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Voices shot to pieces

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    Voices shot to pieces

    Amor's post on the "incongruous appearances" thread about Bryan Ferry got me thinking - who else has completely lost their ability to sing?

    Mam would kill me if I ever said this in front of her face (DEFINITELY not an idle threat!) but the front runner has got to be Rod Stewart. He'd always been husky but in the last few years he's gone the full Sean Dyche and it's destroyed his tone and timbre.

    #2
    I watched that Led Zeppelin reunion thing a couple of years ago and a good number of the songs had been dropped a couple of octaves, presumably because the old boy can't hit those screeching high notes any more.

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      #3
      But isn't this just an age thing? I know Tom Jones could still hit the notes pretty well last time I saw him on TV, but I imagine it's the norm, particularly if you've sung all your adult life.

      Go Ian Brown's way - don't sing from the start.

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        #4
        Yeah, it’s very difficult to be able to sing (what you might loosely term) rock music live in to your sixties with multi-hour sets and and any kind of serious touring schedule.

        McCartney’s voice is absolutely destroyed now, however much he covers it up with backing vocalists at gigs, Elton John is the same and Rod Stewart’s yelping is indeed painful to endure. On a slightly different tack, I always wanted to see Neil Diamond live but the evidence of live broadcasts that I saw put me off.

        It may be easier to list rock vocalists who can still deliver past the age of sixty.
        Last edited by Ray de Galles; 07-02-2018, 13:26.

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          #5
          Boy George

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            #6
            I recall a Jools Holland Hootenanny from a couple of years ago (I know, I know), which featured an appearance from Sandie Shaw. Her subsequent vocal gurgling drew winces and murmured 'bloody hell's from my family members. My attempts to justify her throaty and highly unusual approach to singing came to no avail.

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              #7
              Is Tom Waits disqualified from this thread for being too obvious.

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                #8
                Some do survive well with care, Scott Walker for instance, Joan Baez too (though I realise her type of voice isn't popular these days.) Some also adjust their repertoire, Joni Mitchell, before she retired had edited her sets to avoid the three octave range she was capable of a couple of decades earlier. She did OK with what she had left though, in spite of a lifelong four pack a day habit.

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                  #9
                  Paul McCartney is a good shout. Also, Geddy Lee on the past couple of tours is struggling with the upper registers.

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by G-Man View Post
                    Is Tom Waits disqualified from this thread for being too obvious.
                    No, that's actually a very good shout.
                    I know quite a few people who think that he's pretty much always sounded like he does now. Those people are idiots.

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                      #11
                      Macca's voice is definitely shot to smithereens now (as you'd expect!), but there were a few numbers on his last proper album "New" where the straining raggedness of his voice was quite affecting. (I'm thinking of "Early Days" in particular)

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                        #13
                        Dylan seems a fairly obvious candidate for this. Much like Waits, the haterz think he had no voice at all to start with. That's clearly bollocks - just because it wasn't conventional doesn't mean it didn't have range and power and all sorts of things. But modern Dylan has basically become a distillation of his mannerisms without almost any musical element. That's not to say that it's bad - in the right context it's still pretty good. But it's totally shot in terms of singing.

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                          #14
                          One for the exceptions list: Stevie Wonder sounded absolutely fine when I saw him a few years ago.

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                            #15
                            Brian Wilson's voice still sounds alright.

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                              #16
                              And as mentioned, Tom Jones (last time I heard).

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                                #17
                                Saw Tom (and Van Morrison) in October 2016. Tom was belting it out for the entire hour-long set - voice not remotely shot to pieces. This was also the last show of a long tour.

                                Van was Van - voice was deeper than many yrs ago, but he could do his set for next 20 years.

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                                  #18
                                  Ian McCullough

                                  Johnny Cash on some of his later American albums. Although it's understandable.

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                                    #19
                                    Originally posted by Belhaven View Post
                                    Brian Wilson's voice still sounds alright.
                                    I don't think he hits the high falsetto notes anymore. When I saw him a few summers back, Al Jardine's son filled in for the really high parts.

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                                      #20
                                      With Harry Nilsson, you can point to the thing that ruined his voice, recording the album Pussy Cats while on drugs 24/7 with John Lennon during his Lost Weekend. Nilsson apparently was screaming during a take of one of the songs, and it permanently damaged his vocal chords. Never the same voice again.

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                                        #21
                                        I don't think you even need to put a great strain on your voice for substance abuse to adversely affect it - Nilsson would have probably ended up sounding like that anyway, even without the screaming.

                                        Take the Boy George example already given. Listen to the Sold album (which was recorded the year after his heroin addiction became public knowledge) and it just sounds like a dodgy impersonation.

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                                          #22
                                          Originally posted by 3 Colours Red View Post
                                          I don't think you even need to put a great strain on your voice for substance abuse to adversely affect it - Nilsson would have probably ended up sounding like that anyway, even without the screaming.
                                          Billie Holiday blazed that particular trail.

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                                            #23
                                            Brian Wilson can't sing the Pet Sounds material properly anymore so he does it as more of a spoken word arrangement. Matt Jardine does You Still Believe In Me, IIRC.

                                            Billie Holiday still had some good days up to 1956 but her last two albums, with strings, are the voice of a walking corpse.

                                            Nina Simone was just a flat drone in her last decade or so but she could still do these Bach piano runs she learned as a teenage prodigy, denied a classical career by racism.

                                            Elvis Costello, but he was always limited.

                                            Morrissey I assume can no longer do the falsetto he had on the early Smiths singles ("people who don't care if I...live or die.")

                                            Van Morrison has been dropping an octave on many of his 1968-73 tracks in live performance for decades.

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                                              #24
                                              It is often missed quite how incredible a vocalist Tom Jones is.

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                                                #25
                                                David Crosby sounds a good deal frailer these days but I think his voice is all the more affecting for it – his last two albums (‘Lighthouse’ and ‘Sky Trails’) are quite beautiful and contain some of his best work IMHO.

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