"Naked at the Albert Hall" by Tracey Thorn (2015)

 

Oh, this was excellent!

I knew Tracey Thorn as a oddly haunting voice from the pop band "Everything But The Girl" and even loved their 1994. album "Amplified Heart" a lot, but this is type of music that I listen for a while before returning to Bessie Smith and my old favourites. No matter what I listen, you can bet that sooner or later it all goes back to Bessie or Edith Piaf. This is where my heart truly is. Because I am not really following pop music anymore, I was not aware that Thorn had quit live performing and somehow channelled her singing voice into a writing one: she had published three books and writes occasional columns about music - this is how I came to this, by reading her enthusiastic review of Kate Bush concert. The article was so interesting, inspired and idiosyncratic that it was clear this is someone with a special kind of writing voice. 

Than a friend suggested I should check more of her writing and since I just finished meandering courtroom thriller by John Grisham (it took me months), I decided to have a peek at Thorn and gulped it in two days. Now, this came as a surprise because I have problems with focusing on reading books for some time now (internet is basically distracting me) but this one read itself. I even went back to some chapters because they were written so well. I truly never knew Thorn is such interesting person and such well-read, engaging writer - in fact, I hardly knew any other singers who had shown such amazing talent for writing prose. Now, majority of singers use their craft intuitively and could probably not explain what is it that makes this special connection between the heart, the mind and the throat. In fact, I still remember someone's description of audition of young and unknown Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli as "surprisingly intelligent for his profession". Singers are simply placed on pedestals as they are more visible than for example instrumentalists in the background, but here we are talking about being celebrity, not being a good writer. The only singer who actually wrote genuinely brilliant autobiography is to my knowledge, Marianne Faithfull ("Memories, Dreams & Reflections", 2007.) And naturally songwriters like Cohen and Dylan would have talent to pull such project off without embarrassment. 

The best thing about this book is that is not a celebrity autobiography. That would just have been too easy, besides Thorn already wrote about herself in "Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star"  which was highly praised and showed what a stunning way with words she has. (I still need to read that one) This particular book is a collection of essays about the singing. Not in a sense of singing lessons or technical details how to open your mouth and straighten your back, but discussions about how singing actually happens, what is the difference between singing for oneself and performing in public, what it means "authentic voice" or "mannered voice", how in various genres voice means something completely different (in folk music voice is second to the lyrics and story itself), its full of research, quotes from books and interviews with other musicians. I was honestly just flabbergasted how interesting, inspiring and fluid this all was - there was even a chapter about the singers who stopped singing and what power has a silence if coming from mythological sirens - it is, in my opinion, the best non-autobiographical book by any singer that I have read so far in my life. Loved it!