Well I did say I would write a
companion piece to my piece on classical singers, so here it is. Choices are again
personal, and some of them may not be amongst the greatest singers of all time.
I’d be the first to admit I know far less about what is collectively called pop
music, than I do about opera, so no doubt some of my choices may seem
eccentric. I can already hear the cries of disbelief. What! No Ella Fitzgerald
or Billie Holliday! No Tony Bennett or Nat King Cole! No Aretha Franklin or
Nina Simone, no Marvin Gaye, you can’t
be serious! All I can say is that I am not. I love the work of all the
aforementioned singers, but the ones in my list are ones that have meant
something special to me at various times of my life, and, for that reason, I
make no apology. Together they have provided some of the musical signposts of my life,
Passing over such early loves as
Doris Day (as a child, I loved her recording of Che sera sera, recently re-invented by the fabulous Pink Martini), and
Nina and Frederick (Little Donkey my favourite Christmas song), the first
singer who really spoke to me was Dusty
Springfield (how could my parents
not have known I would turn out gay?). Her solo career roughly coincided with
my teens and her first solo album, A Girl
Called Dusty , was the first LP (vinyl back then of course) that I owned. Dusty’s
smoky voice filled with pathos such songs as My Colouring Book and the classic You Don’t Own Me, and belted out such blues classics as Don’t You Know? I bought each one of
Dusty’s subsequent albums, right up to Dusty
in Memphis, which didn’t sell well on its initial release, but subsequently
acquired the status of one of the classic albums of all time, housing, as it
does, Dusty’s definitive readings of such songs as Son of a Preacher Man and The
Windmills of your Mind. Though an enormous critical success Dusty in Memphis was not a commercial
success at its first release, and Dusty’s subsequent albums did no better and
she seemed to disappear for several years, until she guested on the Pet Shop
Boys’ What Have I Done To Deserve This?
in 1989. This and the use of the song Son
of a Preacher Man, in Tarrantino’s Pulp
Fiction helped revive her career and she had another brief spell of success
until breast cancer tragically took her life in 1999.
This was also the time of The Beatles, and nobody of my
generation could possibly have escaped their influence. I remember having a crush
on Paul McCartney (well he was extremely
cute back then), though I didn’t really understand that’s what it was . Just to
hear Paul sing and shake his mop top to songs like All My Loving and I Want to
Hold Your Hand was enough to get me screaming like a girl. Please forgive
me. I was only 11 or 12 at the time. Still you’d think my parents might have
had a clue. That and the fact that my main loves were music and dancing, and I
had no interest in sport whatsoever, apart from horse riding. The Beatles, of course developed, though, for
some reason I stopped following them for a while. I never owned the seminal White Album, but Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was unignorable, and remains
to this day one of my all time favourite albums. I love every track, and would
find it impossible to pick out a favourite; possibly Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, or that gorgeous mini symphony She’s Leaving Home or the sublime fusion
of Lennon and McCartney that is A Day in
the Life, apparently an amalgamation of two songs that John and Paul were
working on independently. 
Reluctantly I pass over The
Shangri-Las, whose outpourings of teen angst, struck a chord in my teenage
soul, ( Leader of the Pack, with its
signature screeching bike tyres, once banned by the BBC, has since become a classic of the gramophone,
a paean for every teenager who was ever in love ) and move on to a French singer, whose music I
still enjoy to this day. With her long, straight hair, fringe half covering her
eyes, tall and lanky, a square cut jaw, high cheek bones and thick lips, Françoise Hardy looked like a female
Mick Jagger, and was the very epitome of the sixties chick. She had a small,
husky voice of limited range, but it was extremely expressive, in a French non-
committal way, and has hardly changed in all the years she has been
singing. In her most recent album,
released in 2010, she hardly sounds any different from the young girl who first
sang Tous le garcons et les filles
way back in 1964. Incidentally her diction was, and still is, superb. I
remember a French teacher, agreeing to a lesson in which we all listened to
Françoise Hardy songs, translating the lyrics into English as we went along.
The piano riff that opened the glorious Voila
was even sampled in Robbie Williams’ recent You Know Me. Françoise, je
t’adore.
Then there is Cher. She may not have the greatest voice in the world, nor would
she claim to have, but you have to admire a woman who has managed a number one
hit in every decade from 1960 to the last one. Her career has had more ups and
downs than a rollercoaster, and her private life was almost as rocky. When her
daughter Chastity came out to her as a lesbian, Cher was surprisingly (she
admits this herself) less supportive than one might have expected. However,
having finally come to terms with the
fact, she seems to have accepted with total equanimity Chastity’s
transformation into the male Chaz Bono, regularly tweeting support for her son
in her twitter feed. Cher is a legend, and as a singer her voice has come a long
way from the days of Sonny and Cher, which is when I first became a fan. The
woman has been with me from adolescence till today and I would find it
impossible to leave her out; and I actually think she is a better singer than
she gives herself credit for. Just listen to the joy with which she sings the
words “Man I am tonight”, when the preacher asks her if she is a “Christian
chile” in her version of Walking in
Memphis. I had a particular fondness for an album called Stars, after the
Janis Ian song of that name, but it doesn’t ever seem to have been reissued. Cher may not be one of the greatest singers of all time, but she has definitely earned her place in the pantheon of great stars.
As lead singer of the Walker
Brothers, Scott Walker wrapped his
gorgeous, velvety voice round such hits as Make
It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain’t
Gonna Shine Anymore, but some of his own material had shown a darker side
to him. As a teenager, I responded to their downbeat, esoteric lyrics, which
were to be more fully explored when he left the group and embarked on a solo
career. His first solo album, simply called Scott,
definitely tried to cash in on Walker’s big ballad appeal, with songs like The Big Hurt and When Joanna loved me, but also contained a fair amount of Jacques
Brel and Scott’s own compositions. The next album followed along the same lines,
but Scott 3 was made up only of songs
by Walker himself and by Jacques Brel. Scott
4, arguably the best and most homogeneous of his early albums, was the
first of his albums not to make the top 10. It was also my favourite.
Particularly ambitious is the first track, a glorious musical evocation of
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal,
with its Morricone style arrangement, and the dark foreboding of The Old Man’s Back Again. I also treasure his Jacques Brel covers,
particularly a haunting beautiful If You
Go Away, though Walker also has a way with the wickedly malevolent Funeral Tango and the sarcasm and pain
enshrined in Next. In later albums,
he became more and more experimental, the music and arrangements ever more
spare, and I found it harder to get on with him, but I still listen to his
first solo albums regularly.
And so to Barbra Streisand. When did it become fashionable to knock Barbra? I
suppose round about the time she achieved superstar status. Before that she was
this kooky American Jewish comedienne with an amazing voice, and she was very much
in vogue, especially amongst gay men, who responded to her the way previous
generations had adored Judy Garland, and future generations would revere
Madonna and Lady Gaga. Maybe it was the bitterness she injected into a standard
like Cry Me A River or Free Again. I was slow to jump on the
Streisand bandwagon, I’ll admit. In fact I was determined not to like her. So
when the film of Funny Girl was
released, I reluctantly went along to see it. By the time she’d sung I’m The Greatest Star near the beginning
of the movie, I was agreeing with her. She truly was the greatest star, the
talent just bursting through the screen. Later on, I suppose, some of the
mannerisms began to grate, but that first exposure to Streisand at full tilt
was a knock out. I’ve heard all the stuff about it actually being a small voice
and only really suitable for recordings, but even if that is the case, it’s an
amazing instrument. I’ve heard many classical singers praise her impeccable
legato, breath control and intonation (she’s always bang in the centre of the
note). She has sung a wide range of music and I suppose I would have to agree
that the song does tend to come second to Streisand. We are often too aware of
the singer and not of the song. That said, she did manage to sublimate her ego
to an extent in the Richard Perry Stony
End album, when she fully embraced the music of her own generation for the
first time. She is also an intelligent singer, as Stephen Sondheim discovered,
when he worked with her for the first time on The Broadway Album. She was the first singer to notice that the
last verse of Send in the Clowns didn’t properly follow from what went before. When she asked him
about it, he told her that, in the musical, there was a scene between that
explained it. She asked him to write a bridge to make it work better as a song
out of context, and he did. I have most of her albums, and though I am more
critical now than I once was of the Streisand mannerisms, I refuse to bow to
fashion. She was, and is, unique.
I first heard the voice of Karen Carpenter on the Carpenters’
single Rainy Days and Mondays, a
voice of such richness and beauty, so easily and evenly produced, that it simply
drew you in. The dark colour of her voice was particularly suited to melancholy
ballads, and reached its apogee in the wonderful Yesterday Once More, which can still evoke memories of sitting
alone in my room listening to Radio Luxembourg, or the pirate radio station
Caroline, the only stations that played non-stop pop music in those days.
Streisand praised her “marvellous instrument” and k d lang went one step
further, comparing her to Nat King Cole “and uh....there's very few singers
that are that rich actually...." She died tragically young, a victim of
anorexia nervosa, but her legacy lives on.
Now, there can hardly have been a
time when I wasn’t aware of Frank
Sinatra, as my parents both loved him, but I only really started to listen
when I heard his 1969 album of Rod McKuen material, called A Man Alone. Although the album was recorded in 1969, I was only
really aware of it in the late 70s after a break up with my then girlfriend
(yes I was still trying to be straight). It’s melancholy mood certainly chimed
in with my own at that time, and I remember sitting alone in the dark,
wallowing in my misery with the voice of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Sinatra had a way with
a lyric, a way of making you feel that the thought came newly minted from his
lips. I particularly enjoyed the Nelson Riddle years, and my favourite albums
still seem to be the more melancholic ones – In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, allegedly recorded as a
response to his break up with Ava Gardner , and the equally downbeat Only the Lonely. Sinatra may have been
great at the up tempo classics like I’ve
Got You Under My Skin, but it was the sad resignation with which he sang
such songs as I Get Along Without You
Very Well that always touched me most.
Moving forward in time a little, I
confess I’d taken very little notice of George
Michael until seeing him sing Somebody
To Love (on tv) at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness
in 1992. He was one of the few singers to really do justice to a Freddie
Mercury song, and his was undeniably the star turn of the concert. Just over 18
months later, I got the chance to hear him live on Wednesday December 1st
1993, at an AIDS benefit in the presence of HRH Princess Diana at Wembley
Arena. David Bowie presented and the other artists were Mick Hucknall and k. d.
lang (more of whom below). George live
was even more impressive than George on tv or on record; I was totally bowled
over. Subsequently I rushed out and bought the album Listen Without Prejudice, Vol 1 (too bad that, because of his
battle with Virgin, we never got Vol 2), and it fast became one of my most
played albums. Older I liked even
better, I think, though it would be a tough call. In 1999, he released an album
of covers, Songs From The Last Century, that was, and remains, the least
commercially successful of all his albums; but I love it, if only because it is
only in the songs of other composers that an artist reveals his true
credentials as a singer. Ranging from jazz standards like My Baby Just Cares For Me, to the Police’s Roxanne, George shows a masterful appreciation of different styles.
My personal favourite is his version of The
First Time I Ever Saw Your Face, sung with a quiet rapture, so full of
wonder and awe. His personal life has not been without troubles, and his health
has recently been cause for concern. It is good to hear that he is well on the
way to recovery, and I hope that it won’t be too long before he can resume his
performing activities.
The other singer to knock me out at
that AIDS benefit in 1993 was k. d. lang, whom I’d hardly even heard of before
that time. The majority of the material she sang was off her album Ingenue, which I didn’t know, though I bought it straight
after the concert. At the end of her set, she brought the house down with her
rendering of the Roy Orbison classic Crying,
which of course she had already recorded with Orbison himself. Lang is another
singer who has proved herself equally in her own material and the music of
other composers. She sings a heartrending version of the Cole Porter classic So In Love, on the AIDS charity album Red Hot And Blue, and her version of
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is
arguably the greatest of all the many covers of that song. I don’t think
Alexandra Burke had the least idea what it was about. There is a youtube clip
of lang singing the song at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame induction of
Leonard Cohen in 2006. It is the most touching tribute that one can performer
can give to another, and Cohen, who is in the audience, is visibly moved. Her
career hasn’t quite reached the heights it ought to have done, possibly due to
her uncompromising attitude to her sexuality, which she has refused to play
down. Whatever the reasons, she is a major artist, with an extraordinary voice,
and a way with a lyric that draws you into its meaning. You really feel she is
telling you a story. Her latest album (k.
d. lang And The Siss Boom Bang) returns her to her country roots, and is a joy from beginning to
end.
So that’s 10, but I wonder if I might
be allowed an indulgence to include one more, a singer who is actually known to
me personally. I first heard David
McAlmont on David Arnold’s The James
Bond Project, singing an absolutely stunning version of Diamonds Are Forever. David had been
around for a while already of course, but you have to remember that pop music
was only really at the peripheries of my listening. I spent most of my time
listening to classical music and opera. David’s voice made itself known to me
again on the Craig Armstrong album As If,
singing the haunting Snow. I did a
little more investigation and found he had had quite a career. David and I
became twitter friends, occasionally commenting on each other’s posts, and I
was surprised and delighted when he invited me to the launch of his last album The Glare, a collaboration with Michael
Nyman, which was also the first time we actually met. I bought the CD then and
there, and transferred it to my ipod, so I could get to know it. I actually had
to stop playing it in the gym, because I’d find myself sitting listening to the
music instead of working out. It is a great achievement and thoroughly deserves
the accolades that have been heaped on it. Ever moving on, David has now formed
the duo Fingersnap with Guy Davies. They have released their first EP, Rise (my favourite track is predictably The Bishop of New Hampshire) and are
about to go out on tour. I urge you to hear them.
One more indulgence. My niece, Abi is a superb
singer/songwriter. Still at college, studying for her BMus, she has two London
gigs coming up Symptomatic
present abi at the The Workshop and Monto presnt Abi at The
Shoreditch. She is going to be a huge star. Go along and hear her now so
you can say “I was there when…”
Selections of some of their recordings here
