Introduction
The human voice is the very first medium that we take for a message.
At the time, being babies, we do not understand that what we are hearing is a medium and are unable fully to interpret the message. But that’s what happens. We hear a sound; we listen; we intuit that the sound means good; we learn quickly to draw comfort from it and to enjoy feelings of expectation and curiosity . . . and then we learn to shape identity from it. It’s possible of course that we do the identity thing first—our mother’s voice, our father’s voice: the first intimations in life that rowdy, meaningless chaos does in fact submit to meaning, the message “I love you” boring like a drill through the big-bang debris of not knowing anything at all.
But the message is not encoded in words. There are no words yet. There is only sound, as there was only sound in the womb. It is the sound of the voice that makes the feeling happen—the tone and timbre of the voice, its comforting rhythm and, of course, its sheer familiarity in its association with touch, proximity, warmth, comfort. And our capacity for feeling these things develops as we develop, keeping an even pace, side by side, as if going somewhere. From the very start of our lives we know that voices carry information, yes. But much more than that, they also express emotion—they confer emotion. They stimulate it. We know, even without the involvement of clearly articulated and comprehended language, that voices are vessels brimming with stuff: that a voice can itself be a message. We learn that we don’t actually need to hear the words of an altercation to know that anger is being expressed, even at low amplitude, even in a whisper. Equally, we can hear love through gibberish. A voice is a ship, and sometimes it is enough to know that it is a ship and that it is coming, whether or not we can picture in our minds precisely what it carries in darkness below the waterline.
It’s fair to say, then, that before words are distinguishable, voices make some sort of case for our close attention. We learn from the start to read voices and to engage with them, as if the voice itself and not the language is the primary agent of meaning. Voices invite inference. They switch us on. Even before we have words with which to encode and decode meaning, voices are an event.
And then we learn that voices have other modes. They can sing, too.
* * *
I have no idea when singing first became noticeable to me. In our house, when I was growing up, singing was just what happened. It was part of the everyday fabric of life, not in any particularly attractive or impressive way but in a comfortable, pleasing, homely way; because it was quite a nice thing to do and because singing constituted a significant feature of the family’s social breathing. There was nothing fancy going on here—there was no “agenda.” I’m afraid we just sang. We sang neither cutely nor Von-Trappishly, and certainly not with any zeal—in fact we sang in rather a methodical way, without any great consideration of how we might sound to others or even what the point of singing was. We sang in church as we sang in school assembly, because it was required. We sang at home because it appeared to give my parents pleasure and because it was normal. None of us sang particularly well. We sang either solo or in harmony, sometimes contrapuntally, never in unison (what’s the point of that?), sometimes accompanied, sometimes not. Victorian parlor songs, church music, carols, arias, lieder, A. A. Milne—the middle-to-highbrow middle-class repertoire of the mid-twentieth century . . .
Why? Well, I suppose my dad—the instigator—thought it was a good way to engage responsibly with his children without having to be overtly educative, or run around or dress up or build things or compete; plus it was a creative and enjoyable activity for himself. We children went along with it because it was quite fun to do and because . . . well, because it was normal.
After all, doesn’t everyone do this?
When I discovered as a moderately small boy that not everyone did it, I came to know the sting of embarrassment possibly for the first time. To my friend Nigel over the road, singing was wholly disturbing. It signified not only weirdness but also girliness, and he disapproved of both of those things. My dad once asked us in passing (Nigel and I were doubtless on our way upstairs from the kitchen to play Subbuteo) whether Nigel and I fancied joining the rest of the family in the living room to try out a four-part Christmas carol he’d reharmonized—“just belt out the tune, Nigel!”—and Nigel reacted as if he’d been invited to participate in group sex. He appeared for a moment to have had a seizure, while standing upright next to the cupboard under the stairs. He then backed into the cupboard door with a thump. Then he came to and shuddered and was quite unable to speak for a period, which was unlike him. In the end he managed a choked “No, thank you,” but was obviously shaken and left the house soon after.
Singing, then, was evidently both normal and not normal, and obviously much less normal in the world beyond the front gate than it was within. What was a boy to make of this?
I quickly learned to swallow the embarrassment along with the niceness, and without too much chewing or gagging. If singing was now associated in my mind with prissy gentility and the dangers of effeminacy, then that uneasiness was always redeemed by the uncomplicated pleasure it gave me when the gaze of society was turned elsewhere and I might sing unselfconsciously—especially in church, where there were echoes and candles after dark, and sustaining, cloaking, caressing harmony, which was like being held. Singing was two things to me: both shame and the sensation of being held. I still feel that way, a little.
But that was only my singing. What about other people’s?
There is of course a considerable difference between the act of singing and the act of listening to other people sing. One is active, the other less so; one is a pushing out, the other a taking in; one is fraught with the potential for embarrassment, the other can be an unselfconscious, even selfless, pleasure that can take you out of the quotidian and into another place and time altogether. Yet—and this is a very important thing to me—it can also make the quotidian vivid and beautiful.
Singing and listening to singing are conjoined but non-identical twins, profoundly linked but really quite different from each other in actuality, and it feels somehow like an act against nature to separate them. But separate them I must, for the good of all. Although it may sound grossly insensitive, I know which twin I prefer and which one I can happily live without. I always want to separate them.
Discounting sex, I love listening to singing above all other activities that are common to all cultures. Other people’s singing is to my mind the highest and deepest human attainment. To me it represents not only the glide of evolutionary progress—the transformation of primordial throaty gurgling into an exquisite, expressive, life-sustaining, tuneable communication system—but also authentic transcendence, through the transmutation of melodized language into something that really does go beyond its functional self, both literally and metaphorically. Singing is, to me, where human life flowers most brilliantly, most subtly and most diffusely.
But that’s enough about flowers. I also like singing as I like food—for its nourishment, its sensory stimulus and for its abiding quality of uncontingent necessity. I really cannot think of anything other than food, warmth, shelter, and love more needful in life than the sound of other people singing. I’ve got to have some, every day. And on those rare days when I don’t manage to get some, I find myself going cold turkey and then relishing the feeling of deprivation because it means that the next time I do get some, the hit will be a rush.
But actually, even that isn’t the whole story, not if I’m honest. I think I like listening to singing most of all because it allows me to be unselfconscious. Singing—other people’s singing—actively encourages unselfconsciousness, facilitates it, ensures that it happens, supports it. I hope that you will indulge this thought on the grounds that you also feel that way—or, if you don’t, that what I’m saying at least rings true and not like the ravings of a solipsist who has spent too much of his life shut up in the box of his own head—and may even have serious attachment issues to resolve. I am afraid it is true, though. Singing throws a switch in me, turns the flux around. It’s as if the sound of singing gives me permission to phase down the arc lamps of self-scrutiny and to focus on a compelling exterior phenomenon to the exclusion of all else. (Although of course what I mean by this really is that singing makes selfhood palatable: I like myself more when I’m listening to singing.) My father was a bit that way inclined too—although, strangely enough, not when his methodical children were doing it. But plonk him down in front of properly good singing done by people who can really sing and he’d go all funny. He’d switch off, as if unplugged at the mains, only to flip over in the same instant to another private circuit, one that was deeply enlivening to his senses and compelling of his attention but just happened to exclude everything else going on in the shared world. And then we would all laugh at him because his mouth would fall open and his eyeballs would bloom over like plum skins.
For me, then, singing is not necessarily cathartic, but it does always compel, provided it fulfills two criteria. One requirement is that it be good singing and the other that it is true singing. True singing does not necessarily have to be “good,” but good singing really does have to be true—otherwise it is not useful.
What do I mean by that? Well, this whole book is an attempt to explore what I mean—what, for me, makes good, true, useful singing.
This is not a technical exercise, nor an academic one, nor a talent competition in prose form. It isn’t a beauty pageant. It is not my intention to isolate “the best voices,” nor to model an ideal voice or way of singing, but to explore the voices that count, that have done something for me, that connect with me, that thrill me, that make me wonder, that fill me with quantifiable emotion or weird thoughts or feelings that just can’t be accounted for. These are the voices that have shaped—and continue to shape—my world.
It is a subjective study, as it has to be. There is no such thing as the Platonically perfect voice or way of singing; a voice is not a thing, after all, and it cannot be fixed with tools. There is only transaction: transaction between the voice and you, you and the voice. That’s all there is. The push and pull, the give and take. The loom of interaction.
Is this fair to the singers in question? Is it useful? Is it even sensible? I don’t really know. Possibly not. But it seems to be something I have to do, for my own edification, to explain my voices back to myself. Because nobody else is going to do it for me, and there are plenty of people out there who are more than happy to show me how voices should be, and what they’re worth.
Yes, we would all probably trust an X Factor winner to deliver the prevailing sentiment of “The Wind Beneath My Wings” in more marketable terms than, say, Winston Rodney would, especially in the context of a TV talent show filmed in front of a partisan audience under flashing lights accompanied by a crashing, hyperventilatory arrangement pre-recorded elsewhere and then processed into a sequence of cadential cues specifically designed to frame the drama of the act of singing for judgment. (It’s exhausting, isn’t it, just reading about it? But then exhaustion is central to the X Factor experience, which defines singing as the sinew-straining, health-threatening, competition-shredding, life-changing exercise of supreme effort.) But X Factor vocalization is to true singing what keepy-uppies are to football. It is the exhibition of decontextualized skill, a measurement of the ability to show off. Where’s the use? What does singing like that mean, beyond the advocacy of exhibition and the solicitation of admiration? We might admire what we hear for its technical accomplishment and even feel moved by the singer’s effort and commitment to the moment (without which no one ever “nailed” anything). We might even think that the singer has a nice voice. But we will also be experiencing lots of other things. We will certainly be aware that what we are doing is sharing in a ritual, a ritual that requires participants to consume an elephantine product on an enormous scale as part of a multidimensional entertainment cascade, which, inter alia, entails social jousting at home with fellow sofa-sitters, all of us bantering and passing judgment both on the singing and on the judgments made about the singing, as well as boggling at the spectacle, marveling at the costumes, choking over the plastic surgery, the social semiotics, the desperation, the agony, the expense, the cruelty . . . The X Factor is by definition a self-conscious mass experience, as the Roman Colosseum was a self-conscious mass experience—it literally depends on mass consumption to warrant its existence, while the mass is incentivized to rejoice in its own mass-ness as it does so—with the result that we are unlikely to be haunted by it on any personal level at all.
I can’t argue with the X Factor definition of singing. It is what it is. It makes money. It titillates. It reminds us, feverishly, of our mass-ness. It offers the suggestion that the only real and worthwhile object of singing is personal celebrity. But what I am interested in with this book has little to do with showing off, nor with mass consumption, nor lights and costumes and cruelty and, least of all, competition. I’m interested in what makes a good haunting.
I am pretty certain that we are only haunted by singing when we experience it not as an act of showing off but as an act of authorship, and then as a personal invasion; an invasion conducted privately, discreetly, loudly or quietly, at home or abroad, upright or lying down, tearfully or dry—it doesn’t really matter where you experience it, or how, so long as the context is felt to be your own and that you listen to the singing not as a constituent of a mass consciousness but as the sole occupant of a single one. Psychologically alone. For what is singing, if not the creative assertion of individuality? And what is a voice, if not the most inimitable, indelible mark of an individual’s individuality—the vessel, the ship sent out bravely over the horizon to export the fruits of our consciousness to places unknown.
I am not entirely comfortable with admitting this, but I am quite sure that a disproportionate amount of my own socialization was accomplished through the agency of other people’s singing. I have never told my mother this.
* * *
Does it matter how old you are?
Of course it matters. It matters enormously. It matters as much as it matters that you engage with the world beyond the compass of your family in terms that may, at the time, be defined as your own. Otherwise we’d all be excited only by those officially approved things we are given to know in our early upbringing. (I, for instance, would be turned on more by Alfred Deller and Janet Baker than I am by Al Green and Mary Margaret O’Hara.) The evolution of personal taste is always a small act of rebellion, and when we make it, we begin to separate ourselves from all that we are given to know. The constellation of moments in which you accomplish this separation are among the most important moments of your life, and so the context in which this transition takes place matters tremendously.
So I didn’t choose Mick Jagger; he just happened to be passing at the time.
I first encountered his voice at pretty much the same moment, in broad historical terms, as everyone else heard it for the first time, in 1964, shortly after hearing Lennon’s and McCartney’s. “You Better Move On” was the first Rolling Stones song I ever heard, and it is not insignificant that I not only heard it, but saw it, on television. And I have no doubt that, had I been a teenager then, I would have been struck by the underpinning authenticity of Jagger’s voice. I would not have couched it in such terms, but some part of me, at some unknowable depth, would have recognized his slightly self-conscious English suburban sneer as the real thing, a vessel of an unaccommodating new articulacy demanded by a brand-new social mobility—unattractive on the surface, yes, hopelessly inauthentic in R&B terms, but irresistibly compelling in other, less-anticipated ways. I would have been excited by it, plain and simple. Turned on.
On the other hand, if I had been an adult in 1964—perhaps one who had endured the war and the long passage of economic austerity and social conservatism that followed it—it seems likely that Mick’s hipster insolence would have struck a different chord.
As it was, I was four—and I was scared.
A decade later I was trying to sing like that with my own band, because it seemed like the only way for semi-knowing white English middle-class boys to sound authentic to themselves—even as the real thirty-year-old Mick was himself essaying a series of knowing parodies of “black” voices as part of his enjoyment of his new status as a leading light in a new kind of sophisticated jet-setting global elite. His desire for upward social mobility had by then been slaked, pretty much. He’d reached an acceptable ceiling. Of course it matters how old you are when you hear a voice.
Of course it does. It’s because I was born in 1960 into a churchy middle-class East Anglian family that my formative voices were not those of Sinatra and Bennett and Streisand and Nat “King” Cole, but Jagger and Lennon and Hendrix and Dusty and Otis and Orbison and Bobbie Gentry. It’s because I was a teenager in the 1970s that I am still moved by the utterances of Marvin Gaye and Peter Gabriel and Gladys Knight and Joey Ramone and David Bowie; much more so than by those of Morrissey and Lennox and Prince and Whitney, or Cobain and Gallagher and Adele and Sam Smith. The complexities of human neurology and biochemistry see to that, as well as the wearying effects of fashion and time. Whether we like it or not, it is a neurological fact that the developing brain disposes us to soak up experiences most vividly and adhesively during our teenage years. If you must blame something for my taste, blame dopamine.
But that doesn’t mean I dislike Morrissey and Whitney and Prince and Frank Sinatra and Adele. On the contrary, I have plenty of time for all of them, one way or another—as voices, if not necessarily as “icons” or as movers of my heart. The point is that even though none of them connected with me on first, second or—in one case—even thirteenth contact, I have learned to at least “get” them, as a direct consequence of the listening habits formed in my childhood by my terror of Mick Jagger and, a little later, my horny bewilderment in the face of Marvin Gaye, the weird disturbance wrought by Suzi Quatro and the utter conviction, arrived at rather later in life, that even if I didn’t like his voice much when I was younger, then Bob Dylan’s best singing is as true and good as singing has ever been. There you go: the habit of paying attention to voices breeds tolerance, patience, and curiosity, as well as horror, distaste, and contempt.
The bottom line is that voices ask questions, and some of the questions are very hard to understand, let alone answer. Which is one reason why we have to keep on listening.