Seven of my all-time favourite vocalists, extracted from MOJO Magazine’s 100 Singers feature, October 1998.
They are:-
John Lennon
Kate Bush
Van Morrison
Steve Marriott
Dusty Springfield
Luciano Pavarotti
Chrissie Hynde

John Lennon
Born October 9 1940 Died December 8 1980
Jaw-dropping moment: The hoarse, imploring demand at 0.05 of Don’t Let Me Down (on “The Beatles 1967-1970” Apple 1993)
Recommended album: “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” (Apple 1970)

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy… and a torrent of honest, rock’n’roll energy. John Lennon’s voice could encompass all these things because his heart did, too. He never liked his own singing, and used to beg his producers to smother it with echo, or distortion, or anything to take away its natural sound. And yet his voice was unbeatable – a hard, dry, nasal thing that just couldn’t help singing from the soul. Lennon’s is one of the most natural voices in rock, without the traces of theatricality you hear in Elvis, or Jagger or Buddy Holly. It’s a shockingly direct tool of communication: he rarely had the patience to try for anything fancier. And he recorded very few instrumental numbers – it seems that if he didn’t have the chance to *say* something, then he couldn’t see the point of performing in the first place.
It’s difficult to specify the virtues of John Lennon’s voice: like Dylan’s, so much of its power is bound up with your idea of the man himself. “It doesn’t matter what generation you’re from,” says the drummer Jim Keltner, who worked with both men. “When you hear a Lennon or Dylan song you’re going to be moved.” Reaching the audience was the only vocal quality that Lennon cared about. “You don’t have to be trained in rock’n’roll to be a singer,” he once remarked. “I can sing. Singing is singing to people who enjoy what you’re singing – not being able to hold notes.”
But he was technically accomplished, in spite of himself. Sifting through tapes for The Beatles’ “Anthology”, their producer George Martin remembered what natural singers the group had been. “Even when we did a simple thing,” he says, “such as the opening of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ where the three of them sing in harmony, they would naturally do it live on one mike. They would balance themselves and get the harmonies right. And sometimes, in a thing like She’s Leaving Home, when John and Paul both sang on the song, I had very few tracks to play with. I’d already used up two tracks. I had two tracks left for my vocals but I wanted to double track them. So they had to sing together and I had to put a different echo on one voice to get the space. So when they’re doing ‘She’s leaving… what did we do with our lives’ and so on, that was on two mikes but on one track, and they did that perfectly. So then I said, ‘Right, fellas, now do it again, and we’ll double track it.’ And they did. That was how good they were.”
Lennon often sounded at his happiest when he was singing other people’s songs: the version of Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll Music, on “Beatles For Sale”, is one of his greatest performances. He learned to roar like that in the cauldron of those early Cavern gigs, and in the mayhem of the Hamburg shows. You hear the fruits of that savage apprenticeship on Twist And Shout – the final triumph of the all-day session for The Beatles’ first LP “Please Please Me”, when his larynx was nearly pulverised: “John must have built himself a set of leather tonsils in a throat of steel to turn out such a violently exciting track!” wrote their sleevenote writer Tony Barrow.
Those were screams of animal joy, maybe, but when it came to confessional songs such as Cold Turkey, he’d learned to howl his pain. It was on his first post-Beatles LP, “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band”, that Lennon’s urge to bare his soul was at its strongest. You could put that down to his new-found freedom from the old group, to his Primal Scream therapy, or to the daredevil encouragement of Yoko Ono. To his son Sean, John’s high-wire recklessness was a key attribute: “That’s what I admire most about my Dad,” he says. “He fucking came out with ‘Two Virgins’ after ‘Sgt. Pepper’, think about the balls it takes to do that. What a rebel.
“Listen to ‘McCartney’, that was Paul’s first record after The Beatles, it’s a great record, but it’s definitely not such a drastic fuck-you. I mean, my Dad made ‘Plastic Ono Band’ which I think is one of the top three albums of all time. That’s an insanely brilliant record, so raw and stripped down and so exactly not what The Beatles were doing. It’s so him, and he’s completely torn away from that pop sweet harmony world. It’s like punk before there was punk.”
At the other extreme of his range are the tender expressions of longing and vulnerability, like Julia or Jealous Guy; and summoned from somewhere else are the trance-like intonations of Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am The Walrus or A Day In The Life. Lennon, the voice, was always and everywhere the testament of Lennon the man.

Kate Bush
Born July 30 1958
Jaw-dropping moment: Heart-rending emotional gear-change, as post-romance bravery gives way to grief at 0.54, You’re The One (on “The Red Shoes”, EMI 1993)
Recommended album: “The Whole Story” (EMI 1986)

It was pierced ears all round when Kate arrived in 1978. Those pet-worrying shrieks on Wuthering Heights suggested an eccentric talent, but not a voice you’d come to consider sensuous. Yet the pre-Raphaelite nymph with Minnie Mouse’s soprano went on to surprise us all. Her voice, like her material, gained an unsuspected depth and richness, very soon revealed on masterful sequels such as The Man With The Child In His Eyes. From “Hounds Of Love” (1985), through “The Sensual World” to “The Red Shoes”, Bush’s delivery has become even more intimate and perhaps less pyrotechnic. On the one hand she’s the most secret star in British pop; on the other, she bares her longings and her pain with unparallelled frankness.
At first she was a convent schoolgirl with an imagination that was almost too vivid to be usefully channelled. If she was EMI’s “favourite daughter”, she was not unlike the company’s favourite son, Paul McCartney – both were blessed with a prodigious gift for melody that their conceptual abilities struggled to keep pace with. Three or four albums into her career, her songs stopped sounding like scrapbooks and turned into diaries, with all the corresponding emotional freight. Here is where her singing switched from a beguiling novelty to a darkly potent brew. It still swoops through the octaves with a giddying swiftness, but given the greater sophistication of her songwriting in recent years, the effect is to dramatise her emotional range, not merely to parade the colourful characters in her dressing-up box.
The sparseness of her output and the guarded privacy of her life have conspired against her reputation: it’s too easily forgotten what a quietly influential presence Kate has been. Of late she’s made a welcome habit of collaborating with The Trio Bulgarka, whose ethereal voices blend wonderfully with her more strident tones – each, in its way, presents you with something that’s incapable of insincerity. Bush is still a gawky lyricist at times, but in her singing she achieves an emotional truth that words alone can rarely locate.

Van Morrison
Born August 31 1945
Jaw-dropping moment: Van locates the Eternal Now, in Belfast circa 1955, at 7.44 of Take Me Back (on “Hymns To The Silence” Polydor 1991)
Recommended album: “Astral Weeks” (Warner Bros 1968)

He grunts, he growls, he snorts, he mutters – and still it sounds like a sacrament. Not everyone is enchanted by the voice of Van Morrison, but to those who are, there is no other voice that seems so spiritual. The best description is probably his own: The Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart.
Uniquely for a white singer of his generation, Van was already steeped in blues before he heard Elvis Presley. Unlike Lennon and the rest, he was not smitten by the arrival of rock, and never fixated upon the flash or the glamour. “Pop has just never been my music,” he says. “Because I’ve always heard the real stuff, y’know? I grew up in a household where I heard all the real music, so when I heard pop I didn’t have to rush out. I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but I had the background of hearing this other music since I was three. So it wasn’t such a big injection, like with rebellious teenagers when they heard rock’n’roll. I’d already heard similar music that was called rhythm’n’blues, which was where rock’n’roll came from. So it wasn’t any big diversion.”
As a consequence he never developed along the same lines as other rock singers. From the yappy snarl of his first recordings with Them, to the rumbling meditations of his later work, Morrison grew ever less interested in making a show. He doesn’t project, or express, for the benefit of his audience: we are merely allowed to eavesdrop on some obsessive, private dialogue. On the pivotal “Astral Weeks” LP we can hear his voice mid-way between the edginess of his youth and the deeper, more measured resonance of his maturity. But he’s already begun to sing in tongues: “And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry/Hey! It’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why” (Sweet Thing).
He’s the least precise of vocalists, and maybe the most eccentric, but Van can genuinely seem in a trance when he performs – like he’s forgotten who, what or where he is. “When he was on stage he would look like a space cadet,” recalled one of his musicians. “But then he’d open his mouth, and you would realise that he had channelled everything into the sound of his voice. The rest of it was just a shell that was there for the purpose of producing this voice.”

Steve Marriott
Born January 30 1947 Died April 20 1991
Jaw-dropping moment: “Gotta! Gotta! Gotta!”: one last push at 2.18 sees All Or Nothing safely home. (on “The Decca Anthology 1965-67”, Deram 1996)
Recommended album: “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” (Immediate 1968)

The Small Faces passed through a few different phases in their brief career, from mod soulboys to music hall nostalgists, by way of woozy psychedelia. But if there was one thing you could rely on, it was the passionate blaze of Steve Marriott’s voice. This was a voice that came out of a skinny little Cockney kid yet sounded like it could tear up telephone directories. It was a voice that battled loyally for every band he played with, including his next group Humble Pie and the procession of pub-rock acts that he led until his premature end in 1991. Like a lot of great rock singing, Marriott’s style was a triumph of sheer spirit.
In a way it was a result of his influences, and of the obstacles in his path. The first Small Faces gigs were a cacophony of technical ineptitude: the band was “loud, notoriously loud!” he recalled. “If you can’t play, play loud!” The later Small Faces shows were no easier: “It was mad. It was a bunch of noise, a bunch of screaming little girls. It was just a screaming row. The PAs were sort of archaic, you could never hear. Monitors to me were people who brought the milk round at school. You used to stick your finger in your ear to hear yourself properly.” How could he cope except by hollering until his eyes watered? In any case, he was born to be an R&B shouter. He loved Little Richard, James Brown, Otis Redding. He could be soulful and explosive, and both at once if required.
Even the perfumed gardens of English flower power did not sedate him. The Faces’ organist, Ian Mclagan, confessed a distaste for Marriott’s softer moments on Itchycoo Park: “I can’t bear it when he sings with the pretty little voice like that. I want to smack him!” But then comes a roar (“It’s all too beautiful!”) and we’re back in business. Marriott’s reputation has grown since those days. “It’s not surprising,” says his friend Jim Leverton, laughing. “ Steve always said, ‘It’s hard to kill vermin.’”

Dusty Springfield
Born April 16 1939 (Died 2 March 1999)
Jaw-dropping moment: The diva’s imperious return to the hit parade at 1.36 on What Have I Done To Deserve This? (1987 Pet Shop Boys single, available on “Goin’ Back”)
Recommended album: “Goin’ Back: The Very Best Of” (Philips 1994)

It was Cliff Richard who first called Dusty “the white Negress”, in an awkward attempt to praise the sensuous force of her voice. But as her producer in Memphis, Jerry Wexler, has noted, “you won’t hear much of a black intonation in her voice.” From her beginnings in The Springfields, in fact, Dusty moved through folk-pop, mascara-blinded ballads and the funkiest R&B, maintaining a tone that’s all her own. Her taste in songwriters, from Bacharach down, was pretty faultless, too. “She’s deeply soulful,” says Wexler. “As with Aretha, I never heard her sing a bad note.”

Luciano Pavarotti
Born October 12 1935 (Died 6 September 2007)
Jaw-dropping moment: Tension ascending deliciously, U2 and Eno make space for Il Maestro’s majestic entrance at 2.53 of Miss Sarajevo, from “Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1” (Island 1995)
Recommended album: “The Ultimate Collection” (Deco 1998)

As the Pav will inform anyone who asks him, the tenor voice is not a natural sort of noise at all. It’s really an artificial construct that the practitioner must remake each day. His throat swathed and swaddled, he lives in constant fear of losing this mysterious force inside of him. Watch him in close-up on the TV, and he looks amazed by the sound coming out of his mouth. They don’t call him The King Of The High Cs any more, but he’s still the living bridge between high art and popular culture. Truly, it’s not over until the fat bloke sings.

Chrissie Hynde
Born September 7 1951
Sublime moment: Imaginations run riot at 1.56 of Brass In Pocket (on “Pretenders”, WEA 1979)
Recommended album: The Pretenders: “The Singles” (WEA 1987)

When a sceptical Nick Lowe got a demo tape off Chrissie Hynde, her voice was a revelation: “It was *fantastic*,” he recalled, being neither the “Janis Joplin/Maggie Bell squawk which so many girl singers seem to choose” nor “the simpy hearts and flowers, floor-length dresses stuff.” Smitten, he agreed to produce The Pretenders’ debut Stop Your Sobbing, and her career was launched. It’s a wonderfully poised voice that never strives for effect or mere “attitude”, yet pulsates with sex and a self-protective edge of menace. There’s a fully-formed personality in every note, fascinating and dangerous.