'Naked at the Albert Hall', by Tracey Thorn

Having set new standards for the pop memoir with 2013's Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn now turns her attention to the faculty that has enabled her to earn her keep for the past 30-odd years: the human voice. In Naked at the Albert Hall, the singer - best known for her work with her husband Ben Watt in the indie-pop duo Everything But The Girl - explores the art of singing from inside and out, in literature and mythology, in physiology and psychology, on stage and in the studio, from the tortured insecurities of Dusty Springfield (she hated the sound of her own voice) to the innocent pleasure of the children's birthday party (where Thorn says she tries to ensure that when "Happy Birthday" comes around, it is pitched in a comfortable key).

Thorn arranges her material in a series of bite-sized excursions with amusingly catchy chapter headings - "Rufus Wainwright's Trousers", "Looks Like an Elephant"; the book itself takes its title from the chapter in which Thorn discusses her retreat from singing in public - she hasn't done so for 15 years, as a result of her enduring stage fright - and recalls her nightmare in which she is on stage at the Royal Albert Hall: " . . . I look down at myself and realise I am completely naked."

Thorn is particularly good at unpicking the often conflicting attitudes that surround the aesthetics of singing: what constitutes a "good" voice? Though herself a technically accomplished singer with a satisfyingly rich voice, she comes from a generation of new wave and post-punk musicians who set out to challenge artistic norms with what she calls "non-singing". Eschewing the "proper" singing of their predecessors, vocalists such as Mark E Smith of The Fall and the late Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex would, says Thorn, have failed dismally at any other time in pop history ("Can Mark E Smith 'sing', in any conventional sense of the word? You'd have to say no"); instead they forged singing styles that relied on the sheer force of their personalities for their impact.

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By relating her own experiences on stage and in the studio, and through a series of short interviews with fellow singers such as Green Gartside of Scritti Politti and Alison Moyet, Thorn gives an intriguing insider's view of what it's like to sing as a professional. But amateur singers will also connect with her observations on the panic that can arise around the business of remembering lyrics. Thorn relates that moment of terror with which anyone who has sung in public will surely identify: "I'm getting to the end of a line and I'm thinking, I don't know what the next line is . . . and then it comes out of my mouth - and I'm thinking, I didn't know what the line was so how did my voice sing it?"

Thorn is a fluent storyteller who writes with lightness and wit, her pitch-perfect prose skipping nimbly from the superficial to the profound; between, for instance, her irritation at Damon Albarn's habit of sibilating the letter "s", and her questioning of our need to mythologise the lives of female singers such as Vashti Bunyan who flourished briefly and then disappeared from public view.

Thorn suggests that these vanishing acts slipped away not because of some romantic, Garbo-ish desire to be alone, but because singing simply became less important in their lives.

Finally there's the prickly issue of The X Factor, the talent show often sniffily dismissed by those who like to think of themselves as admirers of "real" music, but about which Thorn writes with characteristic candour. "We reach the end drained and wretched," she writes, "wondering why we started watching . . . and we vow never to watch again. And then we do. I do. I absolutely do."

Naked at the Albert Hall: The Inside Story of Singing, by Tracey Thorn, Virago, RRP£16.99, 256 pages

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