by Tracey Thorn
Recently I asked Romy Madley Croft, singer with the xx, about being on tour, and was relieved when it transpired that she was the same as me – perhaps the same as all of us singers. ‘I used to struggle with constantly having a sore throat on tour,’ she said. ‘This might be too much information but I realised it came from exposure to lots of air conditioning, getting a blocked nose and that leading to me breathing through my mouth when I slept, giving me a dry throat. My only singing-on-tour tip is taking decongestant spray with me.’ See? We’re all frustrated ear, nose and throat specialists.
Talking can become a problem, too, especially if, as I believe many people do, you talk less from the diaphragm, like Shakespearean actors, and more from the throat. A lot of talking can tire and strain the voice, yet tours are often accompanied by non-stop promotional activities and interviews. I have always found speaking on the phone especially problematic – something about the fact of not being able to see the other person forces you into a greater degree of voice projection and tension. An afternoon of face-to-face or phone interviews could be disastrous, and eventually these were things I backed away from. At times when my voice was really struggling, I would avoid all talking, spending the day solitary and silent, reading and looking out of the window, nursing medicinal teas, pacing wordlessly in the dressing room rather than socialising and enjoying the build-up to a gig.
All these physical issues are impossible to suppress completely; they just have to be worked around. And they ensure that singers are neurotic about certain tiny aspects of their physiology. As Ian Bostridge writes, ‘It makes us… a very inward-looking breed, literally, obsessed with the health of tiny pieces of mucous membrane (the vocal cords) in the cartilaginous larynx…’ But this basic fact – that the voice is a body, or at least, inhabits a body, and is produced physically, via the movement of muscles, air passing over the larynx and so on – is also what connects singers to their audience, in a way that is different from other musicians. In his brilliant book, Performing Rites, the critic and sociomusicologist Simon Frith points out that as the audience we are aware, consciously or not, that we too possess the same physical attributes – lungs, larynx, vocal cords. When we listen to music we can’t usually play along, but we can and do sing along. We have the same body as the singers we are listening to, we come tantalisingly close to being able to do what they can do, and so the very body which makes the singer so neurotic is also what bonds her to the audience. All of us make sounds all the time – we speak, we laugh, we cry – but if we are not musicians we may never go near a musical instrument, never use one to make a sound with. Musicians, therefore, are separate, distinct from us, in a way that singers are not. Still, singers reveal to us that they can do more with the body than we can, and so they are us, but better. We see ourselves not only reflected, but enhanced, improved upon. The bond is at once egalitarian yet also hierarchical – we identify with and we revere singers – and there, in a nutshell, is the source of some of their power over us.
3
A WONDERFUL TOY
T
he voice is not just a body, however, it’s also a person, and this, too, makes it quite unlike other musical instruments. We usually identify more with singers than other musicians, and we identify them more completely with their songs. In Performing Rites, Simon Frith writes about the fact that we regard vocal expression as being more direct than when a musician expresses themselves via a guitar or drum kit. Despite it being a performance, containing elements of imagination, acting and projection, we often take singing very literally, imagining that what we hear or think we hear is a direct and faithful expression of the singer’s personal feelings or their personality. We feel we get to know singers by listening to them sing, and if we like the voice, we tend to imagine that we like the person.
I have a confession to make: when I listen to bands, I only really hear the singer.
People say, ‘Great bass line on that track,’ or ‘LOVE the drummer in that band,’ and as a teenager, when I was starting to buy records and take them seriously, I simply didn’t know what they were talking about. I was unable to identify what the bass player was doing, or understand what his or her role was. Drumming was more obvious – you couldn’t not hear it, after all – but still, for me it was going on in the background. As for the other instruments, well, they were there to hold the tune together and move it along, to weave a kind of aural net, the purpose of which was to bear the singer aloft and carry them towards you so that they could deliver the true purpose of the music – the lead vocal.
Joining a band provided a brisk Dummies’ Guide to Instruments, and I began to understand what each member was doing. I learned how to join in with the conversation, and trained myself to pay attention to the other things that were going on apart from the singer. But that didn’t mean I ever quite moved on from my earliest perception, and even now I don’t think I hear music that differently. This leads me to wonder, is it possible to like a band, or any record, if you don’t like the singer? Is my way of listening really so unusual, or is it the way most of us hear music?
It can even be difficult to like a band if you have reservations about the singer, or get stuck on some mannerism or other. I’ve always found it hard to get past that whistling sibilance on every ‘s’ that Damon Albarn pronounces, and it stood in the way of me ever having any real affection for Blur. On his more recent projects, some of the intonations and glottal stops have been dialled down, but still, that ‘s’ is a funny little tic. It’s out of his control, obviously, and mean of me to mention it, but on just such minor and apparently trivial points can our feelings about singers snag.
On the other hand, it’s possible to like the singer but not the band. In the Oasis/Blur wars I was on the wrong side, in that I favoured Oasis. Everything they subsequently went on to become, which was hinted at right from the beginning – repetitive, retrogressive, lumpen – versus everything that Blur went on to become – imaginative, open-minded – should have made it obvious who was better. But I had a simple singer preference. On those early singles, Liam Gallagher’s singing was spectacular – a sneering engine of a voice levelled straight at your forehead, the first vocalist since John Lydon to capture that underdog spirit of defiance in all its glory. ‘I’m feeling supersonic/GIVE me gin and tonic’ he demanded, not even bothering to take his hands out of his pockets. At the super-slick, stage-managed MTV Awards I attended in New York he rolled on to the stage, spat on the floor, sang at us with lazy, contemptuous fury, and made me feel proud to be British. But his voice really was the most impressive thing about them, and once I’d had a few blasts of it via the first three or four singles, I felt I’d really had the best of them.
It reminded me, though, that the singer is almost always the way in to the band. It’s both a pro and a con of being a singer; audiences feel close and connected to you, and you can reach your listeners in a way that instrumentalists have to strive harder to do. On the other hand, someone not liking your voice can feel very much like them not liking you. As well as concern for one’s physical well-being that can border on the neurotic, the unavoidably personal element can add to a singer’s sensitivity and self-consciousness; the sense that singing is an exposing thing to do, or at least that an audience, and critics, interpret it as such, and consider themselves entitled to make judgements which, when negative, can feel like attacks on the person.
But a positive judgement can turn into something else entirely: an unrealistic and idealised version of the person doing the singing. It’s not a new phenomenon – Simon Frith discusses the idea of the star singer originating in classical music, before it was adopted by the world of pop: ‘The mass cultural notion of stardom, combining a Romantic belief in genius with a promise to make it individually available as a commodity… derives as much from the packaging of “high” artists as from the hype of the low’. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind went on a US tour, which was masterminded by P. T.
Barnum, and sold extensive merchandising. What we’d now call a marketing strategy was created around her, which emphasised her virginal innocence, her spiritual purity, her ‘authenticity’. She was presented as something superhuman but also unreal, sanitised, infantilised; she was more than just a woman singing a song, she was an Ideal, a Symbol. And perhaps this desire to deify the singer, to stress her purity and goodness, reflected something prevalent at that time, namely an anxiety about the moral status of singing, the probity of performance, of The Stage.
This idea is explored in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, written in 1876, a book which is full of characters who sing, and who fret over what singing says about them, how it reflects upon them as citizens, where it places them in society. Daniel Deronda himself has had a good singing voice since he was a boy – one of those angelic, choirboy voices ‘which seem to bring an idyllic heaven and earth before our eyes’. Anxious about his social standing – he does not know who his parents are and has been brought up by the uncle he secretly believes to be his father – he is alert to any indication of a slight concerning his social status. When his uncle suggests to him as a boy that he could become a professional singer, he is horrified, and replies angrily, ‘No; I should hate it!’ Daniel has a clear sense that being a singer is somehow not respectable, and that perhaps his uncle feels he is not quite a gentleman. Being a professional singer seems to him not just disreputable, but also demeaning, unmanly – ‘he set himself bitterly against the notion of being dressed up to sing before all those fine people who would not care about him except as a wonderful toy’.
So Daniel is the natural, gifted singer who does not want to sing, and his opposite number is Mirah, a young Jewish woman who has sung, or been made to sing, since she was a child. Dragged around theatres by her father, she has performed against her will and shares Daniel’s disgust at being used as a plaything – ‘it was painful that he boasted of me, and set me to sing for show at any minute, as if I had been a musical box’. Mirah has a sense of alienation and dehumanisation, the feeling that people don’t love her for herself, but only for as much as she entertains them. There is a hint that Mirah’s father has attempted to prostitute her out to rich men. Singing, then, can be a slippery slope, down which one could slide away from respectable society into its dark, hidden depths. If singers are treated like objects, slaves even, they are deprived of autonomy and dignity, so being a singer can be a wretched, demeaning profession.
It is left to the musician Klesmer to make a stronger claim, and to stand up for the right of musicians to be regarded more highly than as mere entertainers: ‘We are not ingenious puppets, sir; who live in a box and look out on the world only when it is gaping for amusement… We count ourselves on level benches with legislators.’ If George Eliot is here deliberately echoing the line from Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ – ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ – she is making a case for singing to be elevated to a higher status. This links back to something I said in the foreword, the idea that singing is ‘good’ for us, that it is morally uplifting, and it’s an idea that recurs in poems and novels. In Longfellow’s poem, ‘The Singers’, the job of the singer is to awaken spirituality and godliness in the hearts of those hearing the song: ‘God sent his Singers upon earth/With songs of sadness and of mirth/That they might touch the hearts of men/And bring them back to heaven again.’ There’s a holy, transcendent role to singing; as opposed to singing as entertainment, which can be corrupting and lowering, it’s an explicitly religious interpretation, aligning singers with priests and preachers, charged with saving the souls of their fellow men. A heavy responsibility, you might think.
Even ordinary people can tap into this spiritual uplift when they sing. There is a description in John Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal of a group of carol singers, who look ordinary and mundane in their outdoor clothes, ‘but the moment they began to sing they were transformed… The carolers seemed absolved and purified as long as the music lasted, but when the final note was broken off they were just as suddenly themselves.’ The effect of singing may be short-lived, only lasting as long as the song, but it is transformative and redemptive, and morally uplifting. In Daniel Deronda, Klesmer voices a similar view: that in order to save singers from the ambiguity of their position, from being regarded as tramps on the stage, performing monkeys, anyone’s plaything, they had to be lifted up and sanctified.
This is idealisation, pure and simple, and singers are uniquely vulnerable to it. More than actors, they are seen to be ‘themselves’ in performance; what they offer is a direct expression of their own inner self, or soul, not the portrayal of a character (even though they may in fact be doing exactly that, singing lyrics written by others, or singing the tale of a character not themselves, or singing in character). The audience will tend to assume that the ‘I’ speaking (singing) is the person they see before them. And as such, their responses to the music, their projections and imaginings, become fused with what they imagine to be the personality of the singer. When reading reviews of Bedsit Disco Queen, I couldn’t help noticing how often my writing voice was compared to my singing voice. The comments were positive, and lovely, my ‘voice’ being described as warm or approachable; down to earth and likeable. But making the link between the two voices was interesting to me, suggesting that many listeners already liked ‘me’, or felt that they did, because they liked my singing voice, and readily identified my writing voice as belonging to the same person.
In the 2009 novel The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips, a young singer called Cait apparently enjoys the attentions of an obsessive fan, but towards the end of the book she encounters a different character, Stan, who seems to like her not only for her voice but for herself: her voice is ‘not the most interesting part of you, by a mile’. She ends up dating Stan, who says to her, ‘If your job was dressing up as a rabbit in a theme park, would you want me to come visit you and pretend you were a real rabbit?’ In other words, singing is a form of pretending. It is not who you really are. Anyone who forms a relationship with The Singer, in which they require her to act at all times like The Singer, is asking her to carry the make-believe elements of her job into her real life.
As a lyric writer, I am aware that songs written in the first person have more power, and an audience will connect more readily with them. But I am also aware that it will be taken for granted that every ‘I’ I sing represents the real me. Writing a song called ‘Oh, The Divorces!’ might have been asking for trouble (many listeners assumed I had recently divorced), and following it up with a track about visiting a singles bar in which I sang ‘I pull off my ring as I push my way in/Won’t be needing it here’ seemed to confirm that, yes, ‘I’ really had ended my marriage and was now out on the dating scene. I’m regarded as a confessional songwriter, but one way in which it is possible to maintain a sense of privacy, or some mystery about the meanings of songs, is to blur the moments when ‘I’ really means me, and when it means someone else entirely.
Some singers and writers are understood to write ‘in character’ – Elvis Costello, for instance, or Randy Newman – because the characters they create are so obviously not themselves, and are either highly exaggerated or satirical creations or, in the case of Randy Newman, a monstrous opposite, who could not be mistaken for Randy himself. I don’t do anything as extreme as that, so the assumption that ‘I’ means ‘I’ is easier to make, but it can be frustrating, and is another way in which the skill or decision-making involved in writing and singing can be overlooked in favour of a romantic belief that the artist is always engaged in the pursuit of self-expression. This simply isn’t the case. Something is being expressed, yes, and it may be something heartfelt and true, but it may not be about myself or my own feelings.
So when we respond to a singer, often we don’t really see or hear the actual person; we see and hear an imagined version of them, a projection of our own needs and desires. As Virginia Woolf wrote in Jacob’s Room, ‘Nobody see
s any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole – they see all sorts of things – they see themselves…’ When we hear a singer, much of the experience is actually happening inside our own heads, and is a mixture of memory, desire, expectation and need – we hear what we expect to hear, or what we want and need to hear. If listeners tend to idealise singers, then the love an audience has for your voice can sometimes feel threatening to the singer as a person. It can make singers anxious that perhaps listeners want too much, more than the singer is willing or able to give. The biographies of troubled artists offer examples that bear this out, and when I talk to other singers there can be a recognition of this kind of feeling, but it isn’t often understood or mentioned by people who write about music, especially if they are writing from the position of fan. It takes an imaginative leap for a writer who loves singing or a particular singer to move beyond their own pleasures as the listener and get inside the head of the singer. This is where fiction can bridge the gap, offering a way into that understanding, and it’s why I want to look at certain novels which say things I haven’t seen written down elsewhere. Only recently I discovered the novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, published in 2001, and it has stayed in my mind as a book that places a singer at the centre of its plot and in which I recognised and identified with much of what happens. Most of what we read about singers is journalism, which can be accurate and insightful but at its worst can simply repeat cliches that ultimately prevent us from getting to the truth of the matter. Those in the know – the singers themselves – might have other stories to tell, but someone needs to ask the right questions in order to access those stories. A novel can go further, inviting us to inhabit characters who take us beyond our own experiences. Bel Canto does this very well, dramatising the effect singers can have on those around them and the obsessive feelings that can be evoked. It is set in an unnamed Latin American country, where one night a glittering party full of international guests at the Vice President’s residence is stormed by a group of terrorists who take everyone hostage, including the party’s star guest, an American operatic diva called Roxane Coss.
