Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  It all added up to a general feeling that my voice wasn’t reliable. That in the context of individual concerts, if there were sound problems, I might not be audible enough. And then my voice might start to give out towards the end of the show. And then I might get a cold, which would threaten everything. Given that most singers begin a performance with a certain degree of nerves, even just the normal adrenaline rush of walking onto a stage, which causes the voice to tighten, the throat to constrict, it is usually only as the show goes on that you begin to relax, and the voice settles into its full strength. I would start out with that constriction, then maybe reach a point of relaxation midway through the gig, which I would just have time to enjoy before I’d start to worry about lasting through to the end.

  What I’m saying is that stage fright is sometimes an entirely practical response to a set of real problems. It’s not just about the disconnect between audience perception – ‘You’re a wonderful singer, we love you!’ – and self-perception – ‘I’m aware of all my flaws!’ – it can also be the result of being in possession of the knowledge that, despite what everyone is telling you, actually there is something to be afraid of. Barbra Streisand famously didn’t sing live for twenty-seven years, after forgetting her words on stage in New York’s Central Park in 1967. It was a huge concert, with an audience of 135,000 people, and she has said that suddenly forgetting some lyrics, and being unable to cover this up, left her with an inescapable terror that it would keep happening. ‘I didn’t perform again,’ she said, ‘until they discovered teleprompters.’

  When children perform at a musical concert or in a school play, we reassure them with soothing words – no one is there to judge you, everyone in the audience is on your side and willing you to do your best, and even if you do make a mistake, no one will notice or mind, because they all love you. As an adult performer such reassurance is meaningless and seems patronising – yes, the audience may love you and be forgiving, but on the other hand they expect and deserve to be entertained, and for you to fulfil your professional responsibilities by putting on a good show.

  So said the voice of reason inside my head. My initial stage fright may have been born out of basic insecurity, stepping up in front of an unknown crowd who might not like me, and not having the born performer’s ego or cast-iron self-belief. But my later stage fright was more mechanical in origin; less to do with my faith in the value of what I was doing, and more about my worry that I just might not get through it. It plagued me, and made me happy to retire, leaving behind the aspect of singing which brought me the most grief, but I have always been aware that my retreat from the stage contains a strong element of cowardice, and represents something of a defeat, a state of affairs of which I am not proud. In 2010 I decided to do something about it.

  In the back of my mind I had long nursed the idea that one day I would try hypnotherapy. Like a committed smoker constantly deferring the decision to quit, I just stored this notion away, thinking of it as an easy Get Out of Jail Free card that I could use whenever I chose. ‘I’ll go and get hypnotised,’ I thought, ‘and chuck a few quid at the problem, and hey presto it will be sorted for me and I will be the new Fearless Tracey Thorn.’

  It had been years since I’d sung live, and I’d come through the baby years when I was semi-retired from music, the children my refuge and my excuse, the reason why I could not be expected to perform on stage. I was back to recording now, and so it seemed like a good time to put this secret plan into action. I Googled ‘hypnotherapist’, chose one who looked as though she had all the right qualifications, made an appointment and soon found myself sitting in a tiny, stuffy consulting room, half wondering what I was doing, half waiting for the moment, any moment now, when I would be cured, hooray. The hypnotherapist was warm and friendly, and asked me a few questions about what the problem was and what I hoped to achieve. I dissembled a little, tried to make it sound simple and straightforward, when already it was occurring to me that it was anything but. This was years of trouble I was bringing into the room, and added to that was the fact that, being a natural sceptic and fairly resistant to all manner of alternative therapy, I was going against my whole nature.

  I wasn’t sure whether or not she knew who I was, but I explained to her that I’d been a singer for years and had always had problems with performing. I tried to package the problem up neatly, hoping the solution would be equally neat. I was asked to stand up in the middle of the room, close my eyes and visualise myself in a stressful situation. This in itself was stressful, but it didn’t seem the right time to mention it, so I played along with the script we seemed to have set for ourselves and said that my stressful situation was being on stage in front of an audience. I concentrated on feeling stressed, trying to focus that stress on the imaginary stage rather than the real room. Meanwhile, she sidled up to me and, quite suddenly, gave me a nudge that knocked me off balance.

  ‘Aha!’ she said. The stress I was experiencing, through my imaginings, had unbalanced me, causing me to become ungrounded and unsteady.

  ‘But you pushed me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I pushed you very gently. It shouldn’t have been enough to knock you off balance. Now, I want you to pinch your thumb and index finger together, and think about feeling strong and relaxed while you do it.’

  I pinched. I thought good thoughts about strength and relaxation.

  ‘We’re going to do some tapping. Tap here on your collarbones, and then on your cheeks, and your temples…’

  I tapped. I pinched, and I tapped. I thought good, strong, positive thoughts.

  Then I stood up and she came and nudged me again. I was ready for her this time, so I stood my ground, and apparently this was the correct thing to do as it proved that things had already changed. The pinching and the tapping and the good thoughts had already made me more balanced.

  I’m too obedient for this, I reflected, too polite and non-confrontational. I don’t like conflict, and I don’t find it easy to disagree with people without getting stressed, and now didn’t seem like a helpful moment to start challenging this concept. After all, I was here trying to help myself. Was this the time or the place to start playing the arch-cynic? No, I said to myself, shut up and learn something.

  Finally came the part I had pinned all my hopes on, the actual ‘hypnotising’. I’d always wondered – would I be the kind of person who would go under straight away and be barking like a dog within five minutes, or would I be resistant? I didn’t want to be resistant. I wanted to be hypnotised, and made better, turned into someone who didn’t have stage fright any more. I wanted someone else to take over my mind temporarily and cleanse it of the part that didn’t work properly. I wanted to be cured.

  She put on a CD of ‘spa music’, the least relaxing form of music in the world. Noodly pan pipes, fretless bass. Treacly synth sweeps and occasional random harp. The music that has ruined every facial I’ve ever had, every massage, every seaweed wrap. Why, oh why, I always ask myself, can’t they play a bit of Sinatra. Some gentle Velvet Underground tracks. The xx. Bobbie Gentry. There is a wide world of music out there that hath charms to soothe the savage breast, and still they play this shit, deliberately to drive you mad.

  I gritted my teeth, sat back and closed my eyes.

  ‘Imagine a truly relaxing, safe place,’ she said, ‘the place you always want to return to.’ Mind a complete blank. Who has a stock image in their mind of a place they always want to return to? Do you? I don’t know, the kitchen maybe – I could make a cup of tea, turn these fucking flutes off.

  ‘Maybe a glorious sun-drenched beach, with the ocean lapping gently on the sand,’ she said, clearly not immune to the persuasive powers of the holiday brochure.

  ‘Yes, OK,’ I said, ‘that’ll do. Let’s have the beach.’

  Tried to imagine myself there.

  Uncomfortable in my chair. Could hear noises from the street outside; traffic, footsteps, voices. Tried to relax, to give myself up to it, but that felt wrong to
o, like I was faking it, like I was trying to feel hypnotised. Inside my head a little running commentary of sarcastic rejoinders, in a voice that I couldn’t switch off.

  The hypnotism ended. I was back in the room! I was booked in for a second session! And because I am, as I said, polite and non-confrontational, I went back for the agreed second session and went through it all again, and politely told her I felt better.

  I am a model patient. Turns out I am a bit resistant, though.

  I still haven’t done a gig.

  13

  LITTLE MONSTERS

  I

  f stage fright is partly a fear of the audience, then it’s worth remembering that from time to time there is something to be afraid of with audiences, and that when you move from the territory of having listeners into the realm of having fans, it is not always without its problems. At the beginning of my career I felt that the people who listened to my music and liked what they heard were like-minded people, my peer group, all of us equals. We had similar tastes in music, and knew where we were all coming from and what was important. I never thought of these people as fans, particularly, and though they often wrote me letters, I didn’t think of these as fan letters. It’s only when you become more successful that you start to feel yourself lifting away from the group of people who listen to you, and it’s hard to tell whether that’s just an inevitable fact of life, to do with your growing fame and success, or whether your audience has deliberately elevated you above them, and above yourself, by emphasising how much they look up to you.

  I don’t know whether it’s possible to stop this happening; all I do know is that not everyone wants fans, and having them isn’t always an entirely comfortable situation. I revere and admire many other singers and musicians, but it seems somehow undignified and maybe just downright weird to call myself a fan. ‘I’m your biggest fan!’ people might say, as though it’s exactly what you want to hear, but quite often it isn’t. I understand how, in the heat of the moment, bumping into someone you admire, it’s the shorthand phrase that comes to mind, but the drawback is that it immediately sets up a relationship that is unequal, unreal, or plain unwelcome. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never accumulated the kind of audience that bond to become a unique entity – like Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, the thought of which makes me shiver. But inevitably over the years there has been a handful of, shall we say, admirers, who have gone further than others in their devotion, and while they have been mostly charming, still it never fails to make me shy away, uncertain as to what it means to imply that someone who is, essentially, a stranger is so important to you.

  An unusual, and striking representation of the singer-fan relationship can be found in Anne Tyler’s novel, A Slipping-Down Life, written in 1969. It tells the story of a shy, awkward teenage girl, Evie Decker, who sees a local rock and roll singer play a concert, is transfixed by him and his performance, and begins to act out of character. She starts going to gigs, which she’s never done before, changes her style of clothes, and stands front of stage to call his name out loud while she takes photographs of him. Her behaviour builds steadily to a bizarre climax when, in a moment of – what, possession? hysteria? – she cuts his name, Casey, into her forehead with a pair of nail scissors.

  For its time this is an extraordinarily graphic representation of obsessive behaviour. As an assertive act of ‘authenticity’ it seems almost to prefigure the moment when Richey Edwards carved ‘4 Real’ into his arm. Evie herself regards it as a kind of branding – she wants to mark herself with his name, turn herself into his chattel, imply a relationship between them, even if it’s a distorted, and at this stage imaginary, master–slave relationship. To her it is an act of freedom, self-definition even: ‘I believe this might be the best thing I’ve ever done… Something out of character. Definite. Not covered by insurance’, even if from the outside it looks more like subservience and self-negation.

  The singer, Drumstrings Casey, or Drum as he is known, exercises an almost demonic power over her. There is a hypnotic quality to his performance style – he sings, then in the middle of songs, goes off into unexpected spoken utterances, apparently disjointed nonsensical phrases, reminiscent of a stream-of-consciousness Dylan-esque performance. Because of this strangeness, Evie builds him up, both idealising, and in doing so, dehumanising him. When she sees he has a wristwatch on, she wonders, ‘Did he wind his watch every morning, check its accuracy to try to be places on time like ordinary people?’ So the singer can be a normal person! Who knew?

  They become locked in a mutual dependency – his career never quite takes off and he starts to need her good opinion, regarding her as a sort of good luck charm, providing validation of his talent. Eventually she outgrows him, reaching the point where she denies that she cut the letters into her own forehead and insists that some other girl slashed his name on her face. With this denial she has robbed him of his crutch, and the book ends with him on stage, a lost and lonely figure, with no new songs to sing. It’s a story of singer–fan dependency, and begs the question, who needs whom the most? Is it true warmth that flows from fan to singer, or just a kind of neediness, which can turn to dislike in an instant? When the two have a row Evie quickly renounces his talent – ‘And your music is boring, it tends to get repetitious’ – and equally, while Drum needs the support and love of an audience, he is often contemptuous towards Evie, who is, if you like, his über-audience. What exists between them is a toxic blend of need, fantasy, delusion and love, which turns to hate on the flip of a coin. It’s why the obsessive fan can be scary, and is another reason why I would prefer to have an audience whose members regard themselves as admiring listeners – adults who are your equal, and who might respect what you do, but also respect your privacy, and your independence from them.

  An even stranger singer–fan relationship is depicted in Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You. It begins in the usual one-sided way, but develops into something more complex, reciprocal and, frankly, disturbing. Middle-aged music fan Julian Donahue, reeling from the death of his child and the marriage break-up that ensued, hears a young Irish singer, Cait O’Dwyer, who is a rising star. He becomes obsessed with her voice and her songs, finding meaning in them which inspires him to grieve (something he’s been unable to do), but he also forms a stalker-ish attachment to Cait herself, believing that he has a unique understanding of her, and offers her artistic and career advice.

  But the novel takes a curious path in which the obsessive fascination felt by Julian for Cait is both welcomed and ultimately reciprocated by her. Early on he scrawls a set of instructions for her on some coasters at a bar. They are irritating, slightly patronising and glib comments along the lines of ‘Believe in yourself’, ‘Don’t listen to anyone’s advice’, and even ‘WEAR A BIT MORE MAKE-UP’. Mystifyingly, Cait finds these comments on her work to be insightful, and comes to feel that he understands her in a way no one else around her does. She even incorporates comments he has made into her new songs, so that they develop a collaborative creative partnership – the stalker’s dream come true. None of this seems plausible to me, and as the relationship develops and becomes more entangled and bizarre, so it becomes even less believable.

  They begin a long-distance semi-courtship, leaving messages for each other, dropping hints, teasing and never quite meeting. He follows her, taking off-guard pictures, trailing her through a park and recording her on his phone when she’s singing along to her iPod. Instead of being freaked out by this, she is enchanted, and writes a song saying she has left a key under the mat for him. He goes to her flat where there is indeed a key under the mat, and once inside, he ‘stood swaying in her living room, horrified for her that some maniac could do this too, and he wondered if he should somehow warn her’. Well, yes. Or perhaps he should get out of her apartment and stop stalking her. Like a maniac.

  Julian’s feelings about Cait are, fundamentally, generic fan-feelings about The Singer. In her apartment he feels that ‘he had risen high, to an al
tar in the sky… and there he’d been granted a glimpse into the mysterious cult of a unique goddess’. Cait is a cypher; a figment of his imagination. But what’s never quite clear is whether or not Phillips is satirising Julian’s behaviour, or taking their mutual attraction seriously.