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Thank You For The Music
“Mother says I was a dancer before I could walk. She says I began to sing long before I could talk.”
ABBA - “Thank You for the Music”
That was me, apparently. Or so I’m told; I may be a little hazy on the details.
My first public performances were at the age of two, serenading the local grocer’s shop with the recently-released Tom Jones classic “De-wi-wah” (Give me a break, Ls are hard when you’re two!) The customers seemed to like it and fed me chocolate. Granted, this could have been to give me something else to do with my mouth, but hey, this was back in the days before I got all angsty and self-conscious about the sound of my own voice, and just sang for the joy of it.
At school I was considered a bit of a girly swot (Not entirely true - Couldn’t count then, can’t count now!); so when I dared to try out for an inter-schools singing competition, I was met with a positive tsunami of ridicule. I subsequently won the competition, but this seemed beside the point. The message was clear- you have no business calling yourself a singer. Lesson learned.
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Shut Up and Sing!
In March 2003 Natalie Maines from The Chicks, then known as the Dixie Chicks, famously criticised President George W Bush’s actions in Iraq from the stage during a concert in London. In response, the band were ‘cancelled’ and Natalie herself was subjected to death threats. In their song “Not Ready to Make Nice” (probably the classiest and most blistering “Sorry-not-sorry” takedown of keyboard warriors you’re ever likely to hear), the band details how Natalie was warned to “Shut up and sing”, or risk being killed during performance.
This story got me thinking, not least whether it was physically possible to simultaneously shut up and sing, but also how often as women we are silenced, side-lined by voices which are louder, more strident, deemed to have more important things to say. As an aside, I was once informed by an alternative therapist that the throat problems then plaguing me were caused by me physically stopping myself from speaking, literally biting back what I wanted to say.
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