Real World at the British Library Sound Archive

Andy Linehan, Curator of Popular Music at the British Library, attended that first festival in 1982 along with ethnomusicologist Lucy Duran (who later collaborated with Peter Gabriel on the album Passion) and the idea of capturing the performances for the Sound Archive began to form almost immediately. “At that time we thought it was possibly going to be a one-off, and we had no idea that bands like that would ever come back to the UK, because they hadn’t invented World Music then.”

This long-standing relationship, and the British Library’s Save Our Sounds campaign, led to Real World Records spending a couple of fascinating hours in Linehan’s genial company late last year. A rare and privileged chance to immerse ourselves in the work of the archive, marvel at the British Library’s four floors of subterranean storage on the Euston Road, and wonder for how long one might get lost amongst the musical treasures hidden within.

In reality, even though it’s 30-odd years of recordings, the WOMAD collection makes up only a tiny part of the British Library’s more than 6.5million sounds and it is indeed the ‘sounds’ that first strike us as we began our tour. Ironically, it’s actually the lack of noise you first notice. The silence in the Sound Archive office seems incongruous for such a place dedicated to sound, but the many curators and cataloguers are cocooned in their head-phoned worlds, intent on their tasks at hand. A cacophony of different music and sound all being experienced at once, but hidden to us fleeting passers-by. Then, as we take the lift down into the bowels of the archive, it’s the industrial-like noise that hits you as a complex miniature track system, all spaghetti-ed metalwork, ferries boxes (think airport security trays) above our heads. “It can be noisy down here as there’s this little railway system” says Andy. “There are eight reading rooms in this building— and so there are around 1,200 people using and ordering books [at any one time]. They go onto the catalogue and order the book they want and a printer down here prints out a barcode saying what’s been requested. Someone goes and gets it off the shelf and they put it in one of these red crates and once it’s got a barcode on, which relates to the print out of the request, it tells them which reading room to send it to. It goes all along here automatically, up four floors and then pops out the book for the staff to give to the readers. It looks rather Heath Robinson or Wallace and Gromit, but for 10 hours a day, six days a week it delivers.”

Through some more heavy double doors and we’re into the beginning of the commercial releases, and straight into some oddities; mini-discs and DATs, “not that many people did it… Factory did a few and 4AD…” —there’s a Peter Gabriel Secret World Live release we note proudly.  And then right back to the very beginning of commercial audio releases, “these are wax cylinders… so this is the first thing you could go out and buy and bring home and put on and listen to music. It’s one single groove around the cylinder to rotate and the needle runs across the top.” The late 18^th, early 19^th century Edison cylinder, for a song titled ‘Oh Shining Light’, has a note on it —this record should run at 160 revolutions per minute, no faster— it states. ”Of course, the problem with these is that they were recorded on a hand-cranked machine so you are relying on the machine being constant and steady and people recorded at various speeds, so notes like that are very useful.” And, old as they may be new ones are still turning up; “I had a delivery of 80 more wax cylinders that came in last week from a collection that I got from somebody who died recently, based in Kent, who was a musical hall fanatic, so getting new 100-year-old recordings in is a great thing to do.”

We’re too awestruck to ask what order the LPs are kept in, but Andy explains later:

“They used to be kept by label in alphabetical order so that meant you’d be able to just go to the shelf and see all the Real World releases in the same place. The trouble with that is that you would have A&M up there and ZTT down there, but if A&M suddenly put out a load of records you’ve got to move everything along and when CBS do the same, you know… we then worked out what we needed to do was to have our own barcoding system so that when every release comes in its got its own unique identifier and that tells us where it is on the shelf, and that we can just go and find it and it doesn’t matter what label it is, whatever comes in next goes next to each to each other, so that’s why you now see old stuff and new stuff together.”

Reluctantly, we’re dragged away… but find ourselves in the equally fascinating conservation and preservation centre. There are newly acquired pieces of old equipment —tape machines, dansette record players and boom-boxes— in the corridor waiting to pressed into service and rooms where we see vinyl records getting ultrasonic baths before they face the brushes, tubes and jam jars of the Keith Monks vinyl cleaning machine, a quirky, industry stalwart since the 1960s. And, finally, we pass the studios where engineers are working on digitising a wide variety of source material, from interviews for the Frank Sinatra fanclub newsletter to recordings of chimpanzees. What they’ll be doing the next day, who knows? Could be anything…

As we near the end of our tour Andy explains how the conservation and restoration work of the Sound Archive strives to be free of any subjective decision making that might suit the perceived wisdom of any given point in time. How one person’s preference on how scratchy or bass-y a recording might be doesn’t ultimately affect the master source; “As soon as we’ve got something in as good a condition as possible we will digitise it, as it is, with all the pops and scratches and everything and that will be the master copy and we’ll then clone that and we’ll work on the clone copy to see what we can do in terms of noise reduction and that sort of stuff, but we will always have the original master to go back to and re-clone if we need to, to do other things and experiment with.”

There’s an incredible collection of music, oral history, news reportage, dialect examples and environmental sounds in the British Library Sound Archive, free of judgemental decision making about what has ‘value’ and what doesn’t, just a reflection of who we are and the world we live in, and always open to what might next be added to the collection; “With every curator our job is, or one of our jobs is, going out and talking to people and saying ‘what have you got’ and people ringing me up me and saying ‘there’s a mate of mine at Glastonbury and they’ve got all this stuff, would be interested?’ and saying ‘yes!’. So, we’ve always got little project going, bubbling under that we hope will one day come to fruition and when they do, they come in here and there are thousands of collections here…”

Anyone can access the amazing collections of the British Library and the digitised content of the National Sound Archive. Fill out a couple of forms and to get a British Library Readers Pass and you can happily while-away your time in one of the eight reading rooms Andy Linehan told us about earlier or you can go online to access a proportion of the archive.

The British Library Sound Archive

Many thanks to Andy Linehan for taking the time to show us around the British Library Sound Archive, it was a fascinating, illuminating experience, that left us rather envious of his access to all those amazing recordings.