Naked at the Albert Hall by Tracey Thorn - book review: Singers and song – an insider reveals all

Truly we live in an age of song. No longer mediated by record companies and broadcasters, everyone’s voice can be heard, from casual choir dabblers to YouTube hopefuls patiently waiting to be discovered. Tracey Thorn however is no longer sure she can even describe herself as a singer, having left the boards untrodden since 2000.

But it’s obvious from this occasionally revelatory, always entertaining wander through the theory and application of the human voice to melody that she’s done a lot of thinking about the subject. The follow-up to her best-selling memoir Bedsit Disco Queen offers a genuine insider’s perspective into the mechanics of this commonplace yet universally understood talent.

It’s not a technical guide, though there are interesting points made throughout, on everything from microphone method to Karen Carpenter’s God-given ability to sing long lines in a single breath (while drumming!), contributing to her deceptively languid style. Aware of her own weaknesses – a lack of power and a tendency to overstrain her voice into illness – Thorn empathises with the vulnerabilities of her peers, touched that her young Doppelgänger, Romy Madley Croft of the band xx (even Thorn’s own kids marvel at the resemblance) shares her shyness and stage fright.

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Although singing may be a simple pleasure, adored by nursery classes (and endured by parents), it in no way guarantees happiness for the over-fives. Thorn’s heroines (and they are mainly women – maybe men such as Scott Walker, a former crooner but a determined avant gardener for at least half his career, find it easier to escape their initial public image) are often damaged, up the studio headphones to drown out the sound of her own voice, and the ill-fated Sandy Denny blotted out her insecurities with hard living at odds with her famously controlled tone. A myth-busting conversation with Linda Thompson reminds us that there is more to these women than just a voice.

There’s no doubt whose side Thorn is on. Schoenberg’s conception of Sprechgesang – pitched speech – is dismissed rather wonderfully with the suggestion, “it seems possible that he just didn’t understand singing and singers ...”. It’s not only autocratic composers she mistrusts. Her interest in the relationship between fans and performers is informed by experience, and her analysis of fictional adulation, examples ranging from George Eliot and Willa Cather to Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler, is genuinely enlightening.

George Du Maurier’s histrionic, ur-starmaker novel, Trilby, is the right kind of wrong, it seems, like some of the most memorable voices. As for X Factor, of course she watches it, perpetually fascinated as anyone when the slightest sign of individualism is either mistrusted by the voting public or subjected to a makeover guaranteed to remove any personality. No wonder she compares each series to a “speeded-up version of a career in music”. Thirty years of consideration went into this quietly impressive volume, and it shows.

Virago £16.99