Live music: Is what you are hearing really live?

Shania Twain relied on autotune to stay in tune. Photo / WireImage

What makes live music live? It might seem a silly question, but if you attended a concert where the vocalist was miming and musicians playing to pre-recorded backing tracks, would you feel cheated? Because that is what is happening. Indeed, the bigger the venue and the artist, the more chance what you are hearing is not live.

As a professional music critic, I go to a lot of shows and know about the blatant fakery. Vocals are mixed into choirs of harmonies from invisible backing singers. Rhythm tracks thunder with percussion that would require the drummer to have eight arms. You hear saxophone solos from groups without horns, lead guitar from bands with no stringed instruments and lush orchestral arrangements that appear out of the ether. Meanwhile, singers dance energetically, never out of breath, never missing a note, even when they neglect to put the mic to their lips.

Shania Twain toured the UK last year with a band of dancing musicians perfectly replicating her big-production recordings, with no bassist or keyboard player, and the drummer spent at least half the show detached from her kit. Twain relied on the increasingly ubiquitous autotune effect that artificially adjusts notes so that they are always perfectly in tune.

Yet I am loathe to single out Twain for criticism, because, frankly, they are (almost) all at it. I once saw Madonna drop a microphone during a dance routine with no discernible effect on her vocals. Modern pop has become shameless in its use of backing tracks, with stars from Britney Spears to Justin Bieber barely bothering to disguise their miming. It often occurs to me, watching visibly bored pop stars, that they might not only enjoy themselves more if they tried singing live, they would get better every night. Because faking it never improved anyone's skill.

This trend has crossed into all popular music genres. Rock star Meat Loaf collapsed on stage in Edmonton, Canada, in 2015 while his voice continued to boom from the PA. Beyonce admitted that her rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner at Obama's 2013 inauguration was pre-recorded. Mariah Carey was caught lip syncing at a New Year's Eve performance in New York in 2016. These are just the most public incidents. What is more common now is that singers perform with their voice wrapped in protective pre-recorded layers, so that there is no possibility of hitting a bad note. It is as if nothing can be left to chance, or talent, any more.

This is an open secret in the industry, although details are guarded by an omerta-like code of silence. I have spoken to road crew but none would go on the record. But asked how many bands play to pre-recorded tracks, a veteran sound engineer replied: "I think they all do."

Advancing technology in electronic music has been shifting notions of what musicians can get away with on-stage for decades. As far back as 1990, David Bowie's Sound + Vision tour was hugely reliant on synced material. Keyboard player Rick Fox was so bored triggering samples that he wore headphones and listened to other albums during the show. It has only got worse since.

Or better, depending on your view. Gigs in the past were often beset by sound issues. Today, a big show is almost always pristine. And it seems to be what the public want.

Some musicians still revel in their ability to do it completely live, such as Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan, Jack White and Mumford and Sons.

What you sacrifice when you rely on tech is a sense of jeopardy, the possibility that something could go wrong, or even right. Imagine a gig where it might not sound like the record ... but actually sound better. Where something could happen on that night, in that venue, with those musicians and that audience that nobody could have predicted.

If all we want is proximity to our idols in slick shows that sound exactly like recordings, then you can't really accuse musicians of cheating their audience. But they might be cheating themselves.