Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  On stage, it is hard not to be distracted by external concerns. There are practical and prosaic thoughts going through our heads, ‘noise’ which has to be ignored, as far as that is ever possible. What we hope is that none of it is apparent to the audience. But having been on the stage myself, as an audience member I often find it a challenge to become as immersed in live gigs as I know others do. I am too aware of what’s going on up there and the range of things that might actually be happening. A few years ago I saw Rufus Wainwright doing a solo show at Islington Academy, and it reminded me of the incredible intensity and intimacy of the acoustic performance; the up-close connection with the real performer right there in front of you. And the audience may be having a uniquely spiritual experience, but for the performer there is a never-ending stream of interferences from the outside physical world, which threaten to disrupt. When I got home from the gig I wrote in my diary:

  Rufus is wearing shiny red trousers, which make him slither around a little on the barstool when he sits to play guitar. He jokes about it, but it’s probably irritating him. Funny how the decision of which trousers to wear can have an impact on your performance. They look great in the dressing room mirror, but now, on stage, they’re being a nuisance. Your ability to concentrate and emote is being let down by your choice of trousers. And the in-ear monitors keep falling out, like they always do. Halfway through his version of “Hallelujah”, he repeats himself. “Have I sung this verse already?” he sings, in the middle of a verse that he is indeed repeating. The audience laughs, loving this moment of human frailty. I bet he just drifted off for a moment. Maybe he’s sung this song too many times? Is he thinking of something else entirely? The next song, maybe, or the uncomfortable level in his monitors? Or the slippery trousers?

  Most, if not all, of the audience would have been unaware of these issues, and have probably never noticed or wondered what the experience is like for the singer up on the stage. And often, of course, the audience doesn’t recognise elements of performance which are particularly good or, on the other hand, haven’t quite worked. As the performer, this can make you feel that your efforts are wasted or meaningless, and that the live show is something that both matters and doesn’t matter. For a sufferer from stage fright, the event is built up to a size that is out of proportion to its actual importance: it matters too much. But then, if the audience doesn’t relate to the performance in a way that feels true – i.e. mistakes are not noticed, cliches are treated as high points – then the meaning contained in the music can seem devalued. There is endless decision-making involved in producing music: what to do, how to do it, how to judge when something is good and finished. But there can sometimes be a gulf between performer and audience, which makes the performer feel disconnected from their listeners, or worst of all, contemptuous of them. Singers can learn tricks which please an audience, which always work and get a response, but can then despise the audience for falling for those tricks, or failing to notice the more subtle moments which have taken real skill or imagination.

  In all this distraction and stagecraft, what happens to the spiritual element, the transcendent moment that is the whole reason the audience is there? Perhaps, in truth, the spiritual connection is really created by the listeners, who are engaged in as much of a creative act as the singer, producing from within themselves a wealth of emotions, memories, significances. Making clear how intrinsic a part of the musical experience it is, how much of a collaborative act, Wayne Koestenbaum brings the act of listening vividly to life when he writes: ‘A singer’s voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the listener’s body. First, there are the physiological sensations we call “hearing”. Second, there are gestures of response with which the listener mimics the singer, expresses physical sympathy, appreciation, or exaltation: shudder, gasp, sigh; holding the body motionless, relaxing the shoulders, stiffening the spine.

  ‘Listening, your heart is in your throat: your throat, not the diva’s.’

  Truly, then, it is the listener who is the one most in possession of what we call ‘feeling’ at this point. The sound enters the listener and a physical and mental – chemical, even – process takes place, at the end of which something entirely new has been created. The listener believes the singer has done it, and that they have passively received what has been offered, but in reality both parties are involved, and the listener – who can make anything happen: transform a lacklustre performance into the night of their life, be lifted to the heavens by a singer who is going through the motions on a weekday gig halfway through a long tour – is even more vital than the singer.

  In Arthur Phillips’s novel, The Song Is You, there is a good description of the relationship between the singer and the listener – a music fan listens to a singer he loves, and the songs connect with him, as if they understand him, and ‘when the song was working’ it feels as though there were ‘a unique two-way connection between his mind and that voice, which must therefore be aware of him’. This is a good insight into how and why we feel so close to the singers we love – the delusion that the flow of understanding and knowing goes both ways; that the feelings engendered in our hearts, or brains, when we hear a song, can actually be experienced in return by the singer; that we know them, and they know us in return; that the feeling is mutual.

  Sometimes there is simply no place for emotion on stage; there is too much else going on, and so its presence is left to chance. It can be interrupted and disrupted by other goings-on in the room, even by the behaviour of the audience. Whatever kind of line-up we were touring with, whether a small electric combo, a larger band with a horn section, or later a more electronic set-up with programmed drums and synths, we would often end gigs with an acoustic encore, just me singing and Ben on guitar, where we’d perform something like ‘Fascination’. I’d be more relaxed by this point, the gig almost over, anxieties beginning to recede, a feeling of the shoulders dropping; and because of this it would often be the moment when I was most aware of the emotion in a song, and ‘Fascination’ was one that spoke to me, and to audiences, very clearly. When I sang it I often had the sense of something almost tangible happening and being shared, but – and here’s the problem – almost as often, I had the impression that the feeling, fragile and fleeting as it was, was under threat from some audience members, who were perhaps not so caught up in the moment, were getting ready to leave, chatting, bustling, making just enough noise to intrude. It would be exasperating, and more than once it resulted in an irritable, short-tempered performance of a heartfelt, vulnerable song. I would curse myself for being distracted and rattled by a few people in the crowd, but it was inevitable once I had allowed myself to start feeling emotional on stage. The only way to avoid that kind of situation is to stay detached, calm, professional, and I’m not sure that’s always what we want. It’s just important to realise that live performance is a relatively uncontrolled environment, and you can’t predict what will happen, either musically or emotionally.

  For me, far more often the moment of emotional release is at the point of writing a song and then singing it, either inside my head or out loud for the first few times. It gives me the sense that I’ve come across something. It’s a secret, no one else has heard it yet – and maybe they won’t, if it doesn’t get finished. But singing it the first few times, that’s quite a rare and strange experience. You’re not singing a song you’ve learned, or copied, or heard on the radio – you’re just making it up. No one knows how it goes! You have to decide. That is the moment when you create, or uncover, or recall the emotion of the song, which you then simply have to enact every other time you perform it. I have learned over the years that I can make people cry by singing a song, and I too can be brought to tears by listening to another singer’s performance. But I can’t make myself cry with my song, nor would I want to. That would require a kind of surrender that would threaten the very coherence of any performance. After all, someone has to be in control here or we’re all going to drown. But the moment
of writing a song, coming up with a line that encapsulates everything you intend, that can be emotional, embodying both the feeling you are striving to articulate, and the satisfaction of doing so.

  However, if I’ve implied that I am a detached and over-critical audience member, I should also confess that there are moments when I’m as drawn in as everyone else, and completely forget to wonder what else is going on beside the songs I’m hearing. A while ago, Ben made his first live solo appearance in about thirty years in the basement venue of a London pub, the Slaughtered Lamb. For the first time in all those years I was in the position of being in front of the stage that Ben was on, and while you might imagine that my familiarity with Ben, and with his style and methods of working would make me over-aware and unable simply to enjoy the music, in fact the opposite was true. I was completely absorbed, and registered only things like the change in his voice, which has grown deeper, more resonant, and somehow easier. An earlier reedy quality seems to have vanished, along with any strain or exertion, leaving a beautiful, flowing resonance and an incredible warmth to his sound. He sang for an hour and a half, and here’s what struck me most: in all that time he never had a drink of water. Me, with all my neuroses about losing my voice, becoming too dry or having to clear my throat, I would have been sipping water after the first song, and reaching for cups of tea by the halfway point, but no, he didn’t pause once. And what I assumed, because of the strength and fluidity of the performance, was that he was completely free of nerves or angst about his voice, and immersed in the moment and the singing of the songs. I had fallen into the audience trap of seeing only what was apparent, so when we got home later I was astonished to hear him tell me how nervous he’d been, how sure he was that his nerves were showing. ‘There were a couple of moments,’ he said, ‘when I found myself thinking, “Wonder what Tracey thought of that phrasing…” or “Oh look, there’s Geoff Travis’s glasses.”’

  I’m just like you. I never noticed.

  12

  NAKED AT THE ALBERT HALL

  ‘The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.’

  Claude Debussy

  S

  tage fright sounds like an intangible, nebulous condition. Perhaps akin to fear of spiders, or of the dark; one of those slightly vague, purely psychological conditions, the irrational fear of something that can’t possibly hurt you.

  And in a sense, it is that – an internalised anxiety about the thought of a bad thing happening which, in real terms, isn’t really very bad at all – a poor performance? Singing out of tune? Forgetting words? Pah. Cry-baby. Or perhaps these anxieties are a cover for the real heart of the fear, which encompasses more primal, more universal feelings like the fear of exposure, revelation, inadequacy. Or perhaps it’s even simpler than that – just the fear of not being liked. Standing up in front of an audience, with all the audacity and arrogance that implies; imposing yourself upon them, and then not coming up to scratch. And the audience, they will be judging you, you know that. You’ve been to concerts yourself, after all; you know what you say to the person next to you as the performance unfolds. You don’t hold back, and why should you? You’ve paid for this experience, and if it doesn’t deliver, you’re going to say so. Up on stage, you can imagine that verdict being delivered, and in bad moments you see it in every audience exchange, every shared word. It has struck countless performers, is no respecter of talent or ability, and can either be all-encompassing, or ebb and flow even during the course of a performance. Dusty Springfield, in an interview with Mick Brown for the Telegraph magazine in 1995, was quoted as describing how just in the process of moving from one side of the stage to the other, she could completely destabilise herself, thinking, ‘I’ve gained confidence, I’ve lost it, gained it, lost it. And it’s just… exhausting’.

  In nightmares the fear reveals itself in almost comically obvious ways – you’re on stage, but with the wrong band! You don’t know any of the songs, or any of the words! The music begins, and you try to sing but no sound will come out! Or, my favourite, a nightmare I actually had: I’m on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, in the middle of a concert that is going well, when I look down at myself and realise I am completely naked. No real need for Dr Freud to spend long analysing that one, you might think. You fear being exposed, do you? Thank you. Next.

  On the other hand, stage fright can be built on entirely rational, comprehensible foundations. For me, the twin problems of volume and stamina lay at the root of many of my anxieties. I talked in Bedsit Disco Queen about the psychological aspects of my stage fright – the dislike of being looked at, and being the centre of attention. Aside from this fundamental issue, however, there were genuine physical barriers to surmount, which no amount of confidence-building or reliance on self-belief could alter. Simply put, I don’t sing loud enough for live performance in anything other than a purely acoustic setting. My voice with one guitar or a piano – fine. Anything bigger in terms of arrangement and it becomes a struggle to amplify my voice enough for it to be clearly heard above the band. Audiences might imagine that it’s simply a case of the sound engineer turning up the vocal on his mixing desk. Indeed, shouts of ‘Turn the vocals up!’, which at a couple of problematic concerts of ours were aimed in his direction, prove that there clearly are those who think there’s an obvious solution and the sound engineer must be deaf, or an idiot, not to be dealing with it. What they don’t seem to realise is that mixing live sound is a delicate juggling act – to have the band up loud enough to create energy and excitement in the room while keeping the lead singer audible – and there are limits to how far you can push the volume of any one ingredient without risking feedback. If the sound being produced from the stage is of a low volume, there is simply not much going into the mixing desk, and however much you crank up the controls, that vocal will only ever reach a certain level. Push it any harder and all you will create is a wall of howling feedback, which, while desirable in some circumstances, is not generally what EBTG fans paid to experience. So if the vocal has a maximum volume, the only other way to maintain balance is to turn the band down, thus reducing their power and impact – you can hear the vocal clearly, but the overall effect is polite, contained, limited. That’s the volume problem, and it in turn created the stamina problem – in order to try to increase the decibels, I had to sing as strongly as possible, and the vocal stamina required to do that was exhausting and put strain on my voice, which could be hard to sustain over the course of a tour.

  Now, add to that another physical limitation – as I mentioned earlier, I am asthmatic, not badly so, but enough that every winter I am susceptible to the slightest cold turning into a chesty cough, which lingers and rattles around for weeks. Touring’s not a healthy lifestyle, made up as it is of late nights, poor diet and travel that exposes you to a menacing and ever-changing cocktail of germs, so generally within a week or two I would go down with a cold. Sore throats could sometimes be sung through, but if it went to my chest, that was that, gigs cancelled. I’d be anxious and fretful about my state of health much of the time, alarmed by every tickle in the throat, every sniffle that might be the start of something. Trying to soldier on became a constant feature of touring life. Remedies offered reflected the personality and preferences of the location. In hippy San Francisco I was offered a kind of blossom tea – dried-up pods plunged into boiling water, which bloomed like tiny lilies, producing an apparently voice-saving, though pond-flavoured potion. In more pragmatic parts of the world a doctor would be summoned to administer a nameless injection, which gave enough of a boost to get me through a two-hour show. Once, a doctor came to my hotel room and decided to give me a shot of penicillin. My body chose this moment to develop its penicillin allergy, and by the time the doctor had got back into the lift I was succumbing to an anaphylactic reaction. Luckily Ben caught him before he got out of the swing doors at reception and he returned swiftly t
o give me a hydrocortisone injection. I don’t think I got on stage that night, but it certainly wasn’t for want of trying. Cancelling gigs cost money and goodwill, and was to be avoided whenever possible, but this meant that an atmosphere of medicalisation often attended the business of being on the road.