A Gallery Of Voices
William Gallagher
Radio Times, November 2004
Verity Sharp as you've never heard her before: as a tour guide on a trip round an aural archive of artists' voices. Radio 4's The Archive Hour is many things, but you wouldn't immediately call it giddy. Yet this week, presenter Verity Sharp gives us a sense of excitement and of not knowing what to talk about first, as she takes us on a tour around A Gallery of Voices.
Normally, the slot is concerned with social history topics and it uses radio archives to explore them, to comment on how they've developed and to examine how our perceptions of them have changed. This week, however, an archive itself is the focus: for this is a privileged tour around the Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, which is a sound archive in a spot formally occupied by the Tate Britain pictures stores on London's Millbank. Within these walls is a vast audio treasure trove simply begging to be heard.
"All these recordings have lain unheard and largely forgotten for five, 25 or 50 years" explains Sharp. Among the jewels of the collection are clips from a presentation by the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, as well as lectures by novelist Anthony Burgess, conversations with artists Gilbert and George and Patrick Heron, and writer JG Ballard doing a very nice piece on surrealism.
It's the sound equivalent of the famed Hulton Picture Library and for most of its existence it's been inaccessible. But though its doors are now open, you can't just wander in casually with your iPod and a FireWire cable, asking for Tracey Emin's more exasperated recordings (a couple of which are in this Archive Hour), partly because it's a reference centre intended for researchers, partly because there's just so much of it.
It's a sea of gems where the singer Laurie Anderson, for instance, can sound as if she's speaking today about O Superman (which was released in 1981), but a 1991 tape of Anthony Burgess feels like it was recorded a century ago. That's not because of the sound quality, though naturally that is variable, but because the recordings are more than a collection of the words these people said ˆ the tome and rhythms of each recording revealing the artist and his or her attitudes far more than a transcript ever could.
You come away believing that there cannot be any recording held in the collection that isn't fascinating. In response to this wealth of available material, The Archive Hour has gone for an eclectic grab-bag sampling technique and has decided to use the skills of Verity Sharp not so much as a presenter, per se, but as the voice on one of those museum guide tapes.
