Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  On the subject of hidden singers, no one exemplifies this phenomenon better than Marni Nixon, who sang the vocals for many lead actresses in musical films, often receiving neither credit nor proper royalties for her efforts. She sang the high notes Marilyn Monroe couldn’t reach, and was dubbed over Deborah Kerr’s singing voice in The King and I and Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady. Perhaps most notoriously, when she sang Natalie Wood’s part of Maria in West Side Story, the fact was apparently kept secret even from the actress herself. Denied a full royalty payment by the film’s producers, she ended up receiving a portion of Leonard Bernstein’s royalty, so at least someone recognised that this practice came too close to being both exploitative and disreputable.

  From the singer’s point of view, acknowledgement and recognition are understandably important – no one wants to do all the work only for someone else to take all the credit. In my experience, however, ‘hidden’ singing can sometimes be a satisfying experience, a way of deflecting the limelight and getting to enjoy taking part without having to shoulder the full responsibility of representing the work. At various points in my career, making guest appearances or singing backing vocals with other artists has performed this function for me, opened up opportunities and given me the chance to flit in and out of people’s music – not uncredited, no, but unburdened in some way, not having to be The Lead Singer who is the focus of attention. When I sang with The Style Council on ‘The Paris Match’ I was a virtually unknown singer, my fame and status way below that of Paul Weller. The credits on the album artwork were sketchy, so that for years many people muddled me up with Tracie Young, who had sung backing vocals with The Jam and then sang on the first Style Council single, ‘Speak Like a Child’. I didn’t really mind this; it was a way of being invisible, heard but not seen. I carried on with my guest appearances, singing with Working Week on ‘Venceremos’, then doing backing vocals for The Go-Betweens and Lloyd Cole. There’s a joy to singing backing vocals, whether on your own or other people’s records; it’s where singing becomes not an art, but a craft; not about expressiveness, but about accuracy. Layering harmonies requires precision of pitch, but also subtleties of vocal pronunciation. You have to moderate the sibilance of your ‘s’s, de-emphasise explosive consonants, allow words to tail off with no conclusion so that the word endings don’t all land in slightly different places. These skills only come with experience and practice, and there’s a satisfaction in learning them.

  I sang a jazzy version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ with trumpet player James McMillan, and a drum and bass song with Adam F. I sang trip-hop with Massive Attack, and deep house with Tiefschwarz and then Tevo Howard. A gorgeous yearning ballad with The Unbending Trees. I probably brought a lot of myself and my own sound to all those performances, but still, they each offered a kind of escape route from being me, a liberation from being the one whose face and name was in bold type on the sleeve, a way of appearing and disappearing at the same time. For me, there were certain consolations to being the hidden singer, or perhaps I should say partly hidden. And perhaps it’s only when you practise complete concealment that you run into problems.

  Another example of people feeling tricked by singers can be seen in the upset and outrage which whirls around the use of Auto-Tune. The general public first became aware of it in 1998, when it was used on Cher’s track ‘Believe’ to create that robotic vocal effect you either love or hate. That was the year I began to creep into a form of retirement, so it’s fair to say that me and Auto-Tune, we passed in the night. Then again, I’ve made records since then, and I’d be lying if I claimed that no studio technology had ever been used on my vocal to make the odd correction. It’s controversial, though, and while I can understand why, I’m still struck by people’s misconceptions about how and when it is used, and what it’s good for.

  The story of recording vocals in the studio is one where the apparently competing claims of authenticity and artifice are played out over and over. Debates about how to capture a sound that is most ‘real’, most truly reflective of the actual sound being produced by the person singing, have raged since microphones were invented and recording began. Different microphones capture sound in different ways, and therefore will make a vocal sound dissimilar, but which is more true to life? Some would argue that the most realistic capturing of the human voice is still created by singing into a horn and recording direct onto a wax cylinder, something that has not been the norm for a very long time. So have we simply got used to listening to distorted or inauthentic reproductions of vocals?

  Adding echo, or reverb, to a vocal can enhance the sound, increasing the listener’s enjoyment, but is it authentic? You may be singing in a tiny corner of the studio, but with that particular reverb setting you are now performing in a great hall, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone complain about that as being deceptive or fake.

  You might contend that it’s the overuse of Auto-Tune, not its use in principle, that has led to protests against it. When Jay-Z rapped on ‘D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)’ that ‘This is anti-Auto-Tune’, I guess he was making an argument for a return to roughness and realness, in which case he has a point. But when writer Neil McCormick called Auto-Tune a ‘particularly sinister invention’ that operates by taking ‘a poorly sung note and… placing it dead centre of where it was meant to be’ I have to take issue with that melodramatic and moralising word ‘sinister’. Bizarrely for a piece of recording studio gadgetry, it was included in a Time magazine list of ‘The 50 Worst Inventions’, a list that you can only hope prioritised things like nukes and drones over a plug-in that can slightly pitch-bend a sung note of music.

  Much of the controversy around it seems misguided and misinformed to me, and muddles up the artistic use of Auto-Tune – as in Cher’s ‘Believe’, and then countless other pop and dance tracks, which turn it into an audible, deliberate feature of the track – with plain overuse, as happens in too much current pop recording. If you’re not sure what I mean by overuse, you can quickly acquaint yourself with the sound by popping on a Glee album. I watched the early series of Glee and was a big fan of its gloriously camp celebration of the notion that pop music can still be the saviour of high school outsiders. But Lord, after a while the Auto-Tune nearly killed me, and there is nothing that compares to the experience of listening to a Glee album. When music snobs invented the dismissive phrase ‘bubblegum pop’ years ago, they had no notion of how sugary and toothachey pop music might eventually become. The Glee recordings are surely the end point of this, the aural equivalent of the fate of Augustus Gloop. Every note has a plastic twang to it, an android quality, and it is that robotic element – so likeable when robotic is the desired effect – which turns people against Auto-Tune.

  There’s a kind of fierce accuracy to a heavily Auto-Tuned record, a perfection that is impossible to achieve naturally, and so it renders the sound superhuman, and as a consequence, less than human. Flaws embody qualities like warmth, approachability, connection – easily lost when all the flaws are removed, as in an airbrushed photo. But to be completely anti is to misunderstand how Auto-Tune is used when it’s used ‘properly’. It’s almost as though critics believe that Auto-Tune is a kind of topping, which you smear all over a track like whipped cream, burying everything authentic, smothering the music in a glossy, rich coating. But this isn’t how it has to be. In the right, judicious hands, it is simply another piece of convenient studio gadgetry.

  And if you think you hate Auto-Tune, that implies you can always detect when it has been used, in which case you have magic ears and can be very proud of yourself. Many modern pop records are homogenously and obviously Auto-Tuned, yes, but the fact is that other artists use it carefully and you would never ever know. Sometimes even the artist themselves might never be aware of it, as in the case of a producer I know who worked with a singer who was otherwise great but had a tendency to wander on the tuning. When she was out of the studio, he and the engineer would apply the ‘magic compressor’ to her
vocal. She’d come back in and be thrilled at how they had improved things just with some basic studio technology. The word Auto-Tune was never mentioned. Everyone was happy. I would put money on the fact that you heard that record and never guessed.

  The ideal application is for the correction of a single note in an otherwise good performance. The alternative to Auto-Tune in the old days – and I’m old enough to remember this, and what a drag it was – was that you had to ‘drop in’ in order to correct a bum note. You wouldn’t want to sing the whole song again, or even necessarily the whole verse, when only one line has a mistake in it, and there’s something in the take that you don’t want to lose – a great tone of voice, an emotional moment, a strength, a vulnerability – but having to sing one or two words is awkward. You sing the whole line in order to run up to it so it sounds natural, but the engineer has to go into, and then out of, record at exactly the right moment. Sometimes he misses; you have to do it again. Sometimes you miss the note a second time, and you have to go again. Again and again. It can kill performance, mood, emotion. It can be the opposite of the authentic performance, in fact the most artificial way to record a vocal. Some singers with anxiety issues or studio phobias could end up piecing together takes from a line here, a word there. It’s hardly a true representation of a vocal performance, and proves nothing about who is a ‘better’ singer. That was in the Proper Old Days. Nowadays, things are easier, and when you record using software like Pro Tools, it’s very easy to re-sing sections of a song and then piece together the best bits; there’s no need for old-skool ‘dropping in’. Still, you have to be able to hit that problematic note, and that might still mean singing the line over and over. Auto-Tune, or any of its current equivalents – a clever human invention, just as anaesthetics and refrigeration are – can be used to make adjustments here and there, salvaging all that is valuable in a particular performance for our benefit and enjoyment.

  Like most things, though, there is a time and a place for it. At the poppier end of the spectrum, records can strain towards a clean, perfect sound, and can thrill us with their aspiration, their ambition, their sheer upward mobility. Other records will always revel in, and thrill us with their imperfections. In the end, the whole debate asks us one simple question: what do we want from singers? And the answer has to be, we don’t always want or need the same things – and what the listener wants is not always what the singer wants. Time journalist Josh Tyrangiel called Auto-Tune ‘Photoshop for the human voice’. And if we could Photoshop some of our own holiday snaps, would we not sometimes choose to do so? My first solo album, A Distant Shore, was one of my earliest attempts at studio singing, and contains ‘pitchy’ moments. So if I could go back and Auto-Tune a few of those notes, potentially sacrificing some of the authenticity, but also fixing notes that make me wince, would I? Oh, you bet your life I would.

  11

  RUFUS WAINWRIGHT’S TROUSERS

  F

  or some, the claim that a voice is at least in part a constructed or ‘chosen’ thing will always be anathema, and they will cling to the romantic image of the artist as possessed of instinctive, natural talent. Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark dramatises the push and pull between these two concepts, and different notions of what a singer is, or should be. The novel raises questions about how a singer finds their voice, where that voice comes from, and what role intelligence or conscious thought plays in the act of singing, and in distinguishing good singing from bad. You can see how a writer might be interested in this idea, and want to explore or even debunk the notion that an effortless connection between singer and listener, or between writer and reader, is either possible or desirable.

  The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronborg, who grows up in a small desert town of the American west, discovers a strong connection with music as a child, and then later is found to have a unique singing voice which leads her to fame and fortune, but at the expense of family ties and personal relationships. At first glance, it is an archetypally romantic portrait of the artist as someone with superior gifts, an almost childlike sense of wonder at the world, and a sense that they are only truly themselves through the discovery and exploration of their art.

  As a child, Thea is slow to speak – ‘inept in speech’ despite her intelligence – as if her speaking voice is somehow imprisoned within her; the voice is something precious, not to be given away too freely, or too soon. Her first teacher is Wunsch, an elderly musician who drinks, and he is the first to detect her particular talents – he feels that the beauty of her voice is innate, and its quality is present even when she reads the lyrics of German lieder he teaches her: ‘It was a nature-voice… and apart from language.’ He is the first in the book to propound the argument that is a central theme – that artistic talent is something one is born with: ‘Some things cannot be taught… For a singer there must be something in the inside from the beginning.’

  Thea herself is aware of a feeling that is beyond her conscious control, and it ebbs and flows, fluid and intangible. She likes to sing with the local Mexicans, who live in the poor part of town and are looked down upon; in her bond with them, the implication is that she has ‘soul’, and that they, as a more primitive people, are still in touch with the spirituality of music, a quality which Thea shares. This motif occurs too in Daniel Deronda, where Mirah’s Jewishness also seems intended to imply that she has a special connection to the realm of artistry and spirituality. By our modern standards, this is uncomfortable stereotyping, endowing other races or nationalities with innate gifts, suggesting that they are ‘other’ – dark, mysterious and primal. Nonetheless, it’s an idea about singers that persists, that some are more possessed of natural emotion, and this quality is what raises one singer above another. In the novel, Thea’s piano teacher Harsanyi believes that not only is the voice natural, but that it is separate from the singer’s consciousness – innate, beyond her control: ‘All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox.’

  Thea, on the other hand, believes differently, and this is what makes the story thought-provoking. She knows that singing is more than pure emotion, and as her success grows, she becomes increasingly resentful of the notion that singing is not governed by intelligence, or skill, or hard work, and of some of the idiocies she encounters in other singers. ‘Singing doesn’t seem to be a very brainy profession,’ she says. She plays piano as accompanist to fellow singers Mrs Priest and Jessie Darcey, and finds their lack of technique and the crudeness of their crowd-pleasing antics infuriating. Their success infuriates her even more, making her question the level of intelligence in the audience – ‘But people seemed to like Jessie Darcey exactly because she could not sing; because, as they put it, she was “so natural and unprofessional.” Her singing was pronounced “artless,” her voice “bird-like.”’ Thea is aware that artifice, and skill, are an essential part of good singing, and that the adulation of the natural is mere vulgarity and shallowness on the part of the audience.

  We are back to the question of authenticity versus artificiality, and of what value to place upon singing. If it is simply a natural gift, can the singer be regarded as an artist? If art is all about vision and choice, and how the artist shapes his or her material in order to present it to the world, then to emphasise the innate qualities of the singer is to devalue her. As an aside, it’s worth remembering that not only are singers often not regarded as artists, they are sometimes not even regarded as musicians. In the 1920s and 1930s, the early crooners had to hold an instrument, even a fake instrument, as it was inconceivable that you could just be a singer and do nothing else. Bing Crosby, for example, was given a violin with rubber strings to pose with. Similarly, up until 1979 singers were not eligible to join the American Federation of Musicians, but had to apply for membership as a player of some instrument or other. So it’s no exaggeration to talk about the downgrading of singing compared
to other forms of musical expression.

  Thea stands up, in no uncertain terms, for the right of the singer to claim her status as artist, and the presence of intelligence is central to her perception of what makes a good artist. Without it, all you have is a basic talent that cannot go beyond the ordinary. The belief that audiences can’t always tell the difference between the good and the bad is commonplace among musicians and performers, and at its worst it smacks of arrogance, of contempt for the people who have paid to witness the performance. But we should recall that there can be distinct things going on inside the head of the singer and the head of the listener: sometimes the connection between the two can feel strong, but at other times they are worlds apart.

  I have often found this myself. When I started singing, I didn’t think twice about what was happening during a gig, or what I and everyone around me was feeling. Usually gigs were short, and small, so that you were close to the crowd, and could easily believe that you were all sharing the same experience. But as my career progressed, and the gigs got bigger, I became aware of the distance between the stage and the auditorium, and began to notice that, in fact, maybe the experiences of the band and the crowd were quite different. For instance, at a concert, a singer may perform an emotional song while being actually very detached from the emotion. The listener, however, perceives the presence of strong emotion – so who has put it there? If the singer isn’t conscious of feeling anything at the time, and is even potentially just going through the motions, is emotion really present or is the listener imagining it? The audience’s emotional response is often determined as much by the memories the song evokes as by the performance taking place – you hear a song and are transported back to the first time you heard it, or a period in your life when you listened to it a lot. Maybe it was with someone you loved, it was ‘your’ song; maybe they’re here with you now, maybe – even worse – they’re not. There is a wealth of your own personal meaning encoded within the song, and in a way, the singer is completely extraneous to the experience you’re having. They might not even sing it very well – does it matter, will you notice? Does it just need to be ‘good enough’ to trigger the responses that are really contained entirely within you? In A Singer’s Notebook Ian Bostridge touches on the relationship between feeling and performance, and relates this story: ‘I shall never forget a masterclass in which one of my fellow students proudly moved himself to tears with his own performance. The distinguished teacher’s response was cruel but salutary: “Don’t worry, dear. It wasn’t all that bad.”’ The point being that the singer’s feelings at the moment of performance are largely irrelevant. The emotion should already be there, in the song itself, and you felt it at the moment you wrote the song – you shouldn’t need to relive it every time you perform.