Has a singer changed yourlife?
Losing most of his hearing made Nick Coleman listen to his favourite vocalists in a whole new way. This ‘heartfelt song of gratitude’ is the result...
Voices: How A Great Singer Can Change Your Life Nick Coleman Jonathan Cape €22.98 ★★★★★
In his previous book, The Train In The Night, shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize, journalist Nick Coleman recounted the trauma of being stricken – overnight, in his mid-40s – with almost total deafness. The book charted Coleman’s partial recovery through his determination to regain pleasure from the one enduring ‘psychological mainstay’ in his life: music.
Having sadly encountered continued severe hearing issues since the publication of The Train In The Night – he now has one half-functioning, but fragile, ‘good’ ear – Coleman felt compelled to binge on ‘essential’ singers while he still had the chance. The result is Voices, a deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade, dedicated to the precious ‘loom of interaction’ between singer and listener. Its business is not the showy stuff you might hear on The X Factor, dismissed here as ‘an exhibition of decontextualised skill’. Technique be damned: this is all about scaling the octaves of the heart.
It’s a thematic journey mapped to the contours of his own life. Coleman examines the art of crooning, the communication of anguish and ‘extreme feeling’, vulnerability, ‘soul’ and concealment via deeply felt ruminations on the art of Frank Sinatra – the ‘great bronze bell of 20th-century popular music’ – Rod Stewart, Kate Bush, Van Morrison, Roy Orbison, Amy Winehouse, David Bowie and dozens of other legendary singers.
There are numerous lines that many other writers might wish to ‘cover’, whether it’s Coleman’s description of Paul Simon’s ‘boyish acorn-cup of a voice’, reeking of self-satisfied uptown sophistication, or English folk queen Sandy Denny in full flood, a ‘silken pennant swirling in a furious English breeze’. He traces Joni Mitchell’s evolution from her most gratingly stylised means of expression – ‘unable to cadence a phrase without approaching the notes like a hostess at a cocktail party, swooping up to them in an airburst of expensive perfume’ – to a more settled place where ‘there was no need for show’. Throughout, there are echoes of another music-loving Nick, not least when Coleman shares his Hornby-ish devotion to Arsenal FC. Any bum notes? Well, Coleman has very traditional tastes. There is almost no coverage of modern pop, country music, rap, R&B or heavy metal, all of which could reasonably be regarded as glaring absences. There are questionable generalisations concerning the DNA of British versus American voices, and times when the book reads like a thinly veiled excuse to simply write about the author’s favourite songs rather than analyse the art of the singer. However, these are mere wobbles in pitch. A touching epilogue reveals the continued parlous state of Coleman’s hearing, a struggle that, in a bittersweet irony, has turned him into a more attentive, more appreciative and more attuned listener than most. Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled vocalists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. It’s well worth hearing.