Interviewing Bart
I was 10 when I interviewed Bart Simpson. It took about a week and the resulting interview was little more than a minute long. It was to be the start of my journey with sound.
You see as a 10-year-old armed with nothing more than a Boot’s finest double cassette boom box and a copy of the latest “The Simpsons sing the Blues” album on cassette, it was a case of recording my question onto the blank tape in deck A, and then running the album in deck B to the exact spot where Bart would give me an answer.
Telling the Story
I asked him about his day and told the story of him going to school and getting into trouble when he got home. His answers ranged from ‘where’s your sense of humour?’ to ‘don’t have a cow man’ but the sense of achievement when I played it back had me hooked. What had started out as a blank cassette now featured me and him seemingly chatting away.
I moved on from animated characters to interviewing my friends. My long-suffering mate Melanie was often involved in my ‘radio shows’ and I would spend hours fast forwarding, rewinding, recording and re-recording my own top 10s. By now I had an old record player with a tape deck attached and I would spin the LPs and make up links while Melanie sat bemused by it all.
Radio revealed
It wasn’t until I was 17 that I set foot inside a radio station. A chain of events led me to gain some work experience at what was then Neptune Radio based in Dover. I am not sure whether they invited me back or if I just kept turning up, either way I spent the best part of every Friday there. I continued studying for my A-Levels, thinking about university and hoping one day I would step into a studio where the mic was my own.
I decided at the age of nine that I would be a journalist. My dad was an avid newspaper reader and a regular Radio 4 listener. While I can not remember him ever guiding me towards the media as a profession, I understood that he got a lot from it. And so it was that I left university and became a trainee reporter on the Medway News.
Starting out
I watched jealously as radio reporters held microphones to their interviewees on the circuit and wondered how I would ever make the transition from writing to radio. I took every opportunity that came my way to get inside a radio studio and after six years in print I was given my first job as a broadcast journalist. Two years later I was kmfm’s news editor.
What’s the story?
Nothing gives me as much of a buzz as telling a story in three short audio clips. Listening through after hours of editing to a highly polished and well-produced piece of audio gives me the greatest joy. I may have moved on from 90 cassette tapes to Adobe Audition but one thing remains the same; the audio tells a story. The clips come together to illustrate a bigger idea. No matter the century, the technology or the interviewee — it was always about the story and it still is.