by Tracey Thorn
Margaret Atwood retells the tale again in her poem ‘Siren Song’, which seeks to get to the heart of the mystery of what the sirens actually sing, what the source is of their power. It has one of the sirens speaking directly to the reader – or to some hapless sailor – inviting confidence, flattering, tempting. And in this version it turns out that the sirens’ power is not to do with the beauty of their singing, but with the persuasive content of the lyrics. The siren reels in her victim by claiming that she is a helpless, trapped female in need of rescue, and only this particular ‘unique’ man can understand and save her. The song works – and as she admits, almost in tones of disappointment, ‘it works every time’ – because it plays on the weakness and vanity of the listener, on the willingness of a man to believe any woman who tells him he is special. The poem ends with a stark warning: ‘Now you know. Don’t listen.’
In his short story ‘The Silence of the Sirens’, Kafka posits the idea that Ulysses only thinks he hears the sirens’ song and lives to tell the tale; that in fact they are silent in the face of him, and it is their silence that he cannot escape. ‘Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.’
I read that story for the first time quite recently, while I was researching anything and everything to do with sirens, and it immediately made me think of that mysterious group of singers, mostly female, mostly folky and from the 1970s, who disappeared, or just stopped making music, and in doing so cast a spell over critics and audiences. The silence of the sirens. That line I quoted above, it suggests that not singing can take on its own significance; if the sirens’ singing is one kind of power, their silence is another kind, one we don’t even understand.
You must know who I mean when I evoke these women who seemed to disappear. Queen of them all was Vashti Bunyan, who recorded the fairy-fey Just Another Diamond Day in 1970, then fled in a horse-drawn caravan and remained quiet for thirty-five years, during which time the album became a cult classic and was raved about by journalists and new folkies like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. She finally returned and recorded a second album in 2005, having in the meantime passed into the realms of musical mythology.
Scottish singer Shelagh McDonald also recorded her first album in 1970, then a follow-up in 1971, before apparently vanishing in 1972. It later turned out that damage to her singing voice had led her to seek refuge with her parents in Edinburgh. In the early 1980s she moved on again, losing touch with friends and family, and took up an itinerant life. In 2004 her records were rereleased on CD and again, a new audience was fascinated and captivated by the legend of a woman who had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, or rendered herself mute.
And then there’s Anne Briggs, with her artless delivery, for the most part gentle and vibrato-free, which reminds me so much of Alison Statton from Young Marble Giants, and brings to my mind again that quote I referred to in Bedsit Disco Queen about Alison being someone who sings rather than a singer. Perhaps this was how Anne Briggs regarded herself, too, even back when she did sing. She recorded one album, The Time Has Come in 1971, tried a follow-up but was dissatisfied with it and so gave up on the whole business of recording and performing. The Time Has Come grew in reputation during the years of silence, coming to be regarded as a lost classic, with original copies selling for substantial sums. And, as Alexis Petridis wrote in a 2007 Guardian interview, ‘in her absence, the mythology around her has grown so immense that one writer compared her, in all seriousness, to Robert Johnson’. She herself was quite happy in her silence, raising children, doing other jobs, possibly more content than she would have been on stage. Never a natural performer, she is quoted as saying, ‘I didn’t like being looked at, so I’d shut my eyes half the time, trying to shut it out.’ My sympathies entirely. She herself wore her talent lightly, though contemporaries recognised her uniqueness. Bert Jansch said of her that she was ‘a brilliant, very natural singer… she would improvise like a jazz singer’. But she preferred travelling and busking to recording or performing in clubs; perhaps she simply couldn’t find the place or the space within music in which to be the singer and the person she might have been. I read an interview in which she confessed to feeling guilty at not making more of her talent, and also that she often missed singing through the years, but as for all the romanticising about her, and her silence, and her retreat, she seems to take everything with the same pinch of salt. She’s almost bemused by the fuss made over her, which makes me think – and perhaps this is true for some of these other ‘lost’ female singers, too – that singing was something she only needed in her life for a while. Maybe it didn’t really offer everything she needed to feel fulfilled, and a whole career of it would have imposed rules and restrictions on her that she simply didn’t want.
Two other folk singers from this era – Shirley Collins and Linda Thompson – also stopped singing, though for reasons that were out of their control: both were struck by a vocal disorder called dysphonia. If you research online what happened to these two women, you’ll find that the condition is often referred to as ‘hysterical dysphonia’. It is said that Shirley Collins, who had recorded influential folk albums throughout the 1960s and 1970s, was so traumatised when her husband Ashley Hutchings left her in 1978 that the shock resulted in the complete loss of her singing voice, and she has never recorded since. Similarly, it is frequently suggested that the folk-rock singing star Linda Thompson, who had recorded seminal albums like I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights with husband Richard Thompson, began to be afflicted during their break-up in 1982, and that is why she barely sang at all for the next twenty years.
At first I accepted these snippets of information as fact. They make good narratives, after all, full of personal drama, cruelty and extreme reaction, and I took them at face value. Then, after a while, and after I’d written down my version of what I’d read, the two stories began to worry me. The use of that word ‘hysterical’, wasn’t that a bit dismissive? Even a bit reminiscent of Victorian doctors, with their tendency to label women’s physical problems as neurotic in origin, harking back to ancient notions of ‘the wandering womb’? In both cases the vocal problems were neatly ascribed to heartbreak; the literal silencing of an abandoned woman. Too neatly, I started to think. Perhaps there was something rather glib in the packaging up of these undoubtedly traumatic stories, and I realised I didn’t want to fall into the trap of repeating them as gospel. The only way to get at the truth was to ask the person who’d actually experienced the condition, and so with this in mind I got in touch with Linda Thompson, as I’d been meaning to do for years.
We’d met once before, in the Foodhall at Selfridges. I was having a sandwich and a cup of tea when a lady who’d been sitting at a nearby table came over to me and said, ‘Hello, aren’t you Tracey Thorn?’ Ashamed as I am to admit it, I think I replied somewhat wearily, ‘Yes, I am,’ expecting to sign an autograph, at which point she stuck out her hand and announced, ‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Linda Thompson.’
Now, this stopped me in my tracks, as I had only the evening before watched a TV documentary featuring an old performance by Richard and Linda Thompson. She had been singing something glorious like ‘A Heart Needs a Home’ or ‘Withered and Died’, and I’d been struck once again both by her chiselled beauty and by the plangent, weary resilience of that lovely, unadorned voice. And now here she was, standing at my table, and I hadn’t even recognised her. The coincidence of her presence, on top of my mortification, rendered me speechless, and I managed only a spluttering apology, followed by a gauche Bill-and-Ted-style ‘I am not worthy’, before we hugged and exchanged phone numbers and promised to meet up.
Due, I suspect, to mutual reserve and vagueness, it took a few years for this to happen, but finally I find myself sitting in her third-floor fla
t, looking out at the communal garden in all its spring glory, with the chance to get to the heart of her story, bypassing the internet rumours and finding out what really lay behind her retreat from singing.
‘If you Google you,’ I say to her, ‘or Google dysphonia, you get this rather tidily packaged version of your story, and I didn’t want to repeat it without running it past you first.’
‘Yes, it is very glib,’ she replies. ‘Linda Ronstadt was the first one who said to me, Don’t listen to the doctors when they tell you it’s all psychological. And now, NOW they have found out that it is akin to Parkinson’s. So now, after all these years, I’m seeing a neurologist, and having MRI scans.’
Which quite quickly puts paid to the idea that it is a ‘hysterical’ condition.
‘Yes, although it does get worse with stress. And also pregnancy. It was always worse when I was pregnant, and I was pregnant a lot of the time.’
I tell her that I read online about Shirley Collins being afflicted with dysphonia when her husband left her. Can it be that simple, I ask her?
‘No, it’s not that simple. And the same story is told about me, really – that I got dysphonia when me and Richard split up. But actually I got it about three months after we got married.’
So there you have it. Bang goes the theory. Ignore what you have read on Wikipedia. As I suspected, these stories are too neat to be true.
‘I’m so glad I asked you,’ I tell her. ‘I didn’t want to repeat these stories which seem to say, Oh, poor heart-broken women, their men leave them and they can’t sing.’
‘I know, it’s so fucking annoying. There’s definitely a psychological factor, but if something’s part physical and part psychological and goes on for forty years, it becomes completely entrenched.’
And it affects your speaking, too, not just singing? (I can hear, talking to her, that there’s a slight hoarse, croaky quality to her voice, a bit like someone recovering from laryngitis, and brief moments when there is a gap in her speech.)
‘Yes. If I ask for a bacon butty and they bring me a cheese and pickle sandwich I sometimes can’t say, No, this is the wrong thing. It’s strange. It hits me at odd moments. Someone will say, Do you want this lipstick or that lipstick, and I go –’ and here she mimes being completely mute, unable to get a word out, even to stutter.
I can only imagine the frustration of this. Later she tells me that it means she often avoids conversation, retreating from speech as much as from singing. I ask her how much of a loss it has been, especially the end of her performing career.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I didn’t particularly love touring, but what I would love is to be able to jump up and join in with my kids when they’re performing, get up and sing a chorus. But I can’t, I just can’t.’
Is that because you wouldn’t trust your voice to be reliable?
‘Yes.’
So it might work?
‘It might, yes. Or it might not. If I sing in falsetto, I don’t get any throat problems.’
But then you don’t really sound like you.
‘Absolutely right. But then I keep hearing singers of my age, you know, over sixty, and they don’t sound like themselves anyway, cos the voice does go a bit, hahaha.’
She’s got a gorgeous, smoker’s laugh. I forget to ask her if she does or has ever smoked. Surely not, I think, but you can’t always be certain with singers. It occurs to me, though, that she has told me her dysphonia started a lot earlier than people believe it did, and so she must have had long periods of working through it, recording and touring? It wasn’t just a sudden, abrupt silence, an end to her singing, it was an ongoing struggle, something to overcome.
‘I did, yeah, and it was awful, I never knew if anything would come out or not. And at gigs, the sound guy would say to me, I think you’re going off mic all the time. I wasn’t, but it was cutting in and out. I found out only recently that dysphonia is so specific, it usually starts at the age of twenty-six, which mine did, three months before I was twenty-six. Mind you, if I hadn’t had dysphonia, I’d have never written a song. I was a singer, and that’s what I did. But you have to do other things, when the singing becomes such a problem.’
I tell her about my stage fright, about the years of living with it, performing with it, and how no one who hasn’t experienced it can really understand it, any more than they understand her dysphonia.
‘People say to me, Oh, you’ll be able to sing in my club cos it’s very relaxing, but, you know, it’s not about relaxing. I could drink a bottle of gin and take six valium, and I’d still have dysphonia. It’s just a misfiring in my brain.’
Like me, she’s had that feeling of the stage being a scary place, an arena of confrontation, and she says, ‘In many ways, it’s a sign of emotional stability, not wanting to put yourself in that situation. And when people say, I only really feel at home on stage, I think – I don’t feel at home at home, never mind on stage!’
We laugh our heads off at this. They’re just damaged people, I say, the ones who feel that, even though I’m a bit envious.
‘Yes, I find them very annoying. A part of it’s jealousy.’
As I did with Romy, we end up wondering how we ever ended up on stage, with that sensation that we didn’t belong there.
‘I always used to say to people I have the stage presence of a totem pole.’
A singing candle – that was Simon Cowell’s phrase about someone on The X Factor. He said it very disparagingly one week and I thought, Oh, he’s talking about me.
‘I can’t be doing all that “Oh, I love you guys”, you know, or doing a lot of banter on stage, I just wanted to get the songs done. I’ve had that feeling, that I wasn’t cut out for it – but then there are a lot of fans who would say, “But you were, I loved it”.’
Yes, there are people in the audience who are sick of Entertainers, who want something different, more authentic, for want of a better word.
‘Or in my audience,’ she says, ‘there’d be people thinking, “Will she get through it?”’
Which must have added a layer of excitement, I suppose. That unacknowledged desire of the audience to witness something dangerous, to see something that carries within it the risk of failure, of disaster even. And they’re never aware of how much pressure even their happy anticipation can put on the singer. I say to her that we’ve both had the experience of people being a bit, shall we say, reverential about our voices, and that can make it harder. I’ve always worried that when I actually sing in front of people, they might think, Oh (disappointed voice), oh, she’s not really all that…
‘Yes, or that experience where you come off stage and people say, Oh, that was the best performance ever, when you think, it really wasn’t…’
I ask her about the notorious Shoot Out the Lights tour of 1982, when she and Richard were over, bitterly over, but dragging themselves on, and she sang through a mix of pain and fury, apparently better than she’d ever sung before.
‘I read recently that Richard had said to an interviewer, “Oh, that’s rubbish – yeah, she sang well, but she’d sung well lots of other times before that.” But in fact I felt it was really good, because I was broken-hearted, so I couldn’t focus on this throat thing – plus I was living on vodka and antidepressants – so I could sing quite freely because something else had taken over. But it wasn’t a very pleasant experience.’
Interesting, though, that at a time of such emotional distress her singing rallied. You’d imagine being sad would make any problem worse, but in fact one trouble distracted from another, and so reduced its impact. In the aftermath, however, she slipped into the shadows, recording only intermittently. In the last ten years, she has released three great albums, which isn’t bad going by anybody’s standards, but like me she hasn’t really tried to return to the stage.
She says, ‘There are people, aren’t there, who just never stop. You look at someone like Bruce Forsyth – you know he’s a hundred and ninety seven, and he’s on all t
he time, isn’t he? Always performing. Those kind of people, it’s their life, their raison d’être, but it just isn’t mine.’
