Sing Out

I’ve sung from the moment I drew breath.

This isn’t a showbiz boast:

I danced myself right out of the womb …

Love Marc Bolan. Love that he was an East End kid with an eye for the main chance who dropped being a whimsical folkie as soon as it became clear glam-rock would be his ticket to the Top of the Pops slot he so desperately craved. But that kind of schtick can very easily become the self-aggrandising I’m so talented, this was all meant to happen showbiz narrative bs.

When I say that I’ve sung from the moment I drew breath, I’m articulating a reality:

Every baby sings from the moment they’re born.

It’s a recognised fact.

Babies sing and chuckle and burble and vocalise all the time.

They keep singing if someone sings back.

Singing, like music, is part of the language continuum.

It is possible to develop both when you’re older, but absorb them both unconsciously when you’re young, and they’ll be with you for the rest of your life.

I say, you …

At that age you’re largely dependent on your parents to make the right moves, so if they get it, you will.

Mine did.

I was surrounded by music. The house was full of it, the car was full of it. My relatives houses were full of it. People playing it, people making it, people talking about it …

When I went to school … more music. Faith schools tend to get a bad rap from morons, but what with singing in assembly, singing in class, music lessons, school plays, Christmas shows … you could be guaranteed that you’d be belting something out at least a couple of times a day. You want to run a marathon, you’ve got to put some miles in. Want to be able to sing? Same thing.

It wasn’t like we had lessons. We just sang a lot. Occasionally Mr. Morris might come and stand next to you in assembly, listen to you singing and say ‘you’ve got a good voice. Get forward and sing up’; a school play would demand singing in front of a hall full of parents; or Mrs. Ratcliffe would take us through the A B C’s of music and then try us on something requiring melody, harmony and counterpoint happening all at the same time - and I’m fairly sure that for a trained music teacher and highly-trained musician the resultant sound must have fallen on her ears like a sackful of tin pans falling down stone steps onto a corrugated iron roof.

And then self-consciousness and peer-pressure kicks in and children who used to sing with gusto without thinking about it stop, because it isn’t cool …

Except I carried on - largely because I liked it, mostly because I didn’t think to stop.

Then you meet an Andy H, form a band even though you have no instruments, and one of you has to sing because well, someone needs to so hey, I’ll do it until we find a singer …

… and that turns into gigs, and the gigs start paying, and the question is can you sing harmony, and you go, sure, and find the note that fits with the one the other person is singing …

… and before you know it, you’ve been singing since you were born.

And again, I’m making no claims for myself or my voice. At various times I’ve wanted to sound more rock, more soul, more pop, more indie … you know, a witch’s brew of Paul Rodgers, Aretha Franklin, Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid (I loved Abba then, I love them now), The Beatles (all of them, al at once), Pete Gabriel (his low register is criminally underrated), Bono (say what you like about U2, the man has a voice built for vowel sounds (even if rock n’roll demands occasional consonants … )) …

You get the picture. I wanted to sound like whatever was moving and grooving me that week. Singing is like language. Monkey hear, monkey repeat … the last thing I wanted to sound like was me: tenor range, clear top end, decent head voice, decent chest voice, good pitch control, but no rock n’ roll rasp or edge.

People don’t want a decent range, solid head and chest voice and the ability to sing in tune.

They want rock n’ roll edge.

Although my children didn’t. As long as Dad could sing to them, and write lullabies for them and sing them together, and then write songs about going to the park / baths / museum / Grandma’s House / bed / bath / breakfast … and sing because he was happy and sing back because they were happy, we could then sing those together?

They didn’t care whether Daddy had a rock n’ roll edge or not.

The reason I’m saying all of this is because it turns out it’s true: you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

As I come out of Covid and hopefully come out of Long Covid it turns out that the voice I took for granted has been left behind.

I’m trying to record vocals for the songs for Songs For Separation, I literally don’t recognise the sound that comes out when I open my mouth. Four flat tyres on a muddy road would be an improvement. I’ve lost five full notes from my top end, there’s a nasty harsh middle in the mid range and my low end is wobbly and uncertain. There’s a point between the mids and the top where my voice just cracks and no sound whatsoever comes out. None. In fact the whole thing feels not just wobbly and uncertain but quite distinctly underpowered. I’m presuming that this is a combination of completely bollocksed lungs and my vocal cords going unused for 24 months, but it’s still not nice.

What is worse is that the accuracy of pitch that was once effortless has gone. I never needed to listen to what I was singing to know if I was in tune or not. Somewhere between my ears, my brain, my vocal cords and the sound coming out it all got worked out. I could tell if the note was true or not just by feeling where it was in my chest and throat.

As I start picking up the music I was working on before Covid turned into Long Covid, I’m recording it to try and make sense of what goes where and how to approach it.

Now, I know they say that everyone is shocked when they hear themselves recorded for the first time. It’s because the sound we hear when we speak is processed not just through sound but through vibrations through our jawbones and skull. Without those, the sound we hear is not the sound we’re used to hearing.

I get that.

But I’ve been hearing my recorded voice since I was a teenager, sitting in a bedroom with Andy H, putting down a demo of our latest song - two of us around one microphone into a cassette recorder. I know what I sound like - see above. Why do you think I always wanted rock n’ roll edge?

This, however …

This is different.

I don’t recognise my voice anymore.

There’s no pitch control - like the link between my ears, my brain and my throat has gone. I don’t know if it’s a known Covid thing, but I could swear I’m in tune, and then as soon as I hear it back I can hear that I’m a quarter-tone sharp or flat. Or worse, I start on the true and then it goes all over the place like someone’s messing with the speed control on an old reel-to-reel.

I can hear it in playback, but not in the moment.

Which is terrifying.

A lot of the music that I want to record needs me to be able to play guitar in standard tuning again and sing in a voice which is, for better or worse, mine.

And right now, both represent a significant challenge.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

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Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary. Showing, as they do, my explorations of ideas and approaches and processes as I do things, they are best viewed as glimpses of my workings.

They show my mistakes, the false trails I’ve followed, and the blind alleys I’ve gone down - all of which are intrinsic parts of finding a path through to doing something.

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