It’s lunchtime on a sunny day in early June. I’m standing on London’s Fleet Street outside an imposing door that’s sandwiched between a solicitor’s office and Ye Olde Cock Tavern. I feel nervous and sticky-palmed. A message pings into my phone. It’s from my 17-year-old daughter. It says: “Try not to worry Dad, it’s only an hour and then it’s over forever, and you never need to do it again. Love you!” I swallow hard and ring the bell. There’s no going back. I’m about to have my first ever singing lesson.
In the same way that some people are non-drivers or non-swimmers, I am a non-singer. I do not sing. Other than croaking out Happy Birthday or groaning through the occasional hymn, I just don’t sing. Like so many people, early criticism of my quavering vocals cut me to the quick and turned me into a life-long mimer. My lips move, but the volume is set at zero. Two events stand out. In the first I am seven years old. I’m in the gym and one by one we are summoned to walk across the wooden floor to the music teacher, who sits behind a piano. When we get there she plays two notes and asks which is higher. To me they sound the same. I take a random guess… and the whole class collapses into hysterics. I walk back across the floor with my cheeks on fire. In the second event, answering the headmaster’s call that the choir needs more members, I join my friends for an open practice session. It’s all very jolly. Half way through Kumbaya My Lord, a teacher puts his hand in the air and melodramatically cries: “Halt!” Has he been wounded? What’s happened? He swivels round slowly and singles me out: “You! No thank you!” My friends collapse in hysterics once more and my cheeks explode into colour. That’s it, I think, never again.
I’m not sure why I felt the shame of being a bad singer so acutely. I’m rubbish at all kinds of things. My football, cooking and dancing are all laughable, but I don’t care what anyone else thinks. If they don’t appreciate my aubergine surprise, more fool them. So why am I so stumped by my singing? I once heard a critic describe Bob Dylan’s voice as like a truck reversing out of a gravel pit. And that hasn’t held him back.
When I announced my plan to have a singing lesson, I was met with various responses by friends and family. None were positive. One asked what my aim was: “Will you go busking?” she said, before laughing at her comic genius. Another asked me to record a before and after – rubbing his hands at the aural car crash in store. My wife wondered what I might ask to sing. “How about La Donna è Mobile from Verdi’s Rigoletto?” she joked. Actually, my goal is less lofty. I want to sing a line or two from any song, with no one listening, but in an unselfconscious way. Surely, even for me, that’s achievable.
I hear someone coming to answer the door. If there is a piano in a small room and the teacher plays a couple of notes, I’ll just walk out. The door swings open and Michael Vickers greets me with a warm smile. “Come in,” he says, and leads me into a small room with a piano. He runs his fingers over a few keys and I think I might faint. Then, somehow, even I realise this is all quite ridiculous, and I pull myself together.
Michael’s students are on the whole not like me. They are, in fact, opera singers. “Mostly I work with professionals and ensembles across the UK and Europe,” he says, though he does make the point that he often works with amateurs and teaches a range of styles. If my throat was dry before, it now feels like sandpaper. We get started by tackling the great question that perplexes all non-singers. “No one is tone deaf,” Michael assures me. “Unless, possibly, you have a hearing impairment. We can all detect shifts in tone and inflection. It’s just a case of learning to recognise that.” Maybe there is hope for me after all, I think, as I shift awkwardly on the piano stool.
I’m particularly dreading the moment when I have to open my mouth and go: “Laaaaa.” The prospect feels insurmountable. But Michael outflanks me by getting me to hum first. He plays three ascending notes on the keyboard and then, in his caramelly baritone, sings: “Hmmmmmm.” To my amazement I find myself joining in. His voice is so firm and beguiling it’s all I can do not to follow his lead. We go up and down several scales and then he turns to me and says, “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” No, actually, it wasn’t. I quite liked it. How odd.
We talk about why people feel so shy about singing. Michael thinks it’s because our voice is so intimately bound up with who we are. “If people say they don’t like your singing, they are effectively saying they don’t like your voice, which is then the same as saying they don’t like you.” He might be right. I’m a terrible cook, but cooking isn’t me. If you don’t like the slop that I serve up it doesn’t mean you don’t like me.
“It’s why I always start with humming. You are putting less out there so you feel less vulnerable.” He then points out that truly great singers are not so much the ones with the most technically perfect voices but the ones who let their voices be vulnerable. “Think of Adele,” he says, “her emotion is carried through in every note.” It seems bizarre that Michael, my vocal coach as I now think of him, is talking about my singing and Adele’s singing in the same sentence.
After more humming and a fun sliding game where we make our voices helter-skelter up and down an imaginary slide, Michael ups the ante by opening his mouth and replacing the hmmmmmm with a teeth-baring eeeeeeee. Up and down we go. My eeeeeees sound good to me and Michael is encouraging. The eeeeeeees give way to babababababas – they’re great fun, and up and down we go again.
We take a break from the scales and Michael explains where people so often go wrong. “We tend to think that singing requires something different from speaking, so we contort our throats and chests to make the noises we think we should be making. But singing is about communication and emotion, just like speaking is. What we need to try to do is use the same voice for both.”
Back to the keyboard, but I’m now feeling pretty cool. I’m beginning to relax. I’m just going to use my speaking voice as my singing voice – and put like that it suddenly doesn’t seem so daunting. “Right,” says Michael, “time for some actual words.” We ease ourselves in with some counting: one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. More up and down stuff. Always holding the last note for a few beats. This is my favourite bit so far. I’m wondering where all this is going. In some ways, I think, I’ve mastered this and would now like to quit. I’ll go to weddings and just go bababababa or maybe do some counting and everyone will be happy.
Michael has other plans. “I think we should sing a song now,” he says. I am stunned. A song? But what did I think? Singing is for songs. It had to happen. He leafs through a stack of papers. I wonder what he’ll pull out. I’m a big country and western fan, and I’ve always thought Willie Nelson has a shocker of a voice so maybe that would work… but no, it’s the Beatles. “How about Yesterday?” Michael suggests. He explains that we tend to sing in either chest voice or head voice – and men cope better with a chest voice. Yesterday lends itself to that perfectly.
I feel the fluttering of panic in my chest. While Michael gets ready at the piano, I clear my throat about six times. Would Adele do that? What about Willie? Michael starts singing and playing the piano. It’s really lovely. I’d like to sit here and just listen to him. After one go through, he nods at me and, to my utter disbelief I hear: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away” coming out of my very own throat. I’ve smashed it. I’m not sure what I’ve conquered, but I feel I’ve struggled over some splintery old wooden fence into a bright new place where I can sing – and it doesn’t matter what it sounds like.
I tell Michael he is at this point the first and only person I’ve ever sung in front of in such an earnest way. I’ve astonished myself. He is delighted.
Later that day, I cycle home. I reach the top of the long final downhill to where I live. It’s a glorious summer evening and I let the brakes off and freewheel. And as I do, at the top of my lungs, I sing: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”
The London Singing Institute offers lessons and courses in all genres of music in one-to-one and group sessions. Prices start at £165 per calendar month for weekly lessons. For more information, go to londonsinginginstitute.co.uk
