Tracey Thorn

people, or strain to avoid taking on too strongly the imprint of another, for fear of drifting into mere imitation and unoriginality. Bob Dylan talks in his book, Chronicles, about how intimidated he could be in the early days by hearing others who seemed more authentic than him, and how inadequate that could make him feel. He’d been learning and playing all of Woody Guthrie’s songs, and feeling pretty good about himself as a singer of these songs, when he suddenly heard the recordings of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who’d been singing the same songs for years. Dylan describes being devastated by this – ‘I felt like I’d been cast into sudden hell’. Far from being inspired by the sound of someone doing what he was trying to do, he felt paralysed, and realised that in fact he would have to run a million miles from the very person it seemed he could learn the most from. All he could do was try to ignore Elliott – ‘It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy I just heard. I’d have to block it out of my mind… tell myself I hadn’t heard him and he didn’t exist.’ In other words, influence can sometimes be terrifying – not inspiring at all, but crippling.

Who is your favourite singer? It’s a question I’m often asked, not surprisingly, and my answer is usually the same: Dusty Springfield.

[...] I do know the first time I heard her. Elvis Costello was presenting a radio show, playing a selection of his favourite records, and as was usually the case with anything like that on the radio, I was taping it onto cassette. This was 1980, or maybe 1981. He had already introduced us to another of her signature tunes, ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself’, when he performed it on the Live Stiffs Live album in 1978, and that had been a revelation, opening my eyes to the possibility of liking Bacharach and David as well as punk; a difficult but heady idea, and one I would have to come back to later. Now on this radio show he played ‘I Don’t Want to Hear it Any More’ from Dusty in Memphis, and for the first time I truly heard that voice – that smoky, husky, breathy, vulnerable, bruised, resigned, deliberate, sensual voice.

KRISTIN: I have one rule in the studio: ‘no singing’, meaning ‘no faking’. Which probably pertains to guitar parts as well: no chops, no imitating, no telling the song what to do. A real vocal is a textural expression. Maybe the kind you croon to your baby, maybe the kind you yell when you drop something on your foot, but it must be determined by the song or it will never resonate with the listener. And if it’s embarrassing? So much the better!

I was in the loo at a nightclub once, years ago, when I was recognised as I washed my hands. It can’t have been that long after ‘Missing’ was a hit as the request made of me was not for an autograph, or even a photo, but for me to sing a few lines of the song to prove that I was really that Tracey Thorn.

And because I’d presumably had a few drinks – I must have done or I would have run a mile in the opposite direction – I agreed, and standing there at the sink I took a deep breath and sang, ‘I step off the train, I’m walking down your street again, and past your door, but you don’t live there any more.’

The girls stared and squealed at me, and grabbed each other, and the thing they said, which I took as the ultimate compliment, was: ‘YOU SOUND JUST LIKE YOU!’

I knew what they meant, of course I did. That my voice really was my voice, the authentic sound that came out of my mouth, not some product of studio trickery and fakery. There’s a naivety to this response, really, the idea that someone’s voice can be manufactured for them in the studio – which is simply not as true as people think – and an old-fashioned regard for the virtues of vocal authenticity. But there’s an important point to be made here, a timeless truth, which is that however much vocals can be manipulated, or fixed, or homogenised, finding your own voice – your unique, personal sound – is still the key ingredient in becoming a singer.