Punk in a funk

Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find the comments posted beneath it full of praise for the liquid melancholy in her lovely voice. The simple sound of air passing from her lungs, across her larynx and out of her lips in the 1990s is ‘sexy’, ‘soulful’, ‘classy’ and, most often, ‘perfect’. And don’t get her wrong; she’s chuffed that people like the noise she makes. But she frets about how much this ‘disembodied voice’ has to do with the rest of Tracey Thorn: the introvert with the ‘suburban’ speaking voice.

The anxieties she has built up around the ideally effortless act of singing have prevented her from performing live since the last (and probably final) EBTG album was released in 2000. So this thoughtful book investigating every aspect of the art — mostly focused on pop, but touching all genres — tends to focus on difficulties faced by anybody seeking to use and transcend the human body as an instrument.

Taking a practical iconoclast’s pleasure in exposing the biological and technological realities lurking beneath the romantic image of the professional singer, Thorn describes the daily battle fought against enemies like phlegm and dodgy stage trousers. Quoting from the tenor Ian Bostridge’s A Singer’s Notebook (2011), she reminds us that the primary function of our vocal mechanism is not the one with which we most strongly associate it, but as one of several lines of defence against choking. From Bostridge she learns that hitting the high notes ‘is actually about persuading the body that one is not about to swallow as one reaches for the skies’.

Yet most of us start our lives cradled by crooning adults and quickly enter a world of nurseries and primary schools where singing — for fun, to learn and form social bonds — is the norm.