Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  I’d sung along with pop records before, of course I had. But never before had one demonstrated to me the perfect place for my voice to be. So when I talk about my lack of stage presence and self-confidence, and in doing so imply there’s something almost ridiculous in my wanting to be Patti Smith, maybe I’m in danger of forgetting this ultimate truth – that at the very moment I was beginning to experiment with the idea of singing, I heard a singer embodying in one six-minute song a version of myself both simplified – a black and white version with no grey areas – and amplified.

  Almost the entire Horses album is pitched perfectly for me, as I discovered during the evenings that followed this epiphany. My parents would take the dog out for a daily walk, leaving me with fifteen luxurious minutes of solitude in which I would sing along at full volume with various tracks. ‘Kimberly’, for instance, with its melody that lingers and hovers around the note B, slap bang in the middle of my range, where my voice is at its strongest and fullest. Joining in with Patti on these songs was a joyous experience, utterly secret, something I shared with nobody. The basic physical coincidence of our vocal ranges connected us not just ideologically, but physiologically.

  If you talk about the voice as being a musical instrument, you can make it sound like something tangible. In his book Vocal Authority, John Potter describes it, in mechanical terms, as being made up of three elements: ‘a power supply (the lungs), an oscillator (the cords, or vocal folds as they are sometimes called), and a resonator (the vocal tract, consisting of the mouth and throat cavities)’. The lungs propel air, which passes through the vocal cords, making them vibrate and producing the sound we use for either speaking or singing. But unlike any other instrument, these components are your own actual body parts, and the sound you make is both defined and limited by your anatomy. As an instrumentalist you might practise and adapt your technique in order to follow the style and sound of players you like, and you might then call this influence. But as a singer there is only so much you can ever do to adapt the sound of your voice to emulate other singers. We label as inspirational those singers we happen to sound like. We feel a kinship with those whose sound lives somewhere close to our own, or at least seems to come from a similar neighbourhood.

  It’s also true that we can be negatively influenced by people, or strain to avoid taking on too strongly the imprint of another, for fear of drifting into mere imitation and unoriginality. Bob Dylan talks in his book, Chronicles, about how intimidated he could be in the early days by hearing others who seemed more authentic than him, and how inadequate that could make him feel. He’d been learning and playing all of Woody Guthrie’s songs, and feeling pretty good about himself as a singer of these songs, when he suddenly heard the recordings of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who’d been singing the same songs for years. Dylan describes being devastated by this – ‘I felt like I’d been cast into sudden hell’. Far from being inspired by the sound of someone doing what he was trying to do, he felt paralysed, and realised that in fact he would have to run a million miles from the very person it seemed he could learn the most from. All he could do was try to ignore Elliott – ‘It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy I just heard. I’d have to block it out of my mind… tell myself I hadn’t heard him and he didn’t exist.’ In other words, influence can sometimes be terrifying – not inspiring at all, but crippling.

  When I started, it was more often male singers with whom I connected – Elvis Costello and I shared a lot of range – and a little while later the dark brown tones of Nico’s singing provided another source of influence, or inspiration. In perhaps my favourite line from his recent Autobiography, Morrissey describes Nico thus: ‘Her singing voice is the sound of a body falling downstairs.’ Certainly there’s a downward trajectory to her singing, which reflected my own vocal style. In an early interview with Melody Maker, it was pointed out to me that I must have been influenced by Bridget St John, who in all honesty I had never heard of. Learning that she was a folk singer from the early 1970s, I took umbrage at the comparison and made a conscious effort to avoid finding out anything more about her. Years – no, truthfully, decades – later, I did investigate, and discovered that the distance from her Ask Me No Questions album to my A Distant Shore is only a few short steps. Vocally we are kin. Lyrically we are kin. She must have loved Nico, too, so maybe we both simply took some cues from the same place, but it’s fascinating to come across the singers whom you seem to have been magically influenced by without ever having heard them.

  My range was tiny at first; on the earliest recordings I made, with the Marine Girls, I sang only a handful of notes. By the time I came to make A Distant Shore in 1981, only a couple of years after hearing Patti Smith and getting an inkling that I might want to sing, I still hadn’t really learned how to do it properly, so there are moments where it gets a bit ‘pitchy’ – to use modern parlance – but that’s counterbalanced by the complete absorption of the performance. It’s the record where I began to find out for myself what I might sound like, or be able to sound like, and there’s a sensuality to the vocal which is the result of finally having the mic to myself and simply revelling in the experience – all that lovely reverb, all that lovely low vibrato, God I was enjoying myself! I can remember the freedom of the experience; I was on my own for the first time, without the other Marine Girls, and I sang without the inhibition I sometimes felt in their presence. In front of them, I was wary of ‘showing off’, of implying that my singing was better than Alice’s, of indulging myself. But here I was able to admit to myself that I could sing, and so something of my own style and vocal personality was unlocked; the voice that would be recognisably mine came out into the open and declared itself. But whether I found that voice, or invented it, is a question that has always mystified and intrigued me.

  It was in many ways a small voice, but it was all mine, and for years I didn’t try very hard to do much with it, either to extend or improve it. My approach was that of the passionate amateur, grateful to find myself in possession of a talent that others valued, never exploring much further beyond the realms of what came easily, or ‘naturally’. Singing live and touring meant that I had to try to sing louder, and build up some endurance, but other than that I remained faithful to the handful of notes which constituted my sound. I couldn’t go very high and it didn’t really occur to me to try, until around 1989 when I began to experiment with my higher head voice, or falsetto, you might call it. I hadn’t ever wanted to use it before, it didn’t sound like ‘me’, and it was startling to hear myself sing outside my range. I used it intermittently from the Everything But The Girl album Worldwide onwards, but only grew into it in a comfortable sense during my resurrected solo career after 2007. My producer Ewan Pearson and I joked during the recording of Out of the Woods and Love and Its Opposite that on those two records I sang the highest notes I had ever reached for in my entire life – these being the highest harmony on ‘don’t tell me it’s too late’ at the end of ‘Raise the Roof’, and the ‘sun in your hair’ line in the middle of ‘Kentish Town’. I needed stepladders to reach them.

  It was a very long way from Patti Smith, and not the voice I’d found when I first tried to sing. It must have been there all the time, but hidden away – it needed me to locate it, and then to believe that it sounded OK and have the confidence to use it, before I finally added this bit of range to the notes I had available. I thought that my identity was moored for ever in those first few notes I sang – and to some extent I will always think of that part of my voice as the real me – but still, I’ve learned that although range is both natural and instinctive, it can also involve an element of choice; that extra range can be uncovered, or released, or simply willed into being. These notes, they all come out of the same body, the source of all the sound we make.

  2

  TISSUE AND SKIN AND BONE

  I

  f the sound we make is at least in part determined by anatomy, then which parts, I wonder, might influence the w
ay I sing, and contribute to the way I naturally sound? I’d imagine that strong lungs, an open, relaxed throat and a sense of ease and control in the mouth and jaw would be essential for a singer, or would at least contribute to successful singing. But when I examine myself and my physical history, I realise that I don’t meet these requirements, and that limitations have played a part in the development of my singing and some of the problems I have with it.

  First off, I’ve always had weak lungs. Due to an accident at birth, I inhaled fluid and developed pneumonia as a consequence, not a good start for baby lungs. As a child I had a chesty, loose, smoker’s cough every winter, which my mum would dose up with Phensedyl, a medicine which at that time you could buy over the counter but which doctors gradually became more strict about prescribing. She came home one day from the chemist saying she had had to sign the poison book in order to get a new bottle for me, because apparently the local junkies were drinking it on the village green. At that age I had no idea why, though I found out some years later when I glugged back too much of it in a hotel room in Germany while coughing my way through a tour, and spent a hallucinatory afternoon in bed listening to the kettle in the corner of the room talking to me. In my twenties I developed asthma as a result of living with two cats I turned out to be allergic to, and so asthma inhalers were added to the chest complaints section of my medicine cupboard.

  The anatomy of the throat – the way in which the larynx and vocal cords are put together – must obviously play a part, too. I had to go for a laryngoscopy a couple of years ago when a small operation, for which I’d required a general anaesthetic, revealed some difficulty during the anaesthetising procedure, possibly an obstruction in my throat. The doctor recommended I get it checked out. This was terrifying, both medically (oh my God an obstruction in my throat obviously a tumour I am dead) and musically (could I have developed some problem with my larynx or vocal cords – polyps, nodules – which might put an end to my singing?). With my throat numbed, the specialist inserted a tiny camera up my nose and down into my throat, declaring within a few minutes that all was normal, and that this was just bloody typical of anaesthetists who, if they ever had a difficult intubation, would immediately refer the patient to a throat specialist, arguing there must be some anatomical problem. Apparently this time there wasn’t – my throat was fine. After all those years of singing, it was the first time anyone had looked at it, so it was a relief to hear this.

  And what about the anatomy of the mouth and jaw? Here, too, I have encountered problems, a deviation from what’s considered ‘normal’. When I was a child my dentist noticed that I was developing a pronounced underbite, meaning that my teeth didn’t meet well. He wanted to perform surgery, essentially carving a section out of my lower jawbone and reconstructing my entire jaw, so that my teeth would meet nicely. Mum refused to even countenance the procedure, much to my relief, and it was never mentioned again. Years later, in my twenties, probably, a different dentist asked if I’d ever considered having anything done about my malocclusion. I told him about the suggested childhood operation and he whistled through his teeth. ‘Thank God your mother didn’t agree to that,’ he said. ‘Brutal. We don’t do that nowadays.’ Then he went on to describe the current procedure – a simple case of having my jaw broken and re-set. OK, I said, and why would I want to have that done? Well, he said, you’d look different. I didn’t know if I wanted to look different. Would I sound different? I asked. He wasn’t sure. I was, however, sure I didn’t want to sound different. He told me it would be best to have it done before a certain age – thirty-something, was it? I forget now. I went home and let the years drift by until it was hopefully past the point of being possible.

  But I can only assume that it all contributes, that every bit of the anatomy involved in producing sound must have an impact on the final quality of that sound. Classical singer Ian Bostridge is the author of a fascinating book called A Singer’s Notebook, in which he describes going to a singing teacher who works with a laryngologist and a physiotherapist to concentrate on the mechanical aspects of singing. He observes: ‘My teacher’s most interesting general point about the vocal mechanism is that, unlike the piano, it is not designed for the purpose with which we most associate it. The primary function of the vocal tract is as one of several lines of defence against choking… If I’ve understood him properly, much of what we do as singers, particularly in achieving the high notes that technique facilitates, is actually about persuading the body that one is not about to swallow as one reaches for the skies.’

  I love this fact: that, as singers, we are not only working with a mechanism inside our own bodies, but a mechanism that isn’t even really intended to do what we try to make it do. Every effort to produce a beautiful sound is an effort to overcome the limitations of our apparatus. It’s like trying to use a cheese grater or a vacuum cleaner to make music, and doesn’t this make singing seem both mundane and heroic?

  The idea that there might be something remarkable about the physiology of the singer, especially the classical singer, is one that recurs in literature. In Willa Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, there is a scene where the singer and protagonist Thea Kronborg is examined physically, her teacher feeling her larynx while she breathes and sings, and she is described as being designed to be a singer – ‘the big mouth, the wide jaw and chin, the strong white teeth, the deep laugh. The machine was so simple and strong, seemed to be so easily operated. She sang from the bottom of herself.’

  And again in George du Maurier’s bestselling novel Trilby, when Svengali meets the singer Trilby he examines her like a breeder checking out a racehorse, peering into her open mouth and declaring, ‘The roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Pantheon… The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of St Sulpice… and the bridge of your nose is like the belly of a Stradivarius – what a sounding board! And inside your beautiful big chest the lungs are made of leather!’ These descriptions are strikingly architectural and mechanical in their language, as though the singer’s body is a building or a machine – the grander the cathedral, the stronger the machine, the bigger and better the voice. Similarly, in his book about opera and homosexuality, The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum talks about Maria Callas: ‘Walter Legge, who produced many of Callas’s legendary recordings, once peered inside her mouth and remarked that it was shaped like a Gothic cathedral.’

  It’s as if there is something out of the ordinary, then, about the mouths and throats of singers. As a singer, it could make you self-conscious to dwell on this thought, and that is the last thing you need; you become very aware of your body, more so than other musicians. While I’m very wary of risking sounding like a comedy mime artist – MY BODY IS MY TOOL – it is a simple truth that unlike other musicians, who use an instrument made of wood, strings, brass or electronic components to make their sound, we have to use something made of tissue, skin and bone. Musicians are famous for the care they take of their instruments – buying first-class airline seats for expensive cellos, for instance, or keeping guitar collections in temperature- and humidity-controlled environments – but for singers the equivalent is to lavish fastidious care on the body itself, to a degree which can become tiresome and restrictive. Classical singers take it for granted that rest and quiet are an essential part of touring, whiling away their days gently cosseting their voices and indulging in anxieties and neuroses which are seen as a natural and serious part of their job. The rock singer is supposed to be above all this, to devote more energy to shouting, drinking and hotel-trashing, but it is an unacknowledged fact that not all singers outside the classical realm can afford to play fast and loose with their voices in a Led Zeppelin-like manner. The amplified rock/pop voice can be as hard to maintain, requiring similarly dull regimes of conversation-avoidance, herbal teas and early nights. The anxieties induced by colds and upper respiratory tract infections mean that singers can become preoccupied by the state of the ear, nose and throat areas, and the presence or
otherwise of that basic bodily substance, phlegm. Phlegm is an absolute nuisance to the singer, present – as for most people – in greater quantities in the morning, and makes early performances, for instance on breakfast TV shows, something of a throat-clearing nightmare, to be avoided whenever possible. Eating also causes phlegm to be produced, and so meals before a gig are troublesome. On tour, the structure of the day usually means that arrival at the venue will be followed by a soundcheck, leaving an hour or two before the show in which to eat and get ready. But that is already too close to showtime to eat a meal, and so often – like many singers, I suspect – I would choose not to eat much at this time of the day. Later, there would be sandwiches at the hotel, or a bumper bag of crisps on the tour bus; no proper food, no fruit or vegetables. And then we wonder why we fall prey to colds and respiratory tract infections.