Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  Glamorous and starry, she is an otherworldly being in their midst, bathed in an unearthly glow, and their reactions to her are all overreactions, or coloured by their own imaginations: ‘No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing, found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light through her skin.’ Before the terror attack takes place she performs to the crowd and has a spiritual, in fact explicitly religious impact on them: ‘Her voice was so pure, so light, that it opened up the ceiling and carried their petitions directly to God…’

  During the long siege that follows the hostage-taking, one of the guests, Mr Hosokawa, becomes more and more obsessed with her. It is not the reality of her that he desires, but an idealised version, and he doesn’t really like to think of her as a body: ‘It made him uncomfortable to notice the supreme athleticism of her mouth, to see so clearly her damp pink tongue when she opened up wide and wider still.’ This is a dangerous kind of love: the kind of love that no one can live up to, that can only end in disappointment, and even turn to hate.

  There is a young priest among the hostages, who also falls under her spell. He has long been an opera fan but feels guilt for the pleasure he gets; the singing fills him with a kind of longing, which is akin to desire. So he consoles himself by coming up with the idea that it is really a kind of religious rapture that she inspires. Yet there is a paradox – listening to Roxane sing, he thinks, ‘God’s own voice poured from her’, and yet just a couple of lines later, ‘It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth’ Well, which is it? Is the voice God’s voice, from heaven above, or something elemental, earthy? There is a tension between the disembodied spirit quality of the voice, and the fact that it can only exist, can only be expressed at all, via the medium of a human body, with all the earthly connotations that brings. The ideal or the reality, which is it that the listener prefers?

  Ann Patchett makes it clear that Roxane Coss is in every sense a flawed, mortal creature, and as we learn more about her, so the contrast between her humanity and the saintly version of her created by her listeners becomes ever more obvious. She is aware, for instance, of the power her voice gives her over others, and is not above exploiting this power. She is also proudly aware of her status, and takes comfort from this during their predicament: ‘Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.’

  Throughout the book, though others project onto her their need for her to represent something pure, aspirational, heavenly, her behaviour reveals her to be quite worldly, even venal. Her reason for being there in the first place is purely financial: ‘I thought about declining. I declined several times until they came up with more money.’

  And the moment which is most at odds with her admirers’ image of her comes when she realises that the dire situation they are in may actually work out well for her in the end, as the story of the hostage-taking will increase her fame and so her value: ‘“So if I get out of here alive I can double my price?”’ Surrounded by people who are, in various ways, going a bit mad over her singing, she can coldly calculate the effect this is all having on her future fees. It reminds us that as well as being a vocation, and offering something transcendental to the listener, singing is also a job, it is how some of us pay the bills. And this makes singers more prosaic about singing and what it means, sometimes weary of other people’s attempts to elevate what they do.

  Even Roxane’s speaking voice exerts power over people. She talks on the phone to the priest’s friend, another music lover, and in a moment of gushing fan behaviour, he asks her just to say the names of some operas down the phone to him:

  ‘“La Bohème,” she said. “Così fan tutti.”

  “Dear God,” Manuel whispered… He was paralyzed by her voice, the music of speaking…’

  This is funny, in its extremity. The ludicrous, over-the-top reaction of the fan to the object of their worship can’t help but seem silly. No one can bear the weight of all this implied significance and the reactions to Roxane become meaningless, fabrications of the imagination. It’s a novel that is very astute about the way in which ‘fans’ can become delusional, and the disillusionment that would surely result if they could get inside their idol’s head.

  None of this is to say that singers don’t want or need to be loved – they do, of course – but there is tension in the gap between being loved for yourself and being loved for something that is not real. And an audience’s tendency to idealise can make a singer believe that in order to be loved, the singing has to be perfect, or aspire to perfection; that faults will be judged and the self disliked for them, when of course the opposite can be true. Wayne Koestenbaum explains in his book how he loves Maria Callas above all because she made mistakes and ‘seemed to value expressivity over loveliness’. I would count Björk as that kind of singer. I remember a television programme in which someone said that, in contrast to many classical singers who strive only to use the most beautiful part of the voice, the ‘filet’, Björk was prepared to use ‘the whole animal’. Similarly, Koestenbaum describes Callas’s voice as ‘a set of sounds on the verge of chaos – but enjoyably so’.

  Around Callas there grew up an enormous cult of personality and a strong bond between what people saw as the calamities of her personal life and the faults of her singing. Loving her, they could sympathise with both – ‘we loved the mistakes because they seemed autobiographical’, writes Koestenbaum. The audience were drawn in and involved, they felt they had a part to play in the construction of her singing performances; the sympathetic listener was needed in order to complete the singing: ‘if her notes had a tendency to wobble, to grow harsh, then this possibility of failure gave her fans a function. The infallible performance does not require an audience.’ Koestenbaum points out a particular moment in a rendition of an aria where she holds ‘an awkward high note for its full value, even though the tone is unpleasant; she outstares the ugliness… During the harsh high note, we are closer to Callas. We befriend her.’ She reveals her vulnerability, her humanity at these moments, and we want this from singers more than we want their technical perfection.

  But oh, how hard it is for singers to believe this, and to feel it to be true.

  4

  SINGING INTO A VOID

  W

  ho is your favourite singer? It’s a question I’m often asked, not surprisingly, and my answer is usually the same: Dusty Springfield.

  I was born in 1962, and Dusty’s career hit its peak around 1964, so as a singer she must have always been there, soundtracking my life. Yet no one in my house had any of her records. The radio must often have been playing her big 1960s hits, but I certainly wasn’t hearing them at home. The songs seeped into my consciousness so that when I began to listen to her properly later on, I found I knew many of them by heart – but were they actually her versions I knew, or other people’s? ‘I Only Want to Be with You’ I guiltily thought of as a Bay City Rollers song. ‘How Can I Be Sure?’ was by David Cassidy. ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ was Elvis Presley or even, God forbid, Guys ’n’ Dolls. She was often on TV when I was a child, and I must have seen her, but again, the image that comes most readily to mind is a second-hand one, of someone impersonating her. She’d become famous for the flamboyant hand gestures she made while singing, and the joke was that she looked like she was directing the traffic. So while I have no true memory of seeing her performing, what I do remember is a comedy show, someone doing traffic policeman arms, and knowing that they were ‘being’ Dusty. I don’t think it was meant unkindly, but still, there it was – she was famous enough to be the subject of a comedy impression, yet all I remember is the impression, not her.

  However, I do know the first time I heard her. Elvis Costello was presenting a radio show, playing a selection of his favourite records, and as was usually the case with anything like that on the radio, I was tapin
g it onto cassette. This was 1980, or maybe 1981. He had already introduced us to another of her signature tunes, ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself’, when he performed it on the Live Stiffs Live album in 1978, and that had been a revelation, opening my eyes to the possibility of liking Bacharach and David as well as punk; a difficult but heady idea, and one I would have to come back to later. Now on this radio show he played ‘I Don’t Want to Hear it Any More’ from Dusty in Memphis, and for the first time I truly heard that voice – that smoky, husky, breathy, vulnerable, bruised, resigned, deliberate, sensual voice.

  Ugh, all the same old words, and they won’t do, will they? They won’t do. Roland Barthes in his 1972 essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’ touched on this basic problem of music criticism, remarking snidely that ‘the work (or its performance) is invariably translated into the poorest linguistic category: the adjective.’ Well, it’s hard to know what other part of the language to reach for when we want to describe something. If a voice is a noun, then we need an adjective to describe it, but they are of course limited and so we all reach for the same ones, and they wear thin from overuse. But where to find better ones, truer ones? If you’d never heard her voice, what words could summon it up in your imagination?

  In her biography Dusty, Lucy O’Brien quotes Jerry Wexler, who produced Dusty in Memphis along with Arif Mardin, talking about the uniqueness of her sound: ‘There were no traces of black in her singing, she’s not mimetic… She has a pure silvery stream’. Silvery, I like that. I’ve always thought if Dusty’s voice was a colour, it was silver. There is so much air in every note, and although the sound is rich, it has none of the chocolatey-brown of, say, Karen Carpenter’s. It seems to exist higher up, almost suspended above our heads, literally transcendent. You look up to Dusty’s voice, in every sense.

  Neil Tennant pointed to the emotional tension in her singing, saying there’s ‘an intensity and desperation to her voice that’s fantastically sensual’. Desperation: that’s very observant. It’s easy enough to hear the sensuality, of course, but to spot the undercurrent that makes her pierce you as much as soothe and seduce you, that’s getting more to the heart of her. Of course, although she could be melodramatic, particularly on the mid-1960s pop recordings, she was never a belter, and she was a singer who made use of the microphone. When she did project, there would be a fragility to it, and a feeling that she was covering it up with an element of bravado. There was a possibility that the voice might fail her, a note might break, although it never did. The slight huskiness is often commented on, the sound of being on the edge of laryngitis, which she suffered from recurrently. Some recording sessions were interrupted by her battling with throat problems – there are even songs where she sounds a little too close to actual voice loss, for example, ‘Let Me in Your Way’ from the album A Brand New Me.

  But here’s the terrible thing; the terrible, true thing that she thought, that maybe lots of singers think, which runs counter to all that we imagine it must feel like to be in possession of a unique and gorgeous voice that people love. This is what she once said: ‘All I know is that I have a distinctive voice I don’t particularly like listening to’.

  Dusty Springfield is many people’s favourite singer; she’s not a challenging, left-field choice in any sense, and yet she also exemplifies the tortured artist, riddled with self-doubt, unsure of her worth and even her identity. Lucy O’Brien brilliantly chronicles how, as a slightly frumpy teenage ex-convent girl, Mary O’Brien took the irreversible decision, long before Madonna had apparently patented the concept, to reinvent herself, taking a gamble with her future and her sense of self, the consequences of which she couldn’t possibly have anticipated. It must have seemed like an act of defiant self-liberation when she turned her back on the girl she’d been born as, and emerged with a new look – peroxide blonde hair glued into a beehive do, eyes almost lost under layers of thick black eyeliner and mascara – and a new name: Dusty Springfield. The look was all artifice: the sculptural creation that is a beehive hairdo was possibly the most unnatural style ever invented; the make-up deliberately over-the-top, too much. It was not about looking pretty, it was about looking different, both from everyone else and from her former self. And in this very difference there was an attempt to stand out, to seek attention, but in the same moment, to deflect that attention away from herself onto this new creation, this new fake persona, who could be everything Mary feared she couldn’t be. Mary O’Brien could not be obliterated, she was still in there somewhere, hidden. As the early years of Dusty’s career went by, and she became more successful, she exaggerated the look more and more – ‘the bigger the hair, the blacker the eyes, the more you can hide’ she is quoted as saying – and then found herself having to reconstruct her creation every single morning before she could face the world. No one was allowed to see her without the famous make-up or hairdo, and the sheer physical effort involved in all of it was exhausting and demoralising. What started out as a safety net became a trap. What she hadn’t foreseen, and what looks so obvious in hindsight, is that in the act of creating a fake self she had dramatised and given physical expression to the very self-doubt which usually remains internalised. If artists often question their authenticity – and God knows they do – then what she had done in creating a fictional identity with which to confront the world made it absolutely sure that she would never be able to answer that question satisfactorily. She has talked about how intimidated she was during the sessions for Dusty in Memphis for Atlantic Records, by the fact that those around her had worked with, and often talked about, Aretha. She had a tendency to think that the black session singers doing the backing vocals were ‘the real thing’ and she was a pop fake. And here’s where I empathise completely with Dusty, having experienced the exact same doubts during the recording of EBTG’s album The Language of Life in the US, coincidentally also for Atlantic Records, where I was singing with musicians who had worked with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Understanding where and how you fit, and justifying your right to sing in the company of those who may be your singing superiors, is not always easy to sustain, and requires a degree of rationality and detachment which not many of us possess. It’s a banal and repetitive tragedy that the pleasure a singer can provide does not reflect back to the singer her/himself, but instead hits a brick wall of self-doubt and discomfort.

  In the recording studio Dusty’s doubts were all about her voice. She would be demanding and perfectionist, both admirable qualities, essential for the making of good music, but when it came to the moment of recording the vocals she would turn those thoughts on herself like knives. She would have the volume in her headphones turned up as loud as possible, to the point where it was almost painful, and the effect would be overwhelming. That way she could let herself go into the experience, disappear inside a wall of sound, and so, just as she hid her physical appearance behind the mask of hair and make-up, she would hide even her voice. Jerry Wexler describes her doing this during the sessions for Dusty in Memphis, and is quoted in Lucy O’Brien’s biography saying that he always encouraged singers to have the sound fairly quiet in their headphones so they would project more, but Dusty had insisted on setting it at ear-splitting volume. ‘There was no way she could hear herself – it was like she was singing into a void.’

  If you’re singing into a void, casting your voice out there into a black hole, the implication is that you want your voice to go away, to disappear. Some of the pleasure of singing is purely physical, an athletic enjoyment of using the body, stretching muscles, working up a sweat. You don’t have to hear yourself in order to do this, and if you’re unsure about the quality of what you hear then the enjoyment may be greater if you can’t hear yourself. Singing in a choir, your voice can vanish among all the others, you are part of one big communal sound and no one is listening to you in particular. But as a solo singer, especially a famous and loved solo singer, this luxury is usually denied. You must be heard, and you must hear yourself. Dusty tried to
escape hearing herself as a way of escaping confrontation with that which disappointed her, but I wonder also whether she suffered from that confusion between her voice and her person, whether she perceived doubts about her voice as in fact doubts about her value as a person, even about her existence as a real, authentic person. Was she trying to make ‘Dusty’ disappear, and be Mary O’Brien when she sang? Or did she want to be neither: was she trying to disappear altogether, to become no one, just a voice, not even a voice she wanted to hear, just the sound coming out of her, going nowhere?