Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  The popularity of Gareth Malone’s TV series The Choir is again testament to the fact that people like to take part in communal singing, even if they sometimes do it vicariously by watching others in a choir. Around the country choirs have had a resurgence, suggesting that for many people, singing is more fun to do than to listen to – there is a euphoric experience to be had from the physical sensations of singing as opposed to listening, and an endorphin-releasing element which also informs people’s desire to run marathons or leap about at zumba classes. These kinds of choirs have moved away from associations with churches and a strictly classical repertoire and towards working with more mixed material, and a more relaxed approach to the vocal skills of the participants. At this level, taking part brings the joys of a kind of risk-free singing. In a sense, singing in a choir is an example of singing without being heard, even a version of Dusty’s ‘singing into a void’, in that you can’t distinctly hear your own voice above those of the group, and equally you can’t be heard in an individual sense, you are merely part of the whole. This is a long way from what we think of as choral singing, where discipline is key and every voice counts. In the latter context, as John Potter points out, a chorister is obliged to raise a hand and ‘own up’ if they make a mistake, so that the choirmaster knows who has faltered; but in the modern, democratic, Gareth Malone-style of choir, it is all about getting everyone to feel confident and worthy. Getting the best out of each singer according to their ability is a more achievable goal than striving to get the best result possible.

  At weddings and funerals we still sometimes sing hymns, but often, in these secular times, traditional hymns have given way to other kinds of music and singing that seem to capture the mood. At a funeral this is usually the moment that releases tears, as though the singing voice unlocks something, allows us to acknowledge that we have, in our grief, moved outside the realm of the normal and everyday, with its stiff upper lip and putting on a brave face. Music pushes those formalities aside, expressing the things we haven’t been able to say, even in the eulogies we may have written, the condolences we have offered. Ella Fitzgerald sang ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ at the end of the funeral service for my mum, and for Ben’s sister recently it was James Taylor singing ‘You’ve Got a Friend’. I won’t forget those moments, or be able to hear those songs again without being transported back, but that’s OK, we can bear being reminded.

  Singing on the dancefloor can be as much a part of the communal club experience as the dancing, which is why I get frustrated when club music goes through phases of being completely instrumental. The Streets’ ‘Weak Become Heroes’ is Mike Skinner’s paean to the nights and days of rave, but in the euphoric landscape he describes, all rising pianos and floating emotions, it’s not so much the dancing he remembers – in fact he barely mentions it. What seems to be the emotional core of this song, the proof he offers that in those few moments everyone around him was bonded in a way he had never known before or since, was the fact that ‘we all sing, we all sing’. I can’t hear that song without a tug of emotion, and not out of nostalgia, for it was a scene I had no part in, but because, unlike anything else that’s ever been written about rave culture, this song makes me envious. It’s that image of everyone on the dancefloor together, eyes closed, singing. ‘Sing to the words, flex to the fat one, the tribal drums, the sun’s rising. We all smile. We all sing.’ It’s a melancholy, elegiac track, so it’s no wonder that it’s moving – he’s talking about feelings he’s never been able to recapture – but I love the fact that in trying to encapsulate what was essential about the experience, he settles on the fact that everyone was singing. It immediately conjures up for me other moments, memories or imaginings, when people have sung together, spontaneously, in unrehearsed situations, and it has been something joyous, unpredictable and unifying. Most vividly, it brings to my mind a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’, written about the end of the First World War. You might think that’s stretching it a bit – that the euphoria occasioned by the ending of years of slaughter can’t really be compared to the dancefloor hedonism of a crowd of pilled-up ravers. But they move me in similar ways.

  ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing; / And I was filled with such delight / As prisoned birds must find in freedom, […] Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; / And beauty came like the setting sun: / My heart was shaken with tears; and horror drifted away… O, but Everyone / Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.’

  We all sing, and we all sing together and, thankfully, it will never be done.

  22

  THE EMPTY VESSEL

  W

  hen we sing communally we tend to go easy on ourselves – we’re doing our best, just having a laugh even, don’t judge us. But when we listen to an individual singer we set the bar higher, and I don’t just mean in terms of technical performance. We’re searching for something that isn’t merely sound without content, and we strive to distinguish between singing that has something essential and full about it, and singing which is lacking, missing some vital ingredient. A book that explores the possibility that a singer can sometimes be an empty vessel, and coincidentally one of the strangest books I’ve ever read, is George du Maurier’s Trilby. You’ve probably never read it, might not even have heard of it, but let me tell you that, although it is little read now, it was an absolute smash hit in its day. First serialised in the American magazine Harper’s Monthly in 1894, published as a bestselling novel the following year, then adapted into a hit play and more than one movie, it gave the world both the trilby hat, and the character Svengali – part singing teacher, part mesmerist, who transforms tone-deaf Trilby O’Ferrall into the world’s greatest superstar diva. So far, so bizarre.

  Svengali is the classic artist manqué – he had longed to be a singer himself, and spent years studying, but nature had been cruel to him – ‘He was absolutely without voice, beyond the harsh, weak raven’s croak he used to speak with, and no method availed to make one for him.’ It is clear, though, that he knows all there is to know about singing, and that in his imagination he is constantly singing, transforming any paltry piece of music into something glorious: ‘There was nothing so humble, so base even, but that his magic could transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note.’ The act of singing is defined here as magic, but magic that can only be performed if the basic raw materials, the innate sound of the voice, are in place to begin with, and for Svengali this is not so.

  Enter Trilby – boyish, tall, laidback, dressed in a masculine style and smoking her own roll-ups; cheerful on the surface but obviously possessed of dark secrets and repressed feelings. The joke about Trilby – and it is presented at first as a joke – is that she can’t sing, despite having an extraordinary-sounding voice – ‘a volume of breathy sound, not loud, but so immense that it seemed to come from all round’. We first hear her sing a simple folk tune to some friends, and ‘It was as though she could never once have deviated into tune, never once have hit upon a true note, even by a fluke – in fact, as though she were absolutely tone-deaf, and without ear’.

  She meets Svengali, who instantly grasps that she has an amazing-sounding voice but no musical ear at all. She enjoys singing, yet is ignorant of the mistakes she makes: when Svengali tests her by playing two different notes on the piano, she declares that they are the same. She is tone-deaf but entirely oblivious and without self-consciousness. Singing, then, means almost nothing to her; she can enjoy it as any amateur might, a pure physical pleasure, without depth. His attitude towards her at this point is completely dehumanising. He regards her as an instrument, with the body of a singer, but none of the musical or mental skills necessary. He is the artist, she merely his vessel.

  Time passes, we lose sight of her, then re-encounter her later in the novel when a group of people are discussing the new singing sensation ‘La Svengali’, and as each person joins in they try to outdo each other in superlative praise, their flamboyan
t descriptions of her vocal prowess becoming more and more over-the-top as they go on: ‘The voice is a detail. It’s what she does with it – it’s incredible! It gives one cold all down the back! It drives you mad! It makes you weep hot tears by the spoonful!’

  This, we realise, is tone-deaf Trilby they are talking about, and her reinvention as the greatest singer the world has ever known causes du Maurier some descriptive problems, as he runs out of adjectives in trying to describe the unutterable perfection of her singing voice – ‘its intonation absolutely, mathematically pure; one felt it to be not only faultless, but infallible… The like of that voice has never been heard, nor ever will be again. A woman archangel might sing like that, or some enchanted princess out of a fairy tale.’ This kind of hyperbole goes on for a full seven pages, until by the end, the entire audience at Trilby’s concert, which is composed of ‘the most cynically critical people in the world’ are a sobbing, emotionally drained mess.

  But how has this miracle been achieved? Well, by the power of hypnosis. Svengali has mesmerised her and she is performing in a trance, after which she will be unable to recall any of her great moments of performance. Effectively, she is not even present during these feats of singing genius. Svengali is singing through her: his is the artistic achievement, but due to an accident of anatomy, he is forced to use her body as a means of production. When Svengali dies, Trilby can no longer sing, and is laughed off stage by an audience who hear her suddenly revert to her old tunelessness.

  This, I think, is the frankest example in literature of the dehumanising attitude towards the singer. Nowhere will you find a more complete disconnect between the person and the voice; she has no control over her singing, no stake in it; no part of her personality is present in it. It’s partly just a tale of its time, in a similar vein to Shaw’s Pygmalion – the idea of a male talent taking possession of a vacant, passive female form and animating it in his own fashion, using it to bring to life his own ideals, imposing himself on the world through the body of another, and it’s no accident that this other is a woman. Trilby is at first glance an interesting and non-conformist character, but the world damages and denigrates her, and in her reduced state she is left vulnerable and falls prey to the machinations of Svengali, who exploits her for his own purposes, to realise his thwarted artistic ambitions. It is his dreams being fulfilled – and, you could argue, his ‘voice’ that reduces the audience to tears.

  It’s an odd tale. Fantastical, improbable, overwritten, mawkish and sentimental much of the time. Melodramatic and repetitive. And yet in the character of Svengali, and his power over Trilby, it has handed down to us a stereotype that we recognise to this day. The manipulative puppet-master, hungrily seeking raw talent – talent that doesn’t even know of its own existence, or power, and doesn’t know its own desires – and consuming it. The performer as zombie, animated only by the efforts of a behind-the-scenes schemer. Here, in Trilby, we have the archetype of that story, so prevalent in discussions of the pop world. You don’t need me to say the words Simon Cowell here, do you? Shall we talk about The X Factor?

  23

  THE X FACTOR

  I

  ’m not supposed to like The X Factor, am I? In fact, I’m not even supposed to watch it, let alone like it. I know this because every Saturday when it’s on, people (I say people, I mean men) tell me so on Twitter. That I have shocked and disappointed them. First, someone will say, ‘I can’t believe you watch this crap! You’re a real musician, not like this talentless bunch! I’m so disappointed in you! Why don’t you turn your TV off and do something creative instead!’ And then, whatever the result on a Sunday night, whoever has been voted off – whether by the judges or by public vote – someone will shriek, ‘It’s a fix! I can’t believe you watch this crap, it is such a fix!’

  So yes, I know and I understand that people don’t like it, and that there are valid reasons not to like it. I watch it semi-ironically, same as everyone else, and I enjoy tweeting about it as much as, if not more than, the actual watching and the listening. I’d be lying if I said that I always, or even regularly enjoy it on a purely musical level. Too much of the time, I agree, it is wearying in the extreme. The same three songs that have recently featured in adverts come round again and again. Decades’ worth of well-loved and eminently coverable songs sit neglected on a dusty warehouse shelf somewhere, tumbleweed blowing down the aisles, while the contestants are asked yet again to choose between ‘What a Wonderful World’ or something by Queen. I remember the week barmaid Sophie Habibis sang ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’ by Sonny Bono, a rare example of a genuinely interesting and unexpected song choice. This was more like it, I thought. A different song, familiar to some of us but not all, bringing with it a gentle haze of nostalgia, a whiff of unsullied 1960s innocence. It seemed a perfectly reasonable choice, too – the song is hooky and yet not worn threadbare by repeated revisits. Her rendition wasn’t perfect, but no matter – for a brief moment it was as though a door had opened at the back of the stage, and given us a glimpse of the World of Song that lives out there. Tantalising. Full of promise. A kind of ideal of how the show could be, should be.

  She got voted off.

  There is also all too frequently the feeling that we see the best of contestants at the audition stage. That unlike, say, Strictly Come Dancing, where there is a genuine all-round improvement in the abilities of most of the contestants as training and weekly performances kick in, on The X Factor there is, sadly, a sense that the raw talent which can burst out and surprise you on the audition stage is gradually squeezed into a small and often wrongly shaped box, the corners of which are then remorselessly filed off week by week, till what you’re left with is something bland, safe, indistinguishable from things you’ve seen and heard before many, many times; all sense of individuality, personality, quirk or charm utterly gone.

  I agree with people who say that the show can be cruel – I don’t enjoy the parade of the more ‘vulnerable’ contestants at some of the auditions. Even after that stage, when we’re down to the finalists, it is of course a lions’ den that they are all walking into. In many ways it’s a microcosm of the lions’ den that is the music industry, and in a single series contestants experience a kind of speeded-up version of a career in music (or at least, a historical version of a career in music) – the audition is the moment when you present your demo tape to an A and R man, judges’ houses is the moment when you get signed, and each week in the live finals you perform your new single on Top of the Pops, and see how the public responds; do they buy it or not, do you go up the chart or down?

  So in many ways, it’s no more cruel or unfair than any attempt to make a career in music. You’ll be judged not just on the sound of your voice, but on what you look like, how you move – or not – on stage, and what the public perceive you to be like. Do you have what Louis calls ‘the likeability factor’? You might be able to sing in tune, but does anybody want to hear you sing?

  So with all these negatives laid out before us, why do I say I like it? I’ll tell you why. It’s because, unlike those fans of mine who regularly tweet me to tell me I am better than this show and shouldn’t watch it, I don’t think I am, or that anybody else in music is better than these hopefuls, these brave souls. And at the moment when they have the mic put in their hand, and the stage manager does that phoney ‘3-2-1’ countdown and pushes them into the limelight, I feel a kinship with them. We are the same, in that moment. I know what it is to have the mic in your hand, and step out onto the unforgiving stage, in the glare of those lights. You don’t really know what awaits you out there, certainly not at the start of your career, and it takes a particular and gut-wrenching courage. They are beginners, mostly, and painfully young. Bright-eyed dreamers, innocents, children, about to venture into a world of weary adult cynics. And the step they take is only one small step, but a giant leap in terms of where they’ve come from. Some have done gigs before, usually small ones; some have only ever sung in their be
droom; others have toiled for years on the unforgiving circuit of clubs, wine bars, hotel foyers, and this represents their last, their only chance at something bigger. And so they step out onto a huge, slippery stage, in front of not just the live audience but a huge TV audience as well, sometimes also expected to perform a choreographed dance routine, in full costume, for the first time in their lives. My heart is in my throat, and I feel for them, each and every one, each and every time.

  ‘But is it really about singing at all?’ you ask. And it’s a fair point.

  On one simple level, it is Saturday night light entertainment, a version of the good old-fashioned mixed-bag, end-of-the-pier British variety show which has been a mainstay of lazy weekend telly for decades. Understanding it on this level seems to me to go some way to puncturing the earnest, pompous attacks levelled at it by ‘music lovers’. It is singing presented as fun, or as a kind of circus, but also, in some strange and unexpected ways, it harks back to a golden age of pop music.

  In the early rounds especially, what we are revelling in is the celebration of the amateur, the outsider figure, which is a long-standing and noble tradition within the British pop scene. Characters who look like plasterers and chimney sweeps (as they will prove at interview to actually be) will appear with their British teeth and their hairstyles and hats, and act out a potted history of British pop music – which consists of flashes of vocal brilliance and personality, punctuated by some capering clown taking to the stage and demanding his moment in the spotlight.