Tracey Thorn explores the art of singing in her second book, Naked at the Albert Hall

The Everything But the Girl frontwoman explores the vocalist's craft in her latest book. It is a part memoir, part cultural critique and part study of the mechanics of singing.

The English singer Tracey Thorn formed Everything But the Girl with Ben Watt in 1982. Being a singer can mean dull regimes of conversation-avoidance, herbal teas and early nights, she says. Brian Rasic / REX ShutterstockShow less

Some people were surprised, the English singer Tracey Thorn records here, by what her 2013 memoir Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Become a Pop Star, left out. Despite her string of hits with Everything But the Girl (most notable, perhaps, was Missing, a US number 2 when remixed by DJ Todd Terry in 1995), and despite her being the voice of Massive Attack's revered 1994 single Protection, Bedsit Disco Queen said little about singing.

Naked at the Albert Hall, the follow-up to Thorn's universally acclaimed and best-selling debut, redresses the balance. If Bedsit Disco Queen was about pop music in general and Thorn and her husband/EBTG bandmate Ben Watt's eventful life journey, here, Thorn knuckles down to explore the vocalist's craft in detail. In so doing, she also lays bare the psychology and personal history behind her own complex relationship with the art form. The book mushrooms outwards like a mind-map diagram with the word "singing" at its centre.

What can literature tell us about singers and our attitudes towards them? Is vibrato a good thing? Did Bryan Ferry really just walk up to the mic and sing like that at Roxy Music’s first rehearsal, and if so, what were his bandmates thinking?

Elsewhere in this enjoyable compendium, Thorn probes why and when we sing, asserts that "there is basically nothing you can do to the tune of Happy Birthday that will demonstrate your singing prowess", and muses upon Auto-Tune, microphone technique, karaoke, and why she still watches The X Factor despite being heckled for doing so on Twitter.

The author also canvases the views of fellow singers including Alison Moyet, Romy Madley-Croft of The xx and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside. ­Madley-Croft, a Thorn lookalike and kindred spirit, tells her that she sometimes has to Google her own lyrics before going onstage. Gartside remarks that: “Singing live is like a complicated sporting event for the voice, a fiendish obstacle race.” Thorn is delighted by this and wholly concurs.

The book's title references a classic anxiety dream that Thorn had (due to stage fright, she has not performed live since 2000), and her engaging prose style is not just thought-provoking, but also self-effacing and funny. Early on, she explains that it was while singing along to Patti Smith's Horses album at 16 that she realised that she, too, had quite a low voice for a woman. One downside of this, we learn later, is that when Thorn attends Christmas concerts at her children's school, the carols are pitched in keys she finds challenging: "Anyone standing nearby thinking: 'This'll be good, I get to hear Tracey Thorn singing Adeste Fideles,' is in for a major disappointment," she writes. "The truth is, when singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, I don't sound any better than your nan."

Naturally, Thorn has plenty to say about the singers she likes best. These include great technicians with uniquely appealing timbres (Karen Carpenter and Thorn’s absolute favourite, Dusty Springfield, for example), but she also admires certain individuals who have turned a distinct lack of any conventional gift to their ­advantage. “You could be sure that a lot of thought had gone into that sound…”, she says of The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, “every note he sang had ‘I know I can’t sing’ stamped all over it.” Meanwhile, Poly Styrene, lead singer with 1970s punk act X-Ray Spex, is described thus: “Almost the epitome of the non-singer, she could barely carry a tune, had no vibrato, nothing much to speak of in the way of range, and I absolutely loved her. Sheer force of will and strength of personality meant that she shone on stage.”

Thorn – who can, of course, really sing – also had to overcome drawbacks to become a successful vocalist. There's a point in Naked at the Albert Hall where, discussing George du Maurier's 1895 novel Trilby, she notes that the book's descriptions of its titular female singer – "The roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Pantheon", etc – are all strikingly architectural.

The inference, Thorn says, is that “the grander the cathedral, the bigger and better the voice”, but she herself did not conform to a St Paul’s-like blueprint. An asthmatic child with lungs weakened by infant pneumonia, she also had an underbite that made her dentist want to break and reset her jaw (“Why on earth would I want to do that?’ she asked, and refused).

Thorn is good on how all of this might have made her particularly susceptible to the kind of vocal anxieties that non-­singers, not having an unpredictable body for an instrument, tend to see as hypochondria. “We’re all frustrated ear, nose and throat specialists,” she jokes, ultimately making light of things, but she also points out that being a pop singer can mean “dull regimes of conversation-avoidance, herbal teas and early nights”.

Elsewhere, too, Thorn seems keen to demythologise singers and singing. Though it's the gift those of us who can't really sing often wish we had, Thorn argues that you only have to tune in to The X Factor to see that it's not that rare a talent. As the book unfolds, the author shows and/or reminds us that numerous factors are at play when we put singers on a pedestal. There is the inherently beguiling nature of singing, as explored in a fascinating chapter titled Song to the Siren, but there is also the objectification that the audience/performer onstage dynamic promotes.

Thorn argues that sometimes our pre-established relationship with a certain singer/song is such that, even when we see it performed badly or distractedly, we will be oblivious and moved. She playfully shifts our gaze through 180 degrees, explaining how it feels to stand “in front of an audience, with all the audacity and arrogance that implies”, and she reminds us that, despite appearances to the contrary, she, like any other performer, is subject to all kinds of onstage distractions.

Apropos of this, she reproduces her diary entry after seeing a Rufus Wainwright gig: “Rufus is wearing shiny red trousers, which make him slither around on the barstool when he sits to play guitar. He jokes about it, but it’s probably irritating him. Funny how the decision of which trousers to wear can have an impact on your performance.”

None of this is to imply that Thorn, too, isn’t still enchanted by singing and singers. Patti Smith still touches her when she sees her perform at London’s Royal Festival Hall, and the book concludes with a lengthy playlist of the singers and songs that have charmed Thorn most.

One man who isn’t on there, however, is Damon Albarn of Blur – “I’ve always found it hard to get past that whistling sibilance on every ‘s’ that he pronounces” – says Thorn, and though Chrissie Hynde is on Thorn’s playlist, it’s hard to imagine The Pretenders front woman delighting in the news that her voice reminds Thorn “of the tremolo setting on a guitar amp”.

Some of the best writing here concerns singing done out of the limelight. There's a lovely chapter on singing with children (when Thorn's twin daughters were small and needed a lullaby, only Dream a Little Dream of Me or The Skye Boat Song would do), and the author is great on the singular pleasure of singing alone and for no one, unheard and unjudged. Towards the end of the book, Thorn dedicates a chapter to the The X Factor television show/franchise, and this is fitting given that it is currently many people's chief interface with the world of singing. "I watch it semi-ironically, same as everybody else," she writes, but even if she finds the show's more mawkish moments exploitative and distasteful, Thorn argues that The X Factor's tough-love approach is a useful microcosm of the music industry proper, where "you'll be judged not just on the sound of your voice, but on what you look like, how you move on stage, and what the public perceive you to be like".

The book’s closing pages are highly unconventional, and ultimately pleasing because of that. I half-wondered if Thorn’s publishers might have pushed for a neater summing-up had she not previously written the kind of unit-shifting debut that brings bargaining power. Too much detail would give too much away, so let us say only this: the precious epiphany Thorn has about her singing is triggered by her non-attendance of an event she’d greatly been looking forward to, a “Singing Weekend” hosted by the celebrated Northumbrian folk musicians Rachel and Becky Unthank.

This book is available on Amazon.

James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.