The Singer
By Jessica Law
Copyright 2012 Jessica Law
The singer was young, his heart was full of fire,
He sung as he’d never sung and only could inspire.
– Traditional
The Singer
I’m writing you my story now because there’s no other way for me to tell it. You can make what you like of it, I’m not trying to teach you anything, really—it’s up to you to make your own decisions. I just thought I owed you an explanation, that’s all—for you to finally understand what’s been going on in my head all this time (as much as I can understand it myself). And who knows, maybe you’ll be entertained by it along the way. You can think of it as a cautionary tale, if you want; or you can simply imagine yourself as an outside observer of some interesting scientific process that you can use somehow to further the advancement of knowledge—after all, all experience counts for something.
But you weren’t just an outside observer, were you? You were right in the middle of it, the cause and the cure for it, and I hope more than anything that I haven’t done anything to harm you. Because I love you, more than anything else in the world, and I always will—and I hope nobody else will disappoint you like I did. I always loved you, all along, despite what I did—I hope you realise that. So these words are for you, every one of them, for you to do with as you will.
Grace
I wonder whether it’s possible to fall in love with a voice. I think it must be, that’s the only way I can explain it.
The first time I heard it, we were all in the Robin club one night as usual, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to what was going on. We were sitting in one of the dark corners, and the fibre optic light was casting a dim glow across the middle of the room, leaving the edges in shadow. Nobody had bothered to light the gas lamps that lined the walls, and consequently I was having great difficulty demonstrating to my long-suffering friend how to fold an empty crisp packet into a perfect origami swan shape (an invaluable life skill). So, it was with some considerable relief on her part that I became distracted by the band that had just started playing.
The band itself wasn’t that special, really—just another of those modern groups trying to seem all traumatised and misunderstood. They cringed from the audience, hiding behind their hair, and stumbled haltingly over a few nonsensical monosyllables to introduce each song. It was only the lead singer that stood out. In fact, his voice was almost unbearably good, with a haunting and ethereal quality to it, and an incredible smoothness and richness, like melted chocolate. He had an extraordinary range, seemingly achieved without effort, and a vibrato that sent shivers down the spine. But coupled with this was an incredible integrity, as if the voice he was using was nothing but his own—free from affectation and completely unostentatious, it was a voice with a very true beauty that was indisputable, and would transcend fashion and context to sound potent in any era.
In contrast to this, his appearance was rather unprepossessing. He was quite small and slight, making the voice that emanated from him all the more improbable, and dressed relatively conventionally compared to the other band members (who looked like spring-heeled Jack on a bad hair day). In the dim light, I couldn’t quite make out his features. All I could really take in was the voice echoing out from the tiny stage and filling the room, without amplification (except, of course, the back wall that was, as they all were, specifically designed to magnify acoustics). I kept wondering why everyone around me was acting so normally, carrying on as if it was just another night. Why was nobody making a fuss? How could they stay so calm? The person with the most beautiful voice in the world was in this very room!
Before I had realised it, they were finishing their set and sidling offstage to slightly baffled applause. I found that I was standing right at the very front, surrounded by people. Disorientated, I made my way back to the table in the corner. Above me, the fibre optic flickered—someone must have walked past the gaslight at the other end.
The Singer
I’ve never wanted to be anything else—ever since I was a child, it was all I wanted to do. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, that’s what I’d always say: a Singer. Their reaction was invariably the same—shock and dismay, tempered with incredulity, but also a little awe. “A Singer? Are you sure? But why? Do you realise what you’d have to go through? It’s a pretty huge sacrifice to make—very few musicians decide to go through with it in the end.” But I was adamant. I’d never really had anything important to say anyway—singing was the only thing I was good at, so for me it didn’t seem such a huge sacrifice. In fact, singing was the greatest joy I knew, and to be able to do that, and only that, for the rest of my life seemed to me a wonderful possibility. To use my voice to awe and inspire people, and for it to be heard by thousands, maybe millions across the world—well, for that, I’d do anything.
Even so, very few believed me. Although mechanical modification was, at the time, no longer new and controversial, it still carried with it the doubt and strange sense of cheating nature that it had when it was first used in the 1970s on early Singers like Elvis Presley and Freddie Mercury. You see, I’d done my research, I’d listened to the records, and I’d heard how music had changed throughout the last century—combining with African influences to become louder and more insistent, to be played to huge halls of people, to rebel against adults and the establishment and everything that was staid and orderly in life. At first, pianists had placed tintacks on the hammers of their pianos and trumpeters had bought bigger and brasher instruments to compete with the crowds. By the 1960s bands with guitars were on their way out, and their delicate sound was replaced by that of raucous melatrons and giant organs. But there has always been one unsolvable conundrum that has been the bane of many a musician’s life: how to amplify the human voice.
With all the other instruments, today, the process is relatively simple. One option is simply to make them bigger—giant drums can fill an entire stadium with their sound. Keyboards and keytars, evolved from the necessarily strident organs, can be augmented pneumatically, and now almost any instrument can be fitted with an internal hydraulic resonator that, when coupled with a cone speaker, can amplify the vibrations from the sound it makes. But none of these can be done to a human voice. Yes, there are ways to magnify it to a certain degree—by acoustics or megaphones or, like many of the modern bands, by simply shouting tunelessly. But to fill a stadium or concert hall or festival, none of this is sufficient.
Nonetheless, once a band has sold enough records, and become successful and famous and popular enough, this is what the audience wants. Once you reach this point, you can go one of two ways: you can either carry on as you are, playing to small crowds and being reasonably successful until you go out of fashion and descend into obscurity; or you can become a Singer.
Grace
After that, wherever the he went, I went. Not that he ever saw me, that is, but I managed to find his address on the library register and with the help of my zoom lens secured some pretty good likenesses of him to carry round with me when I couldn’t be near him. Luckily, being as the band were still quite small (although constantly increasing in popularity), they didn’t venture far outside Cinderford. But then, once something is successful in Cinderford it rarely fails to spread elsewhere. That’s what’s so great about living in such a big city—there’s never any shortage of new and exciting things going on. Of course, the crowds can be a bit of a nuisance sometimes.
By the time I finally met him in person, the band were really beginning to take off. They’d got a new manager, the renowned Erasmus Endoplasmic-Reticulum, and signed a record contract with Portobello Junkshop, which was rumoured to be snapping up all the good bands at the time. They were even beginning
to build up a bit of a following. It was actually quite funny to observe the other fans as my long-suffering friend and I stood in the crowd (she didn’t really mind at all—she had her eye on the golden-haired keyboard player, along with half the other people in there). The male fans, we noticed, were all fragile and insecure, desperately delighted to find a band they thought they could finally relate to, who might actually be able to understand and identify with their inner confusion and turmoil. The girls were predatory, with darkened eyes and red lips, scanning the room and waiting to pick off the ones with the least resistance, the unsuspecting broken boys with so much potential for repair. They knew what they were doing alright.
A wave of excitement went through the crowd as the band finally came on stage. They had reached that point in popularity where coming on a bit late actually increased the audience’s anticipation. The support and support-support bands, on the other hand, still had to maintain a precise punctuality, as they were so obscure that nobody knew what they were missing, so just got impatient and annoyed.
They played the first few chords of their opening song and the crowd went