The Singer Came Last

When listening to records from the early part of the twentieth century one thing that is notable is the absence of singing. There are a lot more instrumental records, and in those records where there is singing it often does not arrive until we have gone through at least one instrumental verse and chorus.

            This can now strike us as odd, as we have got used to the fact that songs come with vocals up front. It is mediation that has been ringing the changes. Jazz was one of the first genres of music to become known through recordings. It was primarily focused on the timbre and improvisation skills of the musicians. Sound recording could capture these qualities; sheet music could not. It was also recording techniques that returned us – gradually – to singers. Electric recording arrived in the mid-1920s and for the first time singers used microphones in recording studios. New, intimate styles of singing were developed, and with them a more intense relationship developed between listeners and singers. Singers were also pushed to the forefront because of the broadcast and filming of music: these media required a different centre of attention to live performance.

            At the same time, the neglect of vocals should not strike us as odd. Anyone who has played in a band will be familiar with the fact that singers can be an afterthought. It is often musicians who form bands: a gang of mates who play guitar, bass and drums. The singer is often the last to join and they can be something of an outsider. In addition, they are not usually listened to. They will be drowned out in rehearsals and also at some live gigs. It is also the case that at smaller gigs there may be no spotlight; thus the audience’s attention is spread between various group members. It is only when bands turn their focus towards recording that things begin to change, and it is only when they are signed to a record label that the singer starts to be elevated to pole position. This can be a hard dynamic to handle for all parties concerned.

The Likely Lads Test

‘No Hiding Place’, broadcast in 1973 as part of the first season of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, is one of the most memorable episodes of a British sitcom. If you have seen it, and have an interest in sport, you are unlikely to have forgotten it. The premise is simple. The English football team is playing Bulgaria in a game that kicks off at midday. The television highlights of the match won’t be shown until 10.00 in the evening. The ‘likely lads’, our Geordie heroes Terry and Bob, try to avoid hearing the result so they can enjoy the full drama of the game when it is shown on TV.

            This is not easy. A hairdresser tells them they’ll ‘never make it . . . there’s the radio, evening papers, television news’. On top of this, their friend Flint gets wind of their media blackout and enters into a bet with them that they won’t escape the score. Terry and Bob make a good go of it. They run for home, so that they can flee Flint and his radio that is broadcasting the game. Home isn’t safe either. The phone rings, but rather than pick it up, out of fear it will be someone wanting to talk about the game, they seek sanctuary in a church. Flint tracks them down there and is about to announce the result when a vicar appears. This intervention provides Terry and Bob with an opportunity to escape. On the run for the rest of the day, they avoid news of the game by giving blood and attending a talk on flower arranging at the local Women’s Institute. Eventually, they settle on their sofa as the TV broadcast is about to begin. But they’ve left the front door unlocked. Flint enters. They let him win the bet, with the proviso that he leave without telling them the score. They then turn on the TV. It is showing ice skating rather than the football. Terry and Bob look dumbfounded. And then a commentator explains that the England v Bulgaria game has been postponed because of a waterlogged pitch.  

            This is the likely lads’ ‘longest day’, one they describe as being ‘endless’. They live in a world where the news is everywhere – on radio, on television, in the papers, on the phone. Avoiding it is like avoiding life itself. ‘No Hiding Place’ is still worth watching, and not only because it’s such an elegantly constructed sitcom. To see it again is to be reminded that media saturation is not a new thing.

But is ‘No Hiding Place’ timeless? The programme has been remade. This century’s most famous Geordie duo, Ant and Dec, assumed the roles of Terry and Bob in a version broadcast in 2002. What’s interesting about this remake is how similar it is to the original. Once again our heroes are told they will ‘never make it . . . there’s the radio, evening papers, television news’.

In some ways there’s been a greater leap between 2002 and 2015 than there was between 1973 and 2002. The world wide web was up and running in 2002, but less than half of UK homes were connected to it, while only 6% had broadband. Wi-Fi barely existed; there were no smart phones. There was no MySpace, let alone Facebook. Twitter was still four years away, and it would be eight years before we had Instagram.

You see where I’m going with this? If ‘No Hiding Place’ were to be remade today, it wouldn’t just be newspapers, TV and radio that Terry and Bob would have to avoid; there would be all manner of social media to escape and all sorts of interconnectivity to unplug. Moreover, if technological futurists are right, 2015 is just about the last time that ‘No Hiding Place’ could be reworked. In a few years time we’ll all have Google glasses wrapped around our faces and we’ll be hardwired to the internet. If we’ve told our machines that we’re interested in football, then avoiding the scores will be impossible.

A side-effect of current levels of mediation is that the story is becoming as important as the game. In Britain, football highlights are still shown in the evenings of a big match day. However, as well as reviewing the game itself, these programmes now feature highlights of the players’ tweets that followed it. Moreover, such is the voracious appetite of social media for content, we’re now weighed down with stories that have nothing to do with the game itself. Gossip rules.

This situation is amplified when it comes to popular music. In sports the results do still matter. In music, it is now difficult to know what the real output of an artist is. Is the gossip there to back up a musical career, or is the musical career there to back up the gossip?

In 1973 it would have been possible to make a version of ‘No Hiding Place’ that focused on pop music rather than football. Flint could have placed a bet with Terry and Bob that they would never make it through a week without knowing what was number one in the charts. This would have been difficult, as the best-selling record was major news at this time. Radio One’s chart show was heard by millions; Top of the Pops, the television equivalent, was watched by even more. The Top 30 was published in the music press, which back then had a vast reach. It was also published in the tabloid newspapers, which in the 1970s were read by the majority of the population.

You couldn’t make this pop version of ‘No Hiding Place’ today. I regularly ask my university students what’s number one in the charts. Despite the repetition of my tests, it is rare that any of them knows the answer. And this is young people who are studying popular music. In the 1970s, most mums and dads would know what was number one. It’s safe to say that hardly any would today.

And yet they may well know what Lady Gaga has been up to, or Rihanna, or Kanye West. Today’s tabloids feature several pages of pop gossip. They don’t feature the charts. And young people aren’t the only ones who use social media. The middle aged and elderly are online. They might not be using the internet to connect to Radio One, but their Twitter feeds may well be telling them about Justin Bieber’s misdemeanours. Have they heard his music? Probably not.

It’s enough to make you want to break out into song. The Likely Lads theme tune will do: Oh, what happened to you, whatever happened to me? What became of the people, we used to be?

The First Ear, the Second Ear and the Final Good Ear

When record producers listen to music, how do they listen to it? In Performing Rites, Simon Frith suggests that they have an ‘imputed audience’ in mind; they are obsessively worrying ‘what does the listener want?’ Frith writes about the people who do this successfully and repeatedly, broadening out his scope to include other record company personnel, such as the staff from A&R and marketing:

There is a touching faith in the industry in anyone who can claim to read the audience, to be in tune with public taste (the usual measure of which is a previous success); such people carry a special authority in in-house arguments; they have a “good ear,” and it takes many failures to offset the original success.

In America, such people used to be known as ‘record men’ (women, apparently, did not have great ears). Back in the 1970s, to have this sense and to use it well was a criterion for helming a record label. Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., Clive Davis at Columbia, Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic and David Geffen at Asylum were all record men. Ertegun explained their particular talent:

You have to develop a second ear. The first ear is your private taste, which is what moves you personally. The second ear is one that, when you listen to a piece of music and you personally think it’s terrible but it’s a hit commercially – the second ear has to say, ‘This is great!’

Is this the heart of the popular music process? Record company bosses and producers aren’t interested in art; they are instead trying to predict the debased tastes of the public. Frith suggests that this is one of the reasons why the ‘industry’ is frowned upon. Obsessed with hits, these people are seen to ‘“interfere” in the proper communication of musician and audience’. Music is meddled with as it is mediated. It loses its initial sense of contact and meaning.

            Frith doesn't buy this line of reasoning. He suggests, instead, that it is the ‘record men’ of the industry who make communication between performers and audiences possible. I would go further than this. I believe that popular music is mediated music. Music doesn’t exist in a pure state at one end of a process, waiting to go through the wringer of the record business before it reaches the audience. It is created with production processes in mind. Virtually all artists will have first experienced popular music via its mediation. They encounter it through recordings and through broadcasts of those recordings. And they will create their own music with recordings and broadcasts in mind.

            But what about audiences? They’re not blind to mediation either. In fact, it can excite them just as much as performance can. Audiences imagine themselves in a number of situations. They picture themselves in direct communication with artists. They also picture themselves as artists: the air guitar might well be the most widely-played instrument. But they also place themselves at the heart of the mediation process. They imagine what it feels like to be in a studio as a record is mixed. They also listen to music with the ears of a ‘record man’. Industry bosses aren’t the only people with second ears, and they aren’t the only ones to get excited by terrible records either. There’s a little part of each of us that thinks we can predict a hit. And this is one of the reasons why we admire one when we hear one. Not all of our popular music pleasures are centred on music that moves our hearts and our minds. We also enjoy being a part of the game.

Vinyl reviewed by David Atkinson in Folk Music Journal

David Atkinson, editor of Folk Music Journal, has written a warm review of Vinyl. He says, ‘I wanted to notice this book because I think anyone interested in the history of recorded sound will really enjoy it. It takes an imaginative approach to its subject and it is both highly informative and readable’. What’s interesting about the review is its slight trepidation. Atkinson begins by saying, ‘It is possible that some readers might baulk at my including a brief review of Richard Osborne’s Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, but I would maintain that, like it or not, songs, including folk songs, have long enjoyed an existence as material objects, and that for at least a century that material existence was embodied in analogue records’. Here he’s tapping into the anxiety that the folk music world continues to feel about the recorded form. On the one hand, this anxiety could be considered strange. As Atkinson points out, recordings have been the primary way of preserving (as well as promoting and creating) folk music for more than 100 years. Many folk fans will have first come to the music via records, and recordings have been central to the development of some strands of folk (including the folk revival of the late 1950s/early 1960s, as I detail in my book). On the other hand, this anxiety should not be gainsaid. It is too simplistic to dismiss folksong as merely being fakesong and its audience as middle class rustics trying to imagine the music of a romanticised working class. There is a power in some of the best folk music that reaches backwards to a world before recorded sound and sideways to a milieu that wants some relief from mediation. And folk music songs don’t have to be ancient to achieve this transcendent state. Each country has a traditional culture that is there for all to share and to build upon. We might live in a world in which technological mediation is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that this technology engulfs everything completely. That said, the folkies are right to be afraid.