Tuneless belter or saviour of pop? Kate Jackson of the Long Blondes (second from left). Photograph: Linda Nylind
Described variously as a "tuneful foghorn" (NME); "marvellously belting, if unsubtle" (the Guardian); and like a "public address call across a Sunday marketplace" (Drowned in Sound) - and that was in the positive reviews of their first album Someone to Drive You Home - it is fair to say that Kate Jackson's voice was a major talking point in the rise of the Long Blondes. From these decidedly backhanded compliments, to various critics who stuck the knife in over Jackson's strident tones, there was no getting away from her voice.
Me? I love it. Not grudgingly, with reservations and qualifications, but wholeheartedly and unreservedly. Where so many girls in bands sing with a meek and mild Home Counties reserve, as if they're petrified of offending anyone, Jackson is the living embodiment of the take-no-prisoners character she often affects in Long Blondes songs. Her voice is like Elsie Tanner in musical form: passionate, unapologetic, unashamed of its flaws, and all the more attractive for that brash self-confidence.
It is with some relief then - imagining that Jackson may have been cowed by the criticism or that some misguided Rough Trade wonk might have forced her into singing lessons - that I can report that Couples, the new Long Blondes album, reverberates with the sound of Jackson operating at full-throttle. Her voice is as desperate-sounding, as stretched and soulful, as charismatic and commanding as ever.
But, then, hasn't it always been the case that the last thing great singers need is actual singing ability? Yes, there is an elite of gifted singers - picking three at random, Jeff Buckley, Tony Bennett and Dionne Warwick - who have used their ability to quickstep up and down the scales in the service of genuine emotional potency. But, generally speaking, accomplished singers with amazing pipes - the Adele/Duffy axis being a prime example - make dull, pretty, emotionally lifeless music. They are capable technicians, but they have no verve or spirit.
The only thing worse is all those dullards in the middle, who can just about hold a tune, and who have taken to singing in a mockney twang - an epidemic affecting Kate Nash, the Kooks and Foals - under the misguided impression that this somehow makes them sound cool.
Give me a singer whose voice has character rather than one who can hold a note every time. Billie Holliday's tormented grasping after some elusive hurt; Robert Wyatt's cracked, broken teacup of a voice; Billy Bragg's open-hearted bellowing; Nico's exhausted dead-eyed delivery; Shaun Ryder's hard, guttural, raging-at-God pronunciation; Alexis Taylor's earnest marshalling of the little-boy-lost notes at his disposal; the range of Bjork's idiosyncratic theatrical delivery. These are the voices that I find exhilarating - those which sound not just novel but which achieve some emotional honesty.
Indeed, there's something about these "singers" getting up on stage and letting rip, knowing full well that they're no Britney, never mind Whitney, which, of itself, is moving. They are naked. Vulnerable. Incapable of hiding behind vocal showboating, struggling, in many cases, to hold a tune. Yet they have to sing. They connect, in spite of their deficiencies.
Kate Jackson wouldn't get past the first round on X-Factor. But she's a star in my book. She is woman: hear her roar.
