Roundabout

Snap, Crackle and Pop

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN You can now get recordings of Shakespeare and Tony Han- cock, Natural Childbirth in Progress. the United Nations, Motor Racing. Space Sounds.

Dramatisations of the official transcripts of the Lady Chatter- ley trial, E. M. Forster ex-

pounding what he believes and an explanation of cricket. The one record that is so far missing is a short speech explaining why anyone should conceivably want to. The tape and record field has extended to such an extent that one begins to wonder what on earth it is 'People are after when they buy records at all. For ordinary music, the LP has obviously done little but good. Since music-lovers hair been able to sit down for a whole symphony, the Main objection to the spread of the LP idea has been simply that it was L. It has been as if the book trade, having discovered a way of binding

up 600 pages at a time, tried to make. all hooks that long, throwing together if necessary The Magic Mountain and Noddy, Sanctuary and The War in the West. Everyone knows the kind of evening in which companionableness is en-

tirely dispelled by their host's desire to play one bit of an LP and his apparent inability not to play it all, thus causing the instant death of

conversation and atmosphere. Yet, according to My record shop, it is not the short EPs, but the 1-Ps that are still on the increase.

It is when it conies to the spoken word- -or bang, sizzle, crash or grunt—that we enter really questionable territory. Poetry I, would accept

for the most part on the grounds that, as with Music, you really do want to hear a poem mei-

and over; but even there I have some doubts.

Rad enough as it may be to hear always the same timing and emphasis in a musical piece. is surely a good deal worse, to freeze a poem so that only one intonation, one series of stresses and pauses ever gets across—and there is the little matter of sequence, too. Everyone who owns a disc of, say, ten songs, knows that after the first eight or nine times there are several that you never want to hear again: but Without a good deal more precision on band- selecting, you are usually forced into enduring them all. In poetic terms this means (I quote at random from a catalogue) that Drayton's Part- ing' is always to be followed by Dryden's 'I feed a flame within,' that Housman's 'Bredon Hill' is always to be followed by 'Tim, an Irish Terrier.' The only records to which this does not apply are children's poetry or children's stories: the same story repeated in exactly the same way, of course. being what all children really want.

Music and poetry are understandable enough. h is the rest of the odd collection of sound recordings that leave me scratching my head— and that even after I have had a rational ex- Planation for the vast majority of it. The cricket instructions are for people who actually want to learn cricket, the air raids and jet noise are for amateur-theatrical sound effects, and the

sea noises are bought out of nostalgia—which will surprise the thousands who, like me, have tried to get into broadcasting for the sole pur- pose of tracking down and throttling the BBC seagull. The one of train noises sells best of all, apparently—to people who run toy-train systems and need records to create the appropriate noises.

I quite concede that there are all sorts of private reasons for wanting peculiar records. I knew a man who used to play exam material over to himself at breakfast, presumably reckon- ing that he was at his most receptive in a semi-conscious state. This particular character also used to work himself into a lather trying to play piano ducts with himself by recording one part and then frenziedly trying to keep in time: it was fortunate that lie was past that stage of duet-playing where the person who finishes two bars ahead cries, 'I've won!' or I suppose it would have been as schizophrenic as playing chess with oneself.

Then, again, there is this record Erotica, sup- posed to be the authentic sounds of a man and woman making love—which someone I know proposes to follow up with an equally evocative record of people eating a Chinese meal. No doubt one could make, or buy, a reminiscent -recording of almost anything--I can imagine one designed to remind ex-fashion writers of the rag

trade, composed of the sounds of manufacturers snapping the bra straps of model girls and the

omnipresent hiss of 'Darlink, I gill it to you excloossif.' But the point about all this is that no one could want to hear any of it more than once or twice. Take these old BBC comedy shows now available on record: I am a Hancock fan-myself, but the thought of playing old shows over on a wet afternoon is a subject ehastly enough itself to- form the subject of a dispatch from Railway Cuttings, East Cheat)). Aker dinner, as Wilde says. one can forgive and body, even one's own relations; and after a Christmas dinner one can feel mellow even towards Com- monwealth relations: but who is going to play over the Queen's Christmas Day Message?

The answer, in fact, is nobody. And the deeply sinister thing about all these records is that they are not really bought for people's own enjoy- ment. They are bought to play at their friends. No one can get thirty bob's worth of entertain-. ment out of one comic record; the extra twenty- live shillings has to be made up in other people's enjoyment, however feigned: which puts the whole thing into the same grim category as home movies, compulsory washing-up and recitations from the little ones.

It may be tiresome to hear the merits of a £200 Hi-Fi set extolled by those who can't tell a B flat from a Key Flat, but it has dawned on me that there is one supreme consolation. So long as they have all that Hi-Fi and Stereo, they may actually play you music on it. The man who talked about heaven as the place where o-ery- thing that was not Music is silence was born before his time.