Taking the mike

Fifty-two years ago, our shiny, silver transistor radio stopped talking or singing to us. It hadn’t fallen off its perch, but it was dead, all the same.

The ‘new’ radio had, in turn, replaced a beloved black wireless set that my parents had brought to the house from their first marital home (a tiny, draughty cottage) in the late 1950s, just before I was born. It had proudly occupied a pride of place on a shelf just above the kitchen table. No matter that my mother never had enough shelf space for pots and pans, the wireless was not for moving until, like the new radio, it didn’t.

And so, in early 1973, another new radio was ordered from the mail order catalogue. Now at ‘big school,’ and having helped steer them through decimalisation earlier that year, I was allowed to have a say in the purchase. My parents waited patiently until I returned home one wintry afternoon for the big unveiling. Black and chunky, it also housed a mechanism not seen in our home before, nor in many other houses in our village.

Yes, we were now the proud owners of our first radio cassette recorder.

My father was relieved that we had gone back to a black set, although he did frequently point out that transistors were no match for valves in terms of tone, as well as reminding us often that the ‘World at One’ now carried news stories in from the outside world that were much worse than they used to be. As for the weather…

I took all of his points on board and just as quickly dismissed them now that I could record the Top 40 on Sunday evenings on my new C120 cassette tapes. I still break out in a sweat when I remember having to quickly and efficiently turn over the tape after the first hour of the programme. Much more than that, though, the new machine came with a portable microphone, which even had its own little stand if your, as yet, small fingers grew tired of holding it.

I could now record chart songs from Top of the Pops on Thursdays, my own voice and even those of other people! I didn’t have many friends, so it was mainly mine. After all, I’d had a say in it.

Recording songs was hazardous, not just because of the recording levels required and consequently deafening volume of the TV set, but because, by crawling towards it stealthily from behind on my tummy to reposition the microphone over and over, the pile on the carpet frequently caused it to fall over. By the time I had it set up perfectly again, the song I’d wanted had finished, and I/it was recording something I’d never listen to.

I’ve been thinking back to this a lot lately, and nothing to do with carpet burns. I am producing audiobook versions of my fiction titles from the Inspector Harcourt crime mystery series. ‘The Proofreader’ is already available from Audible and is shortly to be joined by ‘Water, Slaughter Everywhere.’

I now possess a beautiful Samson microphone, which is also black, and sit quietly in my room in rural Worcestershire, talking to myself for hours! I cheerfully tell my wife I am going into the ‘studio’ to ‘lay down some tracks.’ The studio is, of course, the dining room, but I refer to it as the ‘library’ when I am not recording, and she isn’t listening.

Those early pioneering years are often revisited when, struggling with some aspect of ‘noise floor’ on the real Audacity studio on my PC, I accidentally knock the microphone over and have to start all over again.
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So much for progress…

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