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Home » Back and forth in time: have these guys found the Fountain of Voice Youth?

Back and forth in time: have these guys found the Fountain of Voice Youth?

The New Neo Posted on by

Seriously, how do these old guys do it? Russell Hitchcock (the high tenor) has the sort of voice that doesn’t usually last till the age of 65, which is how old he is in this video. The other singer – Graham Russell (two Russells, I see) – is only one year younger, and he’s no slouch either.

This is the band – or duo, or whatever you want to call them – known as Air Supply. They mostly sing sentimental love ballads that Graham Russell wrote, and they were big in the 80s but remain popular in Asia and South America.

My guess is that a lot of people here and elsewhere cannot stand them, or mock them, or look down on people who like them, or all three. Schlocky, cheesy, showboaty, beneath contempt, whatever. I fully expect all sorts of excoriation for my eclectic musical tastes which are sometimes exceedingly uncool.

As for me – well, I rather like them. It’s Hitchcock’s voice I find especially extraordinary, so clear and seemingly effortless. I also like their harmonies very much, but then again I’ve got a pronounced weakness for harmonies involving male voices. Make of that what you will.

Here they’re performing live in 2014 in Hong Kong; Hitchkock’s the one in the multicolored shirt. I’ve cut out some audience singalong – they seem to be big on audience singalong – that extends the song. Close your eyes if you feel the need to avoid watching Hitchcock’s somewhat frenetic schtick. Listen to his voice, and remind yourself that the tenor is 65 here:

And here’s the ending, after the singalong part is over. That last note of Hitchcock’s is quite the tour de force:

Now let’s turn back the clock and hear them in Hawaii in 1982 at their peak – 32 years earlier, when they were in their 30s. Yes, they were even better back then. All I can say about that last note of Hitchcock’s here is that the name “Air Supply” is extremely apropos. He milks it for all it’s worth, and whyever not?:

[NOTE: Were Graham Russell and actor Jeff Daniels separated at birth?]

Comments

Back and forth in time: have these guys found the Fountain of Voice Youth? — 40 Comments

  1. Once found myself going on a longish nighttime drive into the outskirts of Bangkok with a retired Thai Border Police Colonel and a Hong Kong Godfather who never attended anyone’s christening, if you get my drift. Fortunately I wasn’t in the trunk. Colonel Somchai turned out to be a huge Engelbert Humperdinck fan.

    Couldn’t go inside a pub in HK in the 90s and not hear Hotel California between 10 and 11pm. Just one of those things.

    Not too many Aunties in this part of the world would say no to a free Air Supply Ticket, that’s for sure. Almost a class marker in that everyone who grew up in Asia on easy-listening English language (with some code-switching) stations can’t help but feel nostalgic about these guys.

    Another thing which helped Air Supply was the Great Karaoke Kraze of the 80s/90s in Asia. Disco died pretty fast out here and for a long time it was pretty much just Karaoke until the arrival of MDMA and Clubbing mid-90s. Air Supply lyrics and melodies seem to lend themselves well to Karaoke. No tongue twisters for sure. Autotune deals with any niggles.

    Now if you’re a real doddery old Oriental Grandma/Grandpa, this is the superstar who defined your generation:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv_cEeDlop0

    Younger Sister / Daughter / Niece was primed and ready for Air Supply when they first hit town.

  2. Schlock or not, these guys have real talent. Most male voices diminish in power and range with age, and typically lose the higher registers. These two are singing in the same key that they did in the eighties. It’s a combination of professionalism, practice, raw talent… And probably good genes.

    Hitchcock’s high harmonies are a bit more subdued now, and his sustain on the final note is ten seconds… Not the seventeen he was capable of in the eighties. But those are quibbles. “Effortless” describes it well, although what it really is is years of effort distilled. I can’t imagine the amount of practice these guys must put in.

    I play guitar and sing with my brother-in-law: he’s a trained singer, I am not. He sounds effortless. I don’t.

  3. To my everlasting embarrassment, Air Supply was the first album I bought for myself with my own money.

  5. Air Supply goes into the same category as REO Speedwagon and Journey for me–all favorites, equally good. I love this song, and they’re a genuinely great band.

    (Although I have to say that, for years, thanks to a misattributed youtube video, I thought they did Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You, and it was one of my favorites of theirs–but apparently that was a George Benson song. Ah well.)

  8. Russell Hitchcock in Hawaii (the early-years clip) looks like he just got back from his other gig, at BBC, playing the Seventh Doctor.

    I mean, he’s not the perfect spitting image of Sylvester McCoy, but it’s close enough I was wondering if the show got cancelled for a while so Air Supply could tour.

  9. As for making vocal comparisons with other 80’s acts:

    I think Air Supply belongs in the category with REO Speedwagon and with Supertramp, but not so much with Journey.

    Yes, you have the high vocal parts in all three. Russell Hitchcock has a smooth high tenor, like Kevin Cronin and Roger Hodgson. Steve Perry developed more of the whiskey-voiced grit (while remaining rounder-sounding and more commercially-accepted than the screamers like, say, Axl Rose or Steven Tyler).

  10. No doubt about the unusual prowess in their voices at this age. I can’t speak to their musicianship, so I’ll accept the more knowlegeable assessment of others here.

    Perhaps because I was older and at a less impressionable age, their music never resonated with me. I put them in the same category as England Dan & John Ford Coley. Just not my cup of tea. I’m sure that some of the music I like, at least some here would respond with… “meh”. Thank goodness we don’t all march to the same drummer.

    “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost

  13. You forgot Ann Wilson. Do any comparison video from her in her “prime” to her doing the same songs during the last decade…no comparison. Her voice is stronger with more range and expression now than in her 20s.

  16. Years ago when I was in grade school, and there was still something called pop music – or at least something called “melody” – there were a couple of tunes playing on my parents’ car radio that were on quite a lot.

    They were generally of the breezy, romantic young-adults embarking-on-life milieu type stuff that was not rock, but of the Engelhurry Humpher Jones, Petula Warwick class of output. I guess it is called ” easy listening” or something.

    Anyway, the two I have in mind were “Call Me”, and “The More I See You”. Apparently the latter of these two was well known enough and considered passe’ enough to be included in a scene set in a comic/ominous nightclub patronized by wealthy blinged up Levantines, in the Harrison Ford mystery “Frantic”.

    Anyway, I always envisioned a 20 something blond California girl of that older Elvis Presely age set, singing the song. Hair likely bobbed in a flip, cocktail dress hemmed at the knee.

    The movie, which I saw on DVD some years after its release motivated me to look the song up.

    It was actually sung by some Mexican-American guy.

    Just now doing some checking, I see that a handful of years before, in the early sixties he had had a charting release called “Let’s Dance”. Listening to 30 seconds of that, he sounds just as you might imagine a teenaged self-consciously Hispanic male singer of that era would. He could be singing “La Bamba” and you would just assume it was ….

    Hearing the other tunes though, he sounds like this girl …
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R4pBt3yHOcs

    Mother of mercy ….

  17. I’m with you, Neo. I like close harmony, and what’s wrong with sentimental love ballads?

  18. By the way, I want to state for the record tha I was just having what I hope was taken as a bit of unserious fun, and that no real mockery of anyone’s taste is intended.

    Neo’s anticipation of the critical reactions she expected to provoke, kind of hit me. How rotten that someone cannot even share an innocent pleasure, observation, or reminiscence, without expecting someone else – from whom they might rightfully assume a sympathetic or at least considerate hearing – to instead immediately come along and throw shade on it.

    And I began to think, as I did earlier in reference to the Bee Gees post, about how people who could agree on the broad outlines of political ideals could nonetheless disagree almost violently about what is quality, or even tolerable music. What is then, the nature of music?

    That is a topic probably worth some consideration in and of itself.

  19. There is so much excellent music made, recorded and performed at times in my life when I could not be bothered to try to appreciate it on its merits. It is wonderful to have an open mind at this point to understand the craft and skill that went into its making – and to enjoy it. Although I do not particularly like this song, I agree that there is a lot to be said for it. As an aside, I love to play my guitar and sing and I can truthfully say that I can hit higher notes and sing much more competently now at 60 years old than I could in my teens and 20s. Practice and a seriousness to get better are key.

  20. The last time I had the opportunity to sing the Hallelujah Chorus in a performance was at about age 67. I could still sing the soprano line, taking breaths only at the ends of phrases. It was so much fun!

  21. DNW, thanks for the link. I had never heard of Toots Thielemans. What an incredible musician. And talk about someone who improved with age – look-wise anyway.

  22. It’s easy to sing with a mike up at your mouth. It’s called “crooning”.
    What hurts the pipes is screaming/yelling, belting, or using too much breath.

    Opera singers run the risk of belting and using a lot of breath pressure to “project” when singing without electronic amplification. The ones with bad technique lose their voices.

    The opera singers with good technique don’t ruin their voices. The old Met saw many male opera singers who continued into their 60s. Many of them transition to lieder or other small-recital-hall formats.

    … of course, the cynical explanation of the Air Supply clips is the “Milli Vanilli” approach to touring. Madonna wasn’t singing while dancing like that, either…

  23. Eva Marie on January 17, 2021 at 2:31 pm said:
    DNW, thanks for the link. I had never heard of Toots Thielemans. What an incredible musician. And talk about someone who improved with age – look-wise anyway.

    You are welcome. I didn’t know who he was either and just stumbled across that video some years ago as I was looking up “Bluesette”.

    Arrived for the tune, stayed for the blonde – despite her wig and eye shadow, – and wound up discovering a guy who apparently had a bit of a vogue in the mid sixties with one or two jazz and bossa nova influenced tunes and his guitar and whistling.

    I was most impressed with the ability of the singer to deliver without the slightest detectible Danish accent. Especially in the second song.

    I also see now that if I had read Zaphod’s comment more closely, I would not have struggled to come up with the term ‘easy listening.’

    I guess it is a real category. Kind of.

  25. “The best jazz chromatic harmonica player ever”

    Well to be fair that’s not a large cohort. But he *is* really good.

    Are there any non-chromatic jazz harmonica players, i. e. plain old Marine Band? Those are used mostly for country and blues.

  26. Anyone who maintains popularity in the music business for many years, much less decades, is reaching people whether you or I like them or not. It is not common in my experience for people to buy a recording or attend a concert at gunpoint.

  28. Ben David:

    They’re not lip syncing. They sound different there than any recording of them.

    And “easy to sing with a mike up your mouth”? I certainly can’t do it. I’ve also noticed – because I like to listen to these “then vs. now” videos where I get to compare older singers with their younger selves – that most pop or rock voices seem to degenerate quite a bit with age. Perhaps that’s because they’re not necessarily highly trained and don’t preserve their voices as well as they should.

    I also think that it’s particularly the case that tenors tend to lose it with age, as compared to lower voices. I wonder whether that was true of the old-time opera singers as well. Were any of the ones who kept their voice quality to a ripe old age tenors?

  29. As far as Air Supply is concerned, it looks like they put on a great show. I looked at their 2021 schedule. Several sold out shows. O I hope there won’t be any cancellations.

  30. OT in a Big Way, but not too overtly political and might interest some:

    I’m currently re-reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory about his jaunt down the Mississippi in a small boat in 1979. Been a lot of water under the bridge since I first and last read it ca. 1985, so a kind of elegaic re-reading of an elegaic book about much more than just a river.

    (Aside: River Elegy is a documentary from another another time and place about another river. Highly recommended. )

    Back to Old Glory:

    Ruminations aside, I had the brainwave that I could google every person of note he met in his travels and read what became of them. Also could follow his journey in Google (err) Maps / Street View.

    As the Thais say: Salowly, salowly.

    Had been meaning to revisit Old Glory for a long time, but glad to have gotten to it just around now.

    And I’m going with the flow.

    Panta Rhei … a sentiment much less likely to cop you a thunderbolt from Zeus than Molon Labe in the Current Year.

  31. “Old Glory”: I remember that book. Raban’s description of the crowds at the Minnesota state fair (“a vast cetaceous wallowing” is a phrase that stuck in the memory), almost getting killed in the lock at Minneapolis, the romantic interlude in St. Louis, and the final anticlimactic petering-out in the bayou estuaries below New Orleans.

    Water: you should visit the Gulf–“the Guff”, as they say here–if you make it back the States again. Better make it before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “liberates” us from our “oppression”.

    Looking into what’s become of Raban turned up this piece on his father’s retreat to Dunkirk in 1940:

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n19/jonathan-raban/belt-boots-and-spurs

    His dad was Royal Artillery. Like the title character in Alan Sillitoe’s “The Widower’s Son”, a novel from the same period as “Old Glory” that also describes the retreat to Dunkirk. Wonder if Raban has read it.

  33. Zaphod —

    Google Maps is going to be difficult to give up. Seven or eight years ago I was able to sit down with my dad and find his 1930s boyhood house in Heavener, OK (pop. 3400).

  34. FOAF, I laughed out loud at your comment because it is so true. You nailed it.

    I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s and back then, there were as there are now, a lot of music snobs that look down on what is called “pop” music. Well, it’s called pop because it’s “popular”, meaning a lot of folks like it. And in the music business that’s all that counts really.

    My pat phrase is: “Free American citizens are allowed to have different tastes than you or I.”

    (Well, for now anyway.)

    About old voices… I am 66 and I’ve been singing in choir for a very long time. As I age, I have found that my base register has actually improved a bit while my tenor register has declined quite a lot. I am not a professional in any way shape or form, but I do have a good time.

    The Hallelujah chorus is one of my favorites. It has some good strong base parts. But then there was that time when we were right at the end and I lost count of my “Hallelujah”s. When everyone else rested, I sang a one word solo with all the gusto I could bring. It brought down the house. That was over 20 years ago and my wife and my colleagues still laugh about it, mostly because they all remember my face turning such a lovely shade of red. (It was a dress rehearsal, so it wasn’t as big a disaster as it could have been.)

  36. There were singers who sang “properly” and other who then blew out their voices singing wrongly to get a certain sound that could never last…

  37. It’s health IMO that people partake of some trashy versions of art that they can enjoy on occasion.

    Air Supply, Hall and Oats, Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon are a group of sorts. Hall and Oats has more of an R&B verve. I always enjoyed H&O songs on the radio but never felt like buying any.

    Journey and Styx are interesting in that both started with talented lead guitarists and hard rock bands that couldn’t make much money. Then both bands brought in song writing crooners as lead vocalists. Steve Perry was pretty good, and so Journey was pleasant or at least tolerable (and they made a fortune) whereas that Styx vocalist was just too obsequious (or something) for my taste.
    _____

    Holy smokes, this Michal Adler that Johann A.M. recommended is amazing. Her playing is very lyrical in places, but also reminds me of the piccolo trumpet with the rapid articulated high notes. I think the only other woman I’ve seen playing harmonica is Bonnie Raitt.

  38. Interesting development with YouTube. Though to call it a “development”, may be misconstruing the timeline of the problem. It might be that I merely triggered its operation recently with regards to myself.

    It first began, to some degree , after I downloaded DDGo to my tablet as a search engine. I noticed that if I closed the ATT home page and accessed Neo’s site directly through the browser, I could not then access the Neo linked videos without proving I was human.

    Next, when I turned off the Yahoo home page completely, I found that even when entering the Youtube address in the browser window directly and viewing the standard selection suggestions on the screen, they could not be viewed because of an “invalid response” message appearing.

    I probably should have anticipated this, because when using Brave on an office desktop, I received a message that YouTube videos may not be viewed anonymously. They apparently do not allow it.

    I’m doubtful that this is anything brand new, even if for one reason ir another I did not notice it before as a systematic response.

    Of course as I have previously mentioned, being a registered YouTube member, and hence “creator” (one 15 second video 6 years ago) I recently received notice regarding the new policy that self-entitles them to add advertisements to even non-monetized non-partnered videos at their discretion, and to keep the revenue for themselves.

    They give no reason to doubt that this will apply to videos which they have actively demonetized with regard to the content creator, as well. Your punitively demonetized video might still have ads, under this scenario, but you will not benefit.

    As one might guess, this process could function as a kind of censorship by disruption tool in cases wherein YouTube may not wish to ban a video outright and provoke fallout thereby..

    In order to give this idea a rough exploration, I sought out a couple of videos that should have had very little advertising value. The problem with my test is that I had no way of knowing if the content provider was in fact ” partnered” for advertising.

    Nonetheless, unlike history or science or mechanical engineering videos which are a prime and obvious man trap for generating ad revenue, I figured that a viral video of a conservative Catholic priest delivering an impassioned anti-Democrat homily would be the last thing YouTube would place ads in.

    The first times I viewed it months ago, it did not. This time, two ads interrupted his sermon before it was 2/3rds over. Possibly this was merely the result of it having gone viral in a smallish way and attracting the attention of a system trigger. Or maybe not.

    But it probably bears more investigation.

    And by a chain of thought I won’t bother to describe, this brings me to Gab, and to a lesser degree, to Rumble. My conclusion is that they need to make an effort, especially Gab, to broaden their appeal to producers. Serving as a lifeboat for the stridently discontented will only take the projects so far, after an initial crush to enter.

    Rumble for example needs much more than political and animal videos, and Gab needs to watch out that it does nor become the Libertarian Party of the internet: once briefly up and coming, now a roostimg place and ghetto for QAnon cranks and the like.

    As for Rumble again; if every fat and fake newscasting “conservative” rumor monger with a desk and an Indiana Jones hat shows up on Rumble, it will do as much to kill it as cause it to flourish, if there is not more positive content to keep people there as well.

    Using the mass appeal and audience of Twitter, is how Donald Trump turned the tables on the media government client complex in the first place. He went to a pool with broad appeal, and created a tremendous splash. So, Gab and Rumble, need people who are unlike me; since people like me, have virtually no interest in social media to begin with. Of course, there is no denying that as an open channel alone, Gab does a great service. Rumble too.

    As for me, I’m leaving messages on the car, and ship and history channels on YouTube urging them to take advantage of Rumble. That way, eventually, I hope, I’ll never have to use YouTube again unless I get a sudden and irresistabke craving to watch a jackass skate board off of a rooftop onto a moving pick-up truck.

  39. DNW —

    My understanding is that Youtube changed how they handle interstitial ads, so now the creator has to explicitly turn them off per video or watchers will get ads every X minutes whether they want to or not.

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