MEN WHO SING HIGH
If Bono does it, it’s a bad idea. Few of the laws of pop are so immutable, and U2’s lead git is the master criminal of music, responsible for outrages of every stripe (and indeed Stipe), but few as heinous as his habit of doing a falsetto bit when he has something particularly ‘moving’ to sing about.
It’s a cynical game, this: male vocalists reckon that hitting the high register will make them sound feminine (i.e. sensitive) and weird (i.e. arty). Wrong on both counts – Bono, Yorke, Stipe, Ashcroft et al just sound horrible and freakish as they strain around at the top end of the scale like constipated budgerigars. Bono’s most patience-beating high-note caper is “Lemon”, from his anus-weldingly hateful ‘ironic’ period. (The track is called “Lemon” and the song is, yes, a lemon! See the irony! See it!). And Ashcroft spends the coda of “On Your Own” (un-fucking-surprising that given that your bandmates hate you as much as I do) mewling like Steptoe’s dad. And let’s not even start on Thom Yorke.
Any man who squeaks is said by critics to have “the voice of an angel”. Now, I’m no theologian, but as I understand it Christian doctrine suggests that on the Day of Atonement the virtuous will be resurrected and transported to Paradise intact of body and free of infirmity. In other words, complete with testicles, something plainly lacking in the unheavenly host of tight-trousered squawkers flattered with this cherubic metaphor. In fact, the only remotely good thing about rock stars singing high is that it provides a wonderful preview of what they will sound like all the time when I finally get to give them a sharp kick in the goolies.