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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.

Don’t Panic! How Learning To Sing Helped Me Deal With Panic Attacks

Breathing is something we take for granted. It comes as part of the package of being alive along with a beating heart and a functioning brain. We may feel that our brains work better some days than others, but our bodies keep breathing in and out without us having to give any thought to the process. The latter however is not the case for anyone who has had the misfortune to experience panic attacks. For those, the whole experience of breathing suddenly becomes a much less automatic response.

Cue The Panic Attack

I don’t remember when they started, or why, but I will never forget the rising sense of panic, the struggle to catch breath or the overwhelming desire to flee from wherever I was, as fast as I could. Supermarket queues were a frequent location. There was no logical explanation for this. I could make my away around the store, gathering the items on my list but once I got to the till area and had to stand in a queue, I would suddenly become acutely aware of the overwhelming symptoms of a panic attack. Along with the increased heart rate that made me feel as if my heart was about to burst through my rib cage, there was the light-headedness that caused buzzing in my ears and made stringing a coherent thought together almost impossible.

No Hairbrushes Required! Singing with Dynamic Meladies by Liz

I’ve never been one to parade in front of a mirror with a hairbrush microphone, doing a Kate Bush. But I always did like singing, after a fashion. Sadly, my own fashion, which was just a few notes in the middle and a squeak for anything high, and pot luck for the words. But that was ok, I only sang in the car.

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.