Between The Ears

A ghost town in America's west is brought back to life through words, music and sound.

Preview

Between the Ears presents Ghost Town, conjuring those relics of the old American West – railroad crossings, mines, saloons – places we think we know from films but can still see today, either as deserted ruins or restored as tourist attractions. Producers Alan Hall and Diane Hope blend music, anecdotes and ambient sound into the sort of aural picture which, itself, could become a mere memory if radio’s boundaries go on being narrowed by both budget and corporate ambition.

Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2009

A walk down the main street of any of the hundreds of mining towns in the Southwest of America in the 1870s would have been accompanied by a vital soundtrack: horses' hooves, carriages, men tumbling out of bars, prostitutes hoping they'll fall in their direction, and the animated bustle of a thriving community going about its business. This superb aural portrait captures the traces of this long-ago-life in what is left behind: an eerie and melancholy soundtrack of America's ghost towns. Producers Alan Hall and Diane Hope have cut in unidentified voices from some of the few people who remain in these deserted streets. They tell stories of the jail where the heat was more punishing than the lack of freedom and of the woman who rode naked through town to make her point. It's a superbly crafted evocation of a way of life lost - but not entirely forgotten.

Jane Anderson, Radio Times, 19 June 2009

Press

Ghost Town (Radio 3, Saturday) was full of bare, spare sounds and charismatic eccentrics. "Rumour has it that I rode down through town naked on a horse like Lady Godiva," drawled Katie Lee, one resident of a ghost town in the American West. She didn't confirm or deny the rumour. In this evocative portrait of these crumbling communities, everything was eerie and haunting. Diane Hope's sound recordings caught a creaking sign blowing in the wind; the soft clip-clop of horses' hooves on sandy ground. These aural details formed an atmospheric backdrop to the tales of living where a town used to be.

Lee, who describes herself as a "ghost town lady", recalled busier times in the mining town she still lives in. There were restaurants, bars, hotels, opium dens and "husbands' alley, where ladies were paid for their embraces." Lee's bathtub is an old opium barrel. "It fits me like a glove," she purred. She doesn't have much company, you sense, but she isn't alone. "Oh that's my favourite lizard," she cried, spotting one on the wall.

We also heard from a caretaker of several ghost towns, who keeps things ticking over for tourists. His job, he explained with understatement, "gives me a lot of peace and quiet".

Elizabeth Mahoney, The Guardian, 22 June 2009