This book is an attempt to shed some light on why singers are more likely to sing in certain styles than others; it is about how singing styles evolve, change and relate to each other. It began life as a PhD thesis, which I researched while working as a singer. Like many so-called products of the English choral tradition, I first began to sing at about the age of seven, when I joined my local church choir at the insistence of my father, who happened to be the organist. A small amount of talent and a lot of parental vision enabled me eventually to get a place at the choir school of King's College, Cambridge just as the Boris Ord era was giving way to that of David Willcocks. The daily round of practices and services in that glorious fifteenth-century chapel leaves an ineradicable mark on the children privileged to sing in it, and when I moved on at the age of fourteen it seemed the most natural thing to want to return to one of the Oxford or Cambridge colleges as an undergraduate to carry on where I had left off. In the mid-sixties, therefore, with a newly acquired tenor voice, I found myself having singing lessons in order to attempt the necessary choral scholarship. At about the same time as I started this rather serious business, I became caught up in something entirely other: the almost visceral excitement that was the sixties pop scene.