Near the beginning of her new book, Tracey Thorn addresses a question she's often asked.
Who is her favourite singer? The answer is Dusty Springfield (good choice) and Thorn talks about the initial discovery, hearing a track from the album Dusty In Memphis on the radio. "For the first time I truly heard that voice - that smoky, husky, breathy, vulnerable, bruised, resigned, deliberate, sensual voice," she writes.
But it's the next few lines that matter. "Ugh," she continues, "all the same old words, and they won't do, will they? They won't do."
There are worse ways to describe Springfield's voice but you get the point. How do we talk about the voices we listen to? How do we verbalise the sounds that move us?
It's one of the tasks Thorn addresses in Naked At The Albert Hall, a (sometime) practitioner's book about the art and artifice of singing. Thorn remains best known as the singer of 1980s indie/1990s dance duo Everything But The Girl, though she hasn't been on stage for some 15 years. But these days she is making a name for herself as a writer. Her fine autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen was overlooked in many of 2014's end-of-the-year round-ups, overshadowed by the sturm und drang of Viv Albertine's emotionally exposed memoir, but its quiet, simply stated yet steely vision of an alternative 1980s music scene was a vivid, evocative reminder of that time. (The novelist Toby Litt captured the tension in Thorn's musical career, one worried away at in her biography, when he compared her with Alan Bennett. "They share," he said "a particularly English conflict between propriety and fame.")
Naked At The Albert Hall eschews biography for the most part (though inevitably she addresses her ongoing stage fright) to look at issues of technique and Auto-Tune, miming and authenticity, folk voices and "not singing" - the kind offered, thrillingly, by the likes of John Lydon and Mark E Smith. She even addresses the issue of not liking your own voice.
She does so via novel-reading, interviews with fellow vocalists such as Alison Moyet, Green Gartside and Kristin Hersh, and bringing her own cool intelligence to bear. I think I actually like the result more than Bedsit Disco Queen if I'm honest, though if you care at all about pop music you should read both.
"The singer," she reminds us, "is almost always the way in to the band." It's why there are more books about singers than there are about drummers. Drumming is a learned skill. Singing seems innate to most of us. We all have a voice. But, of course, not all of us can sing. Over the years it's possible - if you were unlucky enough to have lived with me - to have heard me singing. I have sung in the shower, in the front room, in the car along to the radio. But, wisely I think, never in public. Oh, when I was a child in church, yes, or under my breath at a gig. But the world at large doesn't need to hear my watery, wavery voice murder Who Knows Where The Time Goes or even Barbie Girl. Thorn is not the only one who doesn't like her own voice.
But then, as Thorn notes, our vocal tract isn't designed primarily to sing. It's a defence against choking. "Every effort to produce a beautiful sound is an effort to overcome the limitations of our apparatus. It's like trying to use a cheese grater or a vacuum cleaner to make music..." And yet so many do; an act that is, she points out, both mundane and heroic.
It's the heroism we all notice. Thorn is very good at how much more we require from singers than, well, drummers to keep beating that comparison. How we ignore technique and want to reduce the person who sings to his or her voice; how the singer becomes, in effect, "a projection of own needs and desires".
And she's also, despite her concerns at the top of the page, very good at finding words to describe the vocalists she talks about. She says she preferred Oasis to Blur at the start of Britpop just because of Liam Gallagher's voice, "a sneering engine of a voice levelled straight at your forehead". Chrissie Hynde's vibrato, she suggests, "has always reminded me of the tremolo setting on a guitar amp", while Elbow's Guy Garvey's voice "envelops you like a strong pair of arms; nothing bad can happen while Guy is singing".
For Springfield, Thorn eventually steals the word "silvery" from Dusty's biographer Lucy O'Brien. Karen Carpenter's, by contrast, she suggests, is more of a "chocolatey-brown". One can see a hashtag meme in that - #whatisthecolourofyourfavouritesingersvoice.
Thorn's own, I imagine as a speckled matte blue, but one that glitters in the light like mica. But that's not enough for her. "Somewhere beyond me, though, out past the rather modest vocal territory where I dwell, is a realm I gaze at enviously, where Dusty soars above me and Bjork reaches levels I can't. My style of singing suits me, and sits with my personality, but still, I'd love to be Adele for a day."
You and me both, Tracey. You and me both.
Naked At The Albert Hall by Tracey Thorn is published by Virago, £16.99
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