Ian Penman

A kind of transcendence is often demanded of Black voices, as singers or as political orators: the kind of voice that fills the heart, fills the hall, embraces the land. There’s an unspoken expectation that such voices gift us some exalted truth. But quieter, weaker voices can ruffle our feathers too. Maybe they chime with the murky or tattered voices in our own psychical crypts. They seem to befall us.

The rubble had been cleared away, but strange grasses and wild herbs had sprung up where the war-demolished houses had been.

Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

On​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’...

Kraftwerk performing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin on 16 January 2015

In​ the autumn of 1977, sober-suited Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of the German synthesiser group Kraftwerk entered a New York nightclub and were surprised to hear an apparently endless version of a track from their newly released album Trans-Europe Express. Hütter was at first delighted to hear...

One evening recently I was in the local supermarket, which always has a surprisingly tasteful collection of old pop and soul hits on its playlist. ‘Raspberry Beret’ came on and I just couldn’t help it: I was instantly transported, singing along and showing out, right there in Aisle 3. It still sounded so good: those unexpected violins, the slightly ‘off’ backing vocals (a white girl sound, reversing the usual formula where a so-so white male lead is vamped by phenomenally good black female singers), the down-home cornbread of the song’s narrative queered by tiny splinters of subtext that black listeners would immediately flash on (Prince’s store-owning boss ‘didn’t like my kind/cuz I was way too leisurely …’). Was there really ever such a phantasmagorically odd pop hit as this, or was it all just a dream?

People still get into knots about the ‘mystery’ of Bowie’s serial life-swapping in the 1970s, but he’d been pulling the same trick for years on the perimeter of Tin Pan Alley before he applied it to rock. A bit of sci-fi, a bit of up-in-the-air sexuality, a bit of scarves-in-the-air sing-along, a bit of an ‘Oh no he isn’t!’ panto vibe, and a lot of power chords.

Patti Smith, who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (1978’s ‘Because the Night’) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting.

Even into late middle age, even for his closest buddies, carousing with Sinatra was a serious three-line whip: beg off early, fall asleep, order a coffee instead of Jack Daniels, and you risked expulsion, exile, the Antarctica of his disaffection. He could not abide the ends of days: it was one thing he had no control over. So he made an enemy of the clock, of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire moment when the ring-a-ding bell must be wrapped in cotton wool and stowed away. Then came the risky, occluded territory of sleep.

In the spring of 1965, on the road between Memphis and Hollywood, desert plains all around, his bloodstream torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ups and downs, Elvis Presley finally broke down. He poured out his troubles to Larry Geller, celebrity hair stylist and, lately, something of a spirit guide for Elvis. Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum.

A dream, just before waking. It’s a day or two after Kate Bush’s unexpected announcement of her return to the concert stage for a series of shows later this year. In my dream, Bush takes the form of a child’s tiny hardback book: solid, substantial, not too many pages. On the front cover is a menagerie of cartoon animals, all Smartie-tube colours and toothy smiles. (It looks a bit like the sleeve of Kate’s album Never for Ever, from 1980, but not nearly so borderline sinister.) In the air, a singing ringing chorus: ‘This Easter egg, full of rain!’

There is a long and slightly disreputable tradition in jazz of oral biography. The ‘as told to’ voice here belongs to Miles Davis, in Miles: The Autobiography, first published in 1989 and officially attributed to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some Victorian anthropologist’s respectably freaky show and tell.

In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, where Townshend’s is impatient, hectoring.