Changing Voices
Ripping Reynolds's classic "Pirate Madness/Ardkore's Firin'" cassette onto a CD last week for artist Matt Stokes gave me the opportunity to check it out afresh. It consists of Simon's favourite bits of Pirate radio lunacy circa 1992. Nutters rushing out of their heads babbling inanities, phone-ins that go disastrously wrong, appalling almost surreal microphone placements and choons which slipped between the cracks. As an item it's somewhere up there with Hugo Ball's Dada manifesto.
What struck me most about it, and this relates to my remarks about Spaceape's MC-ing I suppose, was that the voices of the Disc Jockies and the MCs sounded a million miles different to how people talk today. Compared to today's pirate MCs they sound like medieval rabble. It's not just a case of shifting slanguage either there's something unplaceably foreign and alien, ruff and grimey about the voices. It made me quite emotional, almost in the way of them belonging to a "gone world", in a way that the just the music itself would never do.