Books

Nick Coleman’s Voices, Scott Walker

“Discounting sex, i love listening to singing above all other activities that are common to all cultures. other people’s singing is to my mind the highest and deepest human attainment.” so begins Voices, nick coleman’s personal and wholly subjective serenade to the knotty business not just of singing – but of hearing, and feeling, too.

Voices is a companion of sorts, the supporting harmony, to his previous book, The Train In The Night, in which he recounted the trauma of becoming suddenly afflicted with almost complete deafness in his mid-forties. His slow recovery (he now has one partially functioning good ear) and compulsion to listen to music again were mapped with a sensitivity which suggested the affliction had left him more attentive, appreciative and attuned than most.

Voices continues the story (we are given an update on the state of his health in the Epilogue). it’s the journey of a lifetime, from childhood to parenthood, broken up into loosely thematic stages. He examines the art of crooning; the communication of anguish and “extreme feeling”; vulnerability, concealment and so on, zeroing in each time on the traits and landmark performances of one or two featured singers, and attempting to fathom why they affect him so.

there are extended essays on, among others, Joni Mitchell, gregory isaacs, Marvin gaye and Roy orbison. His description of the latter is one of several note-perfect evocations: the “sad trumpet” of his tone, his “courtly despondency”, the songs “you could enter, as you might enter a ghost ride at a fairground” – all ring true. sandy Denny has a voice like a “silken pennant swirling in a furious English breeze”. Van Morrison’s pipes are “a chambered vessel”, every vocal expulsion a kind of unwitting, often awkward act of release and rapture. searching for a definition of that most elusive of vocal qualities – ‘soul’ – he finds it, happily, in Rod stewart’s “colloquial veracity” and “curiosity about what it meant to be himself”. He awards stewart’s run of singles between 1971-74 due reverence for their “easy-going, slapdash genius”. He’s astute, too. Writing of John Lennon’s habitual acidity, he notes that “nowhere Man” nevertheless contains “some of the kindest singing i know, and it is reasonable, i think, to suggest that the object of that kindness is Lennon himself”, the Beatle soothing his soul during a period of acute depression and self-loathing.

As both a teen and, 40 years later, as the father to a teenage daughter, coleman is taught a lesson in the “hard-edged reality of girls” by the shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack”: “the blankness, the shrugging, the disdain, the flat-out assertive reserve…” He writes well, too, about the distinct ‘voice’ and ‘language’ of jazz instrumentalists, particularly John coltrane and Miles Davis.

it seems unfair to damn coleman for the sin of omission in such a personal book. this is his song, and he sings it admirably, but naturally each reader will have their own list of glaringly absent voices. More significant is his unwillingness to stray from the canonical path: there is next to nothing on modern pop, little country to speak of, and a vacuum on the singular language of rap. the root notes are orthodox, mostly heritage rock and soul. Aside from these quibbles, and the inclusion of a few rash generalisations,

Voices is otherwise superior, thoughtful, heartfelt writing on a series of relationships and profoundly significant interactions that most of us experience daily, but rarely pause to consider.

the first ever compendium of scott Walker’s lyrics, Sundog begins with an illuminating essay by the irish author Eimear McBride. A committed Joycean, McBride identifies Walker’s oeuvre as a “work of vision, scale, deep thought, deep emotion and much – if often distressed – humanity,” at the same time acknowledging that “it does not impart comfort or ease… [It] does not fit.”

Sundog is, thus, an extended exercise in quickening and often inscrutable disquiet. the ‘selected’ part of the sub-heading is worth noting. there are only five lyrics from the ’60s; the overwhelming focus is on Walker’s forbidding later work, from 1995’s Tilt to 2014’s Soused, plus half a dozen new pieces. it’s instructive to track the evolution of Walker’s obsessions from “Duchess”, through “Boy child” and “the Electrician”, to the “dildo-smacked cheek” of one new work, “Attaché”, and the bleak humour in the words becomes more apparent on the page. But the effectiveness of these shadowed, encrypted thoughts when divorced from the author’s startled baritone and their musical settings is open to question. Back, again, to the significance of voices.