The one female singer Bono said no one could sing like
It doesn’t take much to get Bono on a roll when talking about the greatest vocalists that he has ever seen.
The best music of all time is always the kind that you can scream at the top of your lungs, and while a guitar solo might do the job perfectly well for guitar players, the U2 frontman could feel a certain kinship when someone was singing from the heart and could elicit that human connection from the other side of the speakers. But even if he didn’t know a word they were saying, Bono could still feel the power in someone’s voice through pure musical osmosis.
But, really, if anyone wasn’t putting in the same effort that Bono was whenever he sang, what were they even in the music industry for? He had built himself up as a frontman based on the performance of John Lennon’s ‘Mother’ alone, and since that was one of the most harrowing songs of all time, the fact that it set the bar for the rest of U2’s career was going to be near-impossible for anyone to reach.
Then again, Bono never relied on the pure power of his voice all the time. He got his strength from what emotion the music brought out of him whenever he sang, which usually came from whatever The Edge was playing. Whereas most people say the bass and drums have to be blending together for any rhythm section, the reverse is true in their case, with Bono hearing something like the icy stabs of ‘I Will Follow’ and getting that impressive shout out of himself on the first record.
That did come from Lennon, but the passion wouldn’t have been there without The Clash, either. Each member of U2 was a dedicated punk fan, and since Joe Strummer was singing like it was life or death whenever he went out onstage, so too did Bono whenever he started singing. For all he knew, any song could be the last thing he ever sang, and he was going to make sure that every one of those kids got what they came to see whenever ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ started.
Granted, the new wave has always been punk’s younger cousin, and when listening to a band like This Mortal Coil, you were transported to a completely different place. Their gothic aesthetic, paired with those great synth textures, created a whole world in the headphones, but Bono didn’t become a major devotee until he heard what Elisabeth Fraser could do when she had the right melody.
Compared to the spectral voice Bono could pull out every now and again, he was no match for what Fraser could do, telling her, “You see, I had never heard a voice like yours… though many have tried since, none have the ‘floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee’ punch in the gut that you have… feels like a moth gathering around flame on a candle burning in a ship’s cabin trapped in the imagination of Tim Buckley… or something like that.”
It’s not like Bono was the only legend paying attention to her voice at the time, either. While Robert Plant could have easily gone back to his same old records that he learned from before Led Zeppelin, Fraser’s voice was one of the only sounds from the end of the 1980s that he felt really had some substance to it, which probably bled over into his later work when making music with Allison Krauss.
But if there’s one thing that bands like This Mortal Coil taught their fans, it’s that nothing is about trying to copy what’s been done before. What Fraser was working with was entirely new for the time, and whenever someone heard her voice, there was no point in trying to compete with the pure sounds of beauty.
