That syncing feeling Give us the gaffes of live performance

Madonna opened the broadcast by revealing what an appalling singer she is. Her used gym togs may be worth $39,000 (they're on sale at a Manhattan gallery), but her vocal technique, tone and pitch are bargain basement. I've heard amateurs sing better.

Alanis Morissette did a nice job, but she wasn't perfectly bang on tune, either. And even the great Sheryl Crow hit a flat note or two.

This was a demonstration of real human voices, warts and all. No cozy studio with teams of engineers and fancy electronics to do 100 takes and get every note perfect, it was a live battleground where 100 things can go wrong. I'm surprised Grammy producers had the guts, given the vast audience that tuned in. Other televised music shows, such as the American Music Awards, often rely on pre-recorded vocals. Production-wise, it's a lot easier -and more common than many people think.

"It's usually done to maintain the integrity of the product,"

"Television is way less than ideal conditions. Usually what happens is that we'll run tape in parallel with the live performance and use it for an emergency standby in case a mic goes down."

The viewing public often doesn't know what to believe. Speaking of which, on the verses to Believe, Cher the Disco Queen's big hit, her voice is run through some gadget for an interesting effect we haven't heard the last of. Every time she does the song on TV, it sounds exactly like the CD. Coincidence?

The recent Lord of the Dance show was slammed by a reader for "foot-syncing," i.e., using pre-recorded tap dancing tracks. Producers for the show deny this, explaining said tracks are merely "guides." Pop acts such as Spice Girls, New Kids on the Block and Backsteet Boys have been said to use canned vocals to "enhance" their own. When I saw 'N Sync perform last year, however, I was positive most of the vocals were lip-synced. How else could those guys dance like maniacs and not miss a single note? It's not humanly possible.

Kid group the Moffatts came along last year trumpeting proudly that they play their own instruments and sing their own songs - just like Hanson did - something that should be implicit. Nearly 10 years after Milli Vanilli became the sacrificial scapegoats for the lip-syncing non-issue, it's sad that musicians now have to brag about being the real deal. They all were in the old days, by cracky.

It all came to a head recently. The Edmonton Sun incorrectly reported that Montreal duo Sky's in-store performance in West Edmonton Mall on Feb. 17 was lip-synced. I didn't see the show, but during an interview earlier that day, Antoine Sicotte and James Renald insisted that what they do is live all the way.

Says Antoine,

"Because of the boy bands and all that stuff, it's important for us to show that we write our own songs, we sing, we play all our own instruments, we produce."

It is sad, he agrees, that if you're a pop group - especially a pop group that draws thousands of screaming young girls - people are quick to assume that you're just lip-syncing fashion models who don't write your own material. Antoine and James, on the other hand, were making their own music in their home studio six years ago. Citing '80s pop and R&B as chief influences, they produced an indie album and made a video that went into rotation on Quebec's video network, MusiquePlus, thus earning the attention of EMI Music. Now that Some Kinda Wonderful is a hit and Sky's album Piece of Paradise is climbing the charts, people assume they came out of nowhere, that they're a studio creation. Sky is, in fact, a studio creation - created by the group itself. The Feb. 17 show was only their fourth live performance.

"It was a little scary for us," James says. "The studio for us had been a controlled environment for years, and then going out on stage, it's such a different energy. You lose a little, but you win a whole different thing. We did a lot of rehearsing before our first show and really drilled ourselves to get into that."

OK, so Sky didn't lip-sync. They didn't even use instrumental backing tapes. It was all live. We're sorry.

I was also informed that British pop teen Billie wasn't lip-syncing at her WEM performance. It was "live to tape." Silly me. All the voices - lead and backup singers (though there weren't any there) -sounded exactly the same whether Billie was moving her lips in front of the microphone or dancing around with the mic by her side.

Rule of thumb: If you hear singers in what's supposed to be a "live" performance and there are no singers on stage, the alleged performer deserves whatever arrows you can sling.

Demand the real deal. A few flat notes is a small price to pay - except in Madonna's case, of course. She should lip-sync whenever she can.