Accent on the northwest... The Kooks' Luke Pritchard (left) and Coldplay's Chris Martin.
Photographs: PA
Seeing the The Kooks live the other day, I was struck at how singer Luke Pritchard has this odd sort of Liverpudlian bent to his voice, his diction thickening up. It's there on the start of Seaside, it's there on a lot of She Moves In Her Own Way, and at the outset of I Want You.
Coldplay's Chris Martin also gets this funny sort of clot in his voice sometimes, a kind of furry Liverpudlian "I'm resonating in another part of my mouth" thing that I'm sure linguists have a name for. It's odd because the Kooks come from Brighton, and Pritchard himself grew up in south London. Martin is from Devon. Go figure.
Obviously the whole question of singing accents is vast and vexed. But before you Kooks and Coldplay acolytes dig out your whetstones and come for me, I'm not saying that either band shouldn't have these Liverpudlian echoes: I just find it fascinating that when bands pay homage to their influences, it shows up in the vocals too.
I have a hunch it's because The Kooks have a thing for The La's (definitely) and The Coral (probably), two rather different, but very Liverpudlian bands. With Martin I think it's an Echo And The Bunnymen thing. It's no secret how much Coldplay have loved this band, and part of The Bunnymen's charm lay in Ian McCulloch's cloudy verbal style.
Rock music is partly founded on the premise that band write their own songs (as compared to pop, which has a long tradition of hit-writers producing stuff for vocalists to sing) and that these self-written songs boast sung lyrics that somehow authentically reflect the experience, or thoughts or feelings of the singer. So borrowing an accent to sing your innermost impressions is quite a noticeable thing.
And yet everyone is at it constantly. Californians like Green Day and Rancid ape the London punk glottals of The Clash; New Yorkers The Ramones tried to sound English on Blitzkrieg Bop. The Rolling Stones started the whole transatlantic dialogue by apeing black American rhythm 'n' bluesmen (and women), although on some songs, they do sound English: witness Ruby Tuesday. Did The Streets's Mike Skinner (from Birmingham) get more "London" because it was more "garage"? I anticipate more examples coming in on the breeze.
I should confess an interest. My own accent is a hairy mutt (started off Canadian, morphed into American, ended up going native here, can swap between them now like Gillian Anderson) so maybe I'm more acutely conscious of how words are delivered than is strictly necessary.
Still, it's nice to hear an, ahem, "ambitious" band like The Kooks thinking it's somehow more rock'n'roll to sound like they're from a oft-maligned British northwestern port than LA or New York.
