Between the lines | 6 June 2009

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  Kate Chisholm

  Between the lines | 6 June 2009

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

If you’re over 40 you’ll probably have imbibed Aretha’s most famous song with your mother’s milk, ‘All I’m askin’/ Is for a little respect when you come home (just a little bit)/ Hey baby (just a little bit) when you get home.’ But have you ever thought what it would sound like without the superb backing vocals, harmonising, commenting, reflecting back on what Aretha has just belted out like a preacher in her pulpit? All those ‘oos’ and ‘just a little bits’. Without them, Aretha would lose her momentum, her alternator.

Barraclough, a one-time backing vocalist himself, and a bit of an enthusiast, urged us to ignore the bouncing ego at the front of the stage (you won’t be able to ignore Aretha for long) and to listen in to what the row of singers in the left-hand corner are doing, twisting and turning and cutting in at just the right moment. It can’t be easy. Try singing ‘sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me…’ eight times without a pause, so fast and always right on the note.

Not all backing vocals are quite what they seem. Joni Mitchell, for instance, never trusted anyone else to sing on her albums so she recorded all the vocals herself, multi-tracking each line to create the depth of sound she wanted. Barraclough talked to a singer who does nothing else, singing all the parts, sometimes triple-tracking each line. Kim Chandler gave us an example of how she does it, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in five different voices — normal, low larynx, raised larynx, breathier and more rocky. It was extraordinary how different she sounded each time, from Marilyn Monroe to Suzi Quatro via Diana Ross. Put the five tracks together and you have the Chimes, or the Supremes, or even the Vandellas but with just one voice behind them.

We also heard from Harvey Brough (of ‘Boogie Nights’ and the Wallbangers) who explained how you can trace the ‘doo-be-doo’ and ‘bop bop soo-be-do-wa’ back to medieval pop songs like ‘Summer is a cumin’ in’, sung as a canon, with different groups of singers copying what’s gone before. The Tudors gave us the ‘fa la la la lahs’ and the kids of New York and Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s added the punctuated rhythms and close harmony sounds of doo-wop. He then gave us Gladys Knight’s ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ with a line-by-line sotto voce dissection of how the Pips in that song encapsulate the art of the backing singer. Sometimes they repeat Gladys’s line like a straight canon, sometimes they’re quiet, no refrain. But then after Gladys has explained, ‘He kept dreaming, That some day he’d be a star’, you’ll just catch if you listen hard, ‘A superstar, but he didn’t get far’, sung with such restraint but so much feeling. Brilliant!