conceptual ‘fit’, I of course believed that I sounded a bit like Patti Smith because we were alike, it was a metaphysical connection being made. And in doing so I fell into the first and most basic misconception about vocal influence and inspiration – the idea that it transcends the physical. Now, I believe that the reason she implanted herself into my imagination as my first vocal influence was the simple accident of vocal range; the fact that in that first song I heard her sing, ‘Gloria’, she comes in on a low E, the E below middle C, and for the rest of the song moves around within the space between this E and the one an octave above. My perfect, ideal range. Still the place I most like to sing.