Five of the country's leading vocalistes hand out awards to their fave singers.

JULIE ROBERTS

1 The Emotions "Walking In Line"
2 Patti Austin "All Live Together"
3 Chaka Khan "Nights In Tunisia"
4 Cheryl Lynn "Story Book Children"
5 = Brides Of Funkenstein "Party Going On"
5 = Minnie Ripperton "Loving You"

HELEN TERRY

1 Billie Holiday "Strange Fruit"
2 Jennifer Holiday "You're Going To Love Me"
3 Luther Vandross "Never Too Much"
4 Stevie Wonder "I Believe When I Fall In Love"
5 = Nina Simone "Baltimore"
5 = Aretha Franklin "Till You Come Back To Me"

TRACEY THORN | EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL

1 The Shangri Las "I Can Never Go Home Any More"
2 The Ronettes "Be My Baby"
3 Cocteau Twins "Musette & Drums"
4 Patti Smith "Gloria"
5 The Smiths "Wonderful Woman"

ANNE PIGALLE

1 Tom Waits "Frank's Wild Years"
2 Damia "Sombre Dimanche"
3 Lou Reed "Perfect Day"
4 Eartha Kitt "Lazy Afternoon"
5 Serge Gainsborg "Ah! Melody"

SADE ADU

1 Chet Baker "You Don't Know What Love Is"
2 Bill Withers "Hope She'll Be Happier With Him"
3 Ray Charles "Don't You Love Me Any More"
4 Billie Holiday "Strange Fruit"
5 Marvin Gaye "Inner City Blues"

AH! MELODY

(Serge Gainsborg)
"His voice is so sexy — the song is like a love song but it's not nice and pretty, he always uses kind of... strong words. Sometimes it's a bit rude. But then love is not just a pretty thing. I suppose he's not really a singer, he kind of talks. It's difficult if you're not French, too, because his words are quite important." AP

ALL LIVE TOGETHER

(Patti Austin)
"From her 'Live At The Bottom Line' album — brilliant! I used to go in for talent competitions to make some money, and a lot of the time I'd sing a cappella, mainly 'cos I wasn't too confident of my piano playing. This song is great — mainly a cappella with a bit of gospel at the end, and the emotion comes over so sincerely, you can almost touch it. It won me quite a bit of money, singing this one!" JR

BALTIMORE

(Nina Simone)
"Hick-town song, evocative, and I love the quality of her voice on this one. Expressive — she always makes me feel melancholic, and I quite like that feeling. She's got a very limited bottom-register range, but she's probably the only woman who can sing that deeply with so much force. I can't think of any British singers who can do that." HT

BE MY BABY

(The Ronettes)
"Ronnie Spector has a similar quality about her voice to the Shangri-Las in that it's on the verge of being unlistenable, unpleasant. And once you get three of them at it... A lot of their sound was down to recording and production, too. Everything about the records has that almost-unlistenable quality. Great." TT

DON'T YOU LOVE ME ANY MORE

(Ray Charles)
"I like most of his, really, except an awful country album he did a couple of years ago, the songs were awful. But this is from an album called 'Brother Ray', and it's almost a parody of himself, everything that he does when he sings he does on this song. And the string arrangements on it are brilliant." SA

FRANK'S WILD YEARS

(Tom Waits)
"It's a bit like a contemporary tale. It's quite funny — his voice is almost over the top, but at the same time it's very much kept in the style of the song, so it's not... stupid. I find his voice quite strong, he's good." AP

GLORIA

(Patti Smith)
"I remember the first time I heard it. I fell over, it was so good. And I love songs that start quietly like this, she's almost muttering, and then by the end she's screaming. I thought it was a bloke when I first heard it, the quality is so unusual for a woman, so deep and gruff. She's such a commanding singer — I was impressed. A unique woman's voice." TT

HOPE SHE'LL BE HAPPIER WITH HIM

(Bill Withers)
"It's hard to choose a favourite, but this is one — it's on the 'Live At Carnegie Hall' double, basically him doing most of his repertoire, and the musicianship is excellent. He had a speech impediment, very serious, for most of his life, and then he started singing and it was OK." SA

I BELIEVE WHEN I FALL IN LOVE...

(Stevie Wonder)
"A moving song, sung brilliantly. He's my hero — but this is my favourite of his, with that wonderful overdubbed chorus. Very repetitive, but quite wonderful. He's very self-disciplined too, takes it very seriously." HT

I CAN NEVER GO HOME ANY MORE

(The Shangri-Las)
"One of my favourite songs ever — I'm not sure who sings what on it. The other wonderful thing about the Shangri-Las, though, is the way they talk — better than the way most other people sing. There's a quality to their voices which is almost unpleasant. I love that." TT

INNER CITY BLUES

(Marvin Gaye)
"One of my favourite Marvin Gaye albums is actually 'Mr T', that soundtrack for Trouble Man, but this is my favourite song as you ask me. And you could put 'Makes Me Wanna Holler' in brackets, it always makes me laugh when people do that. The sentiment of the lyric I like. I suppose he was a technically good singer, but he doesn't let his technical ability get in the way of his interpretation of a song. Some people sing a song to be a great singer, other people sing it to be a great story-teller. Marvin Gaye is a great story-teller." SA

LAZY AFTERNOON

(Eartha Kitt)
"Her voice is wonderful, a bit like pure silk. It's soft and... very difficult to describe! I like this old stuff better, I don't like much of the new disco stuff — it's OK, but nothing as good as these old ones. Mind you, some of her songs are a bit 'cabaret', but there are a few that are classics, and this is one." AP

LOVING YOU

(Minnie Ripperton)
"There are so many good things of hers to choose from — a lot of the later stuff's good, too. You can't label her at all, there's nothing else like her. So good." JR

MUSETTE AND DRUMS

(The Cocteau Twins)
"My favourite singer at the moment. The track's an arbitrary choice, more because it's my favourite song of their's than anything else. But she's definitely the best singer around now, in a class of her own. She's one of the few people I can think of who just uses her voice like another musical instrument. It doesn't matter what lyrics she's singing — you can't really hear them — but it's just such a wonderful instrument. Incredible." TT

NEVER TOO MUCH

(Luther Vandross)
"He has a technically perfect voice, an excellent singer. He lives for singing, very disciplined — it's all planned so his voice is on top form all the time. Whereas I don't take singing all that seriously — it's a jolly way to make a living. You open your mouth and a noise comes out. But I admire people like Luther who can discipline themselves and become such perfect singers." HT

NIGHTS IN TUNISIA

(Chaka Khan)
"Brilliant vocal harmony and hardness. There's a high note she hits that's exactly the same as Dizzy Gillespie hit in the original. A lot of vocalists try to sing as an instrument would — Manhattan Transfer, for example — and Chaka Khan did that here with Dizzy's trumpet line. Very hard to do, but it was still very much her version. It was very original in the way she transformed it in such a contemporary way. She's a smart cookie." JR

PARTY GOING ON

(Brides of Funkenstein)
"Hard funk I've always liked, but I always used to think why don't women do this gutsy stuff too? Then I saw George Clinton play and he had the Brides of Funkenstein — I saw them and I fell in love. They're solid. Grit. Real hard core. And also they can sing. A lot of people who do that kind of sexy stuff, say Mary Jane Girls, or Vanity, they don't pull it off because they don't sing with quality. But the Brides would turn from heavy funk to a nice soul ballad easily." JR

PERFECT DAY

(Lou Reed)
"This is a song about ecstasy. I've always thought he's a great singer, his voice is so sexy and so kind of cool, you know? It must be somewhere in him, you can't just put some act on like that, it's got to be there in the first place. I'm sure it needs a little bit of technique, too. I'm quite a fan, actually, and this is a special one — if you feel a bit down you just put this on and you feel a bit better." AP

SOMBRE DIMANCHE

(Damia)
"That's actually 'Gloomy Sunday', but it was originally written as a French song. It's a very kind of dark song, people used to commit suicide to it. A dark love song. Her voice is really pure, but not in a technical way, more from the heart. It's old — the 40s I think — and it's where Piaf got a lot of her style from." AP

STORY BOOK CHILDREN

(Cheryl Lynn)
"I was still in the West Indies when it came out, about 1979 I think: 'Got To Be Real' was a smash, so I bought the album. This song, well... it made me cry. You can hear all her vocal technique to the fore — she can really go high, and she has this way of rounding off words, she doesn't just trail off like so many others do. This woman is serious, she does a lot of her own business, and she doesn't mess. The album she did with Luther Vandross was great, too — that really should have made her. She deserves more recognition." JR

STRANGE FRUIT

(Billie Holiday)
"I heard it first when I was about three years old and it really scared me, such perfect singing. Chilling. It still does. I just hope no-one covers it and ruins it. It's like a monument, it should have a preservation order slapped on it." HT

"It's quite eerie, and she represents in that one song the whole heart of the problem that existed at that time, she tells it like it was: it's basically about the suffering of the blacks in the South. 'Southern tree bears the strange fruit...' where the strange fruit is the black man hanging. There are various versions on record of her singing this — and I also love Nina Simone's version, which is quite quirky, almost avant-garde. But Billie Holiday really tells the story from the heart." SA

TILL YOU COME BACK TO ME

(Aretha Franklin)
"She has to be in here somewhere. A Stevie Wonder song, the first I heard of her when I was about 16. She does some weird things, repeating the 'tap on your windowpane' line over and over. Wonderful! Leo Sayer covered this last year and I had to leave the house when it came on. Leaving the room wasn't enough. Aretha doesn't overdo it here, she's very much in her stride, at the bottom end of her range — you can feel that she's comfortable, a nice easy feel." HT

WALKING IN LINE

(The Emotions)
"I used to study voices, and one of the groups I really got into was the Emotions. This sounds like four voices going on, and it's my favourite of all theirs. They just work so well together — whenever I go through my albums I'll always play an Emotions track." JR

WONDERFUL WOMAN

(The Smiths)
"My token man. This'll set the cat amongst the pigeons. People say to me Morrissey can only sing three notes, but I say he sings those three notes so well! I think he's an incredible singer and not recognised as such — and this is his finest moment. A beautiful ballad, and I think that's where he's best. Mournful, moving and unusual." TT

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS

(Chet Baker)
"The first time I ever heard him sing I thought he was a woman, I was listening to someone's tape. Then 'she' suddenly sang 'she... something or other'. Hang on. Is this a lesbian or something? Then I found out who he is — I love it. He quite often sings out of tune, a very lively recording. It's a beautiful track — and he's very natural and quirky. And Honest." SA

YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE ME

(Jennifer Holiday)
"This is from 'Dream Girls' — she's totally over the top. A classic torch ballad, I guess. I saw her do it on an awards programme on the TV and it made the hairs on the back of me neck stand up. I thought, somebody who can sing this song like this must have a totally warped and twisted character — but I met her and she's really sweet. Makes me look skinny, too!" HT