Seduced by Sound
I’m not sure I can remember the exact moment I became utterly seduced by sound but I do remember when I became infatuated with radio. I was already working at the BBC in Glasgow after somehow stumbling into a job in Radio Scotland. Having rarely listened to anything more than the Radio 1 breakfast show as a kid I was suddenly working alongside Stuart Cosgrove and Tam Cowan on the now legendary Off the Ball.
I was living in a magnolia bedsit in Glasgow’s Cleveden Drive, a leafy walk from work through the Botanics. It was a grand, double fronted house where dark, heavily polished mahogany-lined-walls and doors encased elegant, pastel tinted lead windows and mosaic tiled floors. Now it’s been renovated and commands eye-popping million plus figures – I know because I just googled number 38 and was treated to a silky-smooth video walk through to a beigey bland backing track – but then, in 1996, it was just a house of multiple occupation ruled over by a small and fierce female landlady.
We didn’t mix much, the other residents and me, I’d occasionally see the guy across the hall (he who got the bay window), a beautiful model called Jayden with a much older but equally beautiful Swiss girlfriend who’d fly in from Europe to visit him while her ex-husband looked after their 4-year-old twins.
New to Glasgow and far too skint to own a tv or go out much I grew to love the solitude of curling up in my single bed and listening to the radio. I flirted with any and every station I came across. I followed each medal of the 1996 Olympics immersed in 5 Live, breathless when Pinsent and Redgrave won Gold in the Coxless pairs, I literally cried with laughter at I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and The News Quiz on Radio 4 then swiftly changed allegiance over to Radio 1 to share my late nights with Mark and Lard. Little did I know that all those hours, lying in the dark listening, would prove so formative; that all these years later – 27 of them – I’d still be lying in the dark listening, more often than not these days, to my brain whirring, unable to settle while I piece together an edit in my head. Playing with sound and its possibilities has become a lifelong obsession.
When I was first making radio documentaries and features, I’d lie awake at night in a panic of indecision, terrified of looming deadlines while I scrambled to fit things together in my mind, an audio jigsaw with a million moving parts. There was always too much choice, too many ways to make something, the sound possibilities seemed endless. Slowly over the years I learned to stop panicking and trust the process, my process, that process being one of sitting with the kernel of an idea and softly listening for the solution. Now it almost feels like a game of stealth, concentrate too hard on an idea and it won’t take shape but look away and it will start to form, usually finding shape in the early hours of the morning. One of my tests for whether an idea is good or not is if I’m stalked by it. If I find it lurking in the shadows when I’m making coffee or setting the fire, if it comes on every dog walk and sits passing me ingredients as I cook.
I’m sure every programme maker will do it differently but for me it’s always been a case of sitting waiting until I quite suddenly and clearly hear the idea in my head, then I simply pour it out of my head into the mould I’ve imagined for it. Once I’m in the edit I’m in my happy place, its where everything flows.
Those days in that magnolia painted bedsit seem so far away, with thousands of audio adventures between now and then, but the passion remains unwavering and my delight in leaning in to listen intently to the power of sound has never waned.