Between the lines

Not all backing vocals are quite what they seem. Joni Mitchell, for instance, never trusted anyone else to sing on her albums so she recorded all the vocals herself, multi-tracking each line to create the depth of sound she wanted. Barraclough talked to a singer who does nothing else, singing all the parts, sometimes triple-tracking each line. Kim Chandler gave us an example of how she does it, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in five different voices — normal, low larynx, raised larynx, breathier and more rocky. It was extraordinary how different she sounded each time, from Marilyn Monroe to Suzi Quatro via Diana Ross. Put the five tracks together and you have the Chimes, or the Supremes, or even the Vandellas but with just one voice behind them.

We also heard from Harvey Brough (of ‘Boogie Nights’ and the Wallbangers) who explained how you can trace the ‘doo-be-doo’ and ‘bop bop soo-be-do-wa’ back to medieval pop songs like ‘Summer is a cumin’ in’, sung as a canon, with different groups of singers copying what’s gone before. The Tudors gave us the ‘fa la la la lahs’ and the kids of New York and Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s added the punctuated rhythms and close harmony sounds of doo-wop. He then gave us Gladys Knight’s ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ with a line-by-line sotto voce dissection of how the Pips in that song encapsulate the art of the backing singer. Sometimes they repeat Gladys’s line like a straight canon, sometimes they’re quiet, no refrain. But then after Gladys has explained, ‘He kept dreaming, That some day he’d be a star’, you’ll just catch if you listen hard, ‘A superstar, but he didn’t get far’, sung with such restraint but so much feeling. Brilliant!