For about a year now, I’ve been conducting interviews with members of the Big Chill online forum. My motivation has been simple: I was struck with how we, or at least I, don’t spend much time asking random strangers to tell their life stories. My theory was that everybody is interesting - we just have to ask the right questions. The plan was to give “ordinary” people the Parkinson treatment, and interview them as though they were celebrities. I encouraged people to put their names into a virtual hat, and then pulled them out at sporadic intervals.
Sadly - due to the frustratingly unflexible nature of the space-time continuum - this’ll be my last interview. But hopefully there’ll be no shortage of volunteers willing to grab the baton and keep the tradition alive.
The interviews so far:
Rollergirl
Alzinho
VannieBee
Dazed
& Confused
Kimberly
Clark
Soundbird - in situ (i.e. this interview, but on the Big Chill forum, with feedback)
Most of the interviews so far have been live on the Big Chill forum; geography and time have prevented anything more intimate. But the most recent name out of the hat was Sarah - known online as “Soundbird” - who happens to live down the road from me. So a couple of weeks ago, Sarah and I met up over a bottle or two of wine, got pissed, and I delved into the secrets of her life.
Sarah is a beautiful smiley woman, with long dark hair and kissable lips. She lives in a Manchester suburb and works as a sound editor/designer, for the animation company which makes Pingu and Bob the Builder.
When she was younger she dreamt of being a female Francis Ford Coppola. “I wanted to make massive beautiful lovely films, but I got to college and I hated directing, and I hated telling people what to do, and I hated camera work, but I really really loved just messing about with sound. I learnt to edit on physical tape, and I loved the fact that you could cut something out and physically move it to another part of the tape, to make something different.”
She studied in Bristol, for a media production degree called Time-Based Medium, “which doesn’t actually mean anything, but it was known on campus as Mime-Based Tedium,” where her love of sound and lack of interest in journalism (“I was rubbish at interviewing people”) meant that she focused mostly on radio dramas.
She acknowledges a definite connection between her work as a sound editor and her interest in music, which started when she was four. Her brother brought “some Kiss stuff” home from school - she remembers being intrigued by the make-up, and the band member dressed as a cat. “As I grew older, music became horrendously important to me. Really really important. When I was a teenager I was very obsessive and defensive over my music. I did not take my Walkman off for about eight years. I had it on at school all the time, and just disappeared into the music.”
Despite this, she’s never felt tempted to work in music production. “I like to think I’d be able to, but I don’t really have enough musical talent to put a beautiful tune together like some people can. I don’t DJ, or anything like that.”
But does she view her work as a creative thing? “The creative always comes first. Because I’m editing sound for picture, it has to work. Even if what they’re doing has one sound that you think it should be, it might not be right. Technically it’s all about going over levels, and distortion, but it has to work and it has to feel right.”
I’m interested in this side of sound editing, particularly the rhythm of the spoken word. I asked her how much consideration went into this. “If it’s to picture, you’re sort of stuck with what you have, but then as soon as it moves away from picture you can edit the soundtrack. And because with animation the dialog comes first, you have to get a nice flow and a nice rhythm as it goes along.”
This set me wondering whether she would ever edit actors’ speech to get the rhythm right. She was taught at college that this wasn’t ethical... then once she came into the industry she found herself doing it, to a certain extent. But she has to work with what she’s given. She cuts pieces of spoken word to give a good rhythm to the programme as a whole. “But you can’t alter the rhythm of the actor’s voice, because it just sounds wrong.”
She enjoys the work, although she has her off days. “Sometimes a job just becomes a job. And you have to get up in the morning. But, yeah. I do enjoy what I do. I’m very lucky. Where I used to work, I enjoyed the job, but I hated where I was working. And to work somewhere like Hot, where you’re given the freedom, and the time, and the atmosphere’s really good... yeah, I really really enjoy my job. That’s quite sickening, isn’t it?”
It’s hard not to feel a little jealous of Sarah, but I’d defy anyone to feel ill will towards someone with such an infectious laugh.
Her job isn’t only sound editing. She’s been involved in many aspects of television production - for instance, the work of a Foley artist.
A what?
“It’s all about creating sound to match the pictures. You watch somebody on a film and you do their footsteps perfectly in synch with them, wearing vaguely the shoes they’re wearing. So if it’s a woman wearing heels you obviously need that heely sound, and you have all these different trays with different surfaces, with gravel and sand and concrete and parquet floor...”
Apparently the trays are only about a meter long, which perplexed me. Surely that leaves room for only one step? It seems the trick is to walk on the spot, which Sarah demonstrated for me... along with the art of walking with one foot. One-footed walking though, is apparently the preserve of the professionals. They tend to work in pairs, visiting sound recoring studios all over the world, carrying suitcases full of shoes, shirts, materials, and even - you guessed it - coconut shells.
When it’s in the UK, Foley is used to enhance soundtracks. Sarah worked on the Royle Family, where they do “fuck all” and still have full Foley sessions, with footsteps, movement and fag packet noises. But most of the work comes when programmes are sold to other countries. The dialog is stripped off, causing the loss of the human sounds that accompanied the voices. “So you have to do all the sex scenes, all the kissing, and hissing, and just everything. If there’s an old woman wearing a big old crepe dress, it makes a noise and it swishes, and leather jackets as well. Lots of leather jackets. And um... mud, we had to do walking in mud, where we had a dirt thing, and we poured loads of water in, and we were splashing about in... mud.”
That sounds messy, but mud is nothing compared to semen.
Come again?
“I did the Foleys for Queer as Folk, and there was a scene where somebody was wanking somebody off... one guy had come in another guy’s hand and he’d just sort of flicked it away, so we had to make a little sound effect for... come hitting floor. It’s messy and it’s fun. It’s a bizarre job.”
One of Sarah’s best friends is her boyfriend’s sister, who’s recently emigrated to New Zealand. She has two other close female friends in far-flung places - New York and Wolverhampton - who she says “mean the absolute world” to her.
She hasn’t a problem maintaining friendships with people she doesn’t see so often - she doesn’t make big demands. “As a friend, should I be needed, I’m always there. I suppose at the back of my mind I expect them to be there if they’re needed, but I don’t necessarily take them up on the unspoken offer. I might keep a lot to myself, and then I’ll be told off, for not going to them with something. But we’ll just speak on the phone, and pick up where we left off, no matter how long it’s been. We’re far more gushy than we’d be if we spoke every day, but I think that’s nice. I miss them quite a lot at the moment.”
I’m interested generally in how people relate to their friends, and what expectations they have. I asked Sarah whether she’d ever been betrayed by a friend, and the answer was yes. She had a very good male friend throughout her time at university. They stood out as a pair, because Sarah is only five foot tall and he was “six something, very tall and thin”. Then a year after they both left college... “He turned round and was absolutely... I’d always known he was quite nasty, but I’d not been the butt of it before, and he was so horrifically nasty to me... I was devastated. I tried to... I don’t know, apologise. Because I’m horrendously apologetic, even for things I’ve not done. But it was all quite shocking; I was very betrayed by him.”
It takes her a while to get over things like that, but she’s not the type to bear a grudge. And despite a tendency to excessive apology, she doesn’t blame herself when things go wrong. “No. That’s weird, when it’s people really really close to me I blame them. I take a fair bit of the blame myself, but not as much. It’s not all my fault.”
That infectious laugh again.
She also has a healthy disdain for the middle-class guilt that trip some of us up. “It comes and goes, but then I just think fuck it. I was born a certain way, into a certain background, and this is what’s happened, so why should I apologise? I suppose it’s when people start attacking the Guardian-reading liberal left-wing middle classes that you think oh I suppose that’s me, but I couldn’t give a shit any more really.”
She had what she describes as a normal middle class happy childhood, apart from a Big Brother paranoia. “I thought my mum had some kind of early CCTV rigged up around the house when I was a kid, cos she just knew everything, and she could see everything. Me and my brother used to jump on our window ledges, and she’d be downstairs in the living room, and you’d hear her shout, ‘Get off the window ledge!’ I thought she had some kind of 1984 set-up.”
Her earliest childhood memory is being put back in her cot by her grandad after she climbed out and went downstairs, at about eighteen months old. She grew up in the suburbs, where the children all played rounders in the street. The road is different now; there are a lot more cars, and the children - she presumes - are all indoors playing with their Playstations.
She still lives close to her parents, in the area which is effectively her birthplace. This is something she’s quite embarrassed about. She moved back in with her parents on her return from university. She couldn’t afford to stay in Bristol, but was only planning to come home for six months. “Please Mum, can I come home, I’m going to save some money, I’m going to go to London because the streets are paved with gold.”
But then she found a job, met her partner Dan, and Sale is a south Manchester suburb that’s handily accessible for all the city has to offer. “I suppose if I lived in the town that Dan was brought up in, that would... because that is proper middle England small town Daily Mail-reading country... I suppose I do have a slightly dimmer view of people who stay there. I think I can get away with it because I’m on the edge of the city.”
When she doesn’t see her parents she gets sarcastic phonecalls from her father, checking that she’s still alive, but she feels close to them. “I see them less and less, but as I get older I understand them better, and there’s more of a pull.”
She finally moved out two and a half years ago, to move in with Dan. They didn’t rent; they bought a flat straight away. “Quite scary, and quite brave I suppose. I just thought I should get out really. It was about time, I was 26.”
She’s had good news recently - after a lengthy period of freelance contracts, she’s finally been put on the payroll at work. She and Dan are celebrating by buying a house. They’ve already seen somewhere they like, and their flat has been turned into a “Stepford show home” while they wait with baited breath to see if anybody bites.
They’ve been together for six years. They met at the birthday of a matchmaking friend and colleague who thought they were ideal for each other: “Well Dan’ll be there and Dan’s really nice and Dan’s the new runner and he’s really good looking.”
That first night, they went out looting.
“We went out, and fair amounts of drinks and stuff were had, and for some reason we were waiting for a taxi and someone had put Whittard’s window through - the tea and coffee people. So we looted some plates.”
Standard practice on a Friday night in Manchester, of course. “Yeah, we do it all the time. ‘Do you want to come out looting?’ we say to each other.”
She stayed out all night. She thought she’d get up early and let her parents know she was still alive. But she didn’t wake up. “My mum just went schiz on me because she was so worried.”
She was 22, and she was hooked. “He’s not Mr Dynamic, and he’s not Mr Big Overtures, but he’s quietly the love of my life.”
I wonder if anything makes Sarah angry. “Lately I’m really getting intolerant of rude people. Just rudeness and can’t-be-arsed-ness and people dropping litter and the whole attitude... there was a group of lads recently, they had a Kentucky Fried Chicken thing and they just chucked the whole lot, but they were quite scary. I was angry with myself for not saying anything but they were the kind of lads that wouldn’t have cared. You know though, it doesn’t take two seconds to be bothered.”
I’m guessing Sarah is a person who makes the effort to smile at people. “Yes, I’m very conscious of people who probably don’t get noticed, do their job and get no thanks for it. The cleaners at work, some people chat to them, and some people just completely ignore them. They’re a member of staff, they work for the same company, so treat them like everyone else.”
By this time we were nicely drunk, so I pretended to be a tabloid journalist, and went in for the kill. I asked her about her first sexual experience. “Um, probably first time was on my own. But with somebody else... I was probably about 14, with a lad who was my first sort of boyfriend. I remember actually feeling something; some sort of teenage rumblings when we were snogging and hands were roaming. And then responding to them.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I love it when women own up to masturbation. Never mind the roaming hands, tell me about the wanking. I asked her how she felt about it. “I was about eleven, twelve. I wasn’t ashamed of it, just sort of quietly delighted with myself. But I knew not to discuss it over dinner.”
I like this woman.
So now we were on to the juicy stuff. I asked her whether she’d ever ‘experimented’ with her sexuality. “Yes. I’d probably call myself bisexual. But I suppose out of courtesy for Dan, I wouldn’t really say that any more. I know it sounds bizarre, but...”
I asked her whether she thought the label of bisexuality might imply infidelity, as though it suggested she were eyeing other women up. “Yeah, I think so, whereas obviously being straight means you don’t look at other men...”
It’s interesting, this labelling dilemma. It confronts all monogamous bisexuals in relationships; their sex lives can never confirm the ‘bi’ pigeonhole.
But that’s the subject of a whole article in itself. What about the detail? Who? Where? When? “I was very much in love with a woman for a long time. We had a long distance relationship. But I think because of that, it was a lot sweeter. It was very much a love affair. It was love letters, it was little presents, it was phone calls, and then when we were together it was... quite... hot.”
Phew! “Sometimes we didn’t really have anywhere to go, so we’d be snogging in the corners in clubs. We nearly got kicked out a couple of places.”
I’m a sucker for a love story, and I was already imagining star-crossed lovers, but how’s this for romance: When they became involved with each other, Sarah was only 17. The relationship lasted though several boyfriends for both of them until she was 21. They never got to be an 'exclusive' couple, and everything had to be quite secretive. But most romantic of all, her lover was - literally - the girl next door. Still, that’s only a positive fact from a dramatic point of view. In reality, it made things quite awkward. Their parents were, and still are, very good friends who never officially knew about the affair. But Sarah thinks her mum worked it out, and it was her reaction that prevented the relationship from developing.
“My mum was quite horrible about it for a while, which made me think that she knew. That deterred me from taking it any further, because I was too scared.”
So what happened in the end? “It just sort of petered out and she’s now one of my best friends. We’ve got a very strong friendship. I don’t think there’s any sexual feeling there any more.”
Sarah’s ex is now married with a kid, and I’m intrigued to know if they ever refer to their past. “The odd comment, but no. We both have the occasional sort of glint and glimmer, though we don’t talk about it really. But we’re very close.”
She acknowledges that they do - as you would expect of close female friends - discuss their respective partners. “I think it’s really good that we’ve managed to move onto that level of friendship.”
It’s hard to resist pondering whether Sarah’s life might have turned out differently had it been easier to pursue her sexuality. Had she ever wondered whether she was a lesbian? “Yeah, I did, but... no, I don’t think I am, or was. I just always find it easier to flirt with blokes, to be with blokes... maybe it’s the easy option, I don’t know. Maybe if I’d have tried harder I could have been a lesbian!”
We both acknowledge that if this were the case, she wouldn’t be as happy as she is with Dan. Still, she struggled to find a way of being openly bisexual at university. “I came out to friends when I was 17, and to everyone when I got to college, because they didn’t know me. I joined the LGB [Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual society] and I was really really annoyed, because they were quite... it wasn’t the LGB, it was the LG.”
But despite such difficulties, this is an enduring part of Sarah’s sexuality. “Mmmm, women’s bodies are.... I mean sexuality-wise, women are far more beautiful than men. But as I grow older I’m starting to look at men’s bodies in a beauty way rather than a brawn way.”
I was interested in whether Sarah’s heart had ever been broken. “When I was 21... I’d just come up here, and I was already quite depressed. He was a lot older than I was. I fell head over heels and got my heart broken.”
Depression is something Sarah’s had a few battles with. I was surprised by this, as she seems the epitome of the phrase “sunny disposition”. But the aforementioned heartbreak coincided with the darkest period of Sarah’s life.
“I was so much in love with him that it was a distraction. And then he wanted this nice little 21-yr-old who was all loving, but I was actually a hideously depressed 21-yr-old, who didn’t have what she thought she’d have or want or need or anything. The heartbreak was the catalyst and it spiralled down from there.”
It started just before she left college. Then she came back up to Manchester, and found herself friendless. She’d cut herself off from all her schoolfriends, many of whom had pissed her off. She didn’t have the job she wanted. “I was temping, and just everything was wrong. And I felt hideous. A friend spotted me from a distance and said I looked like a smack addict, which was nice. I’d lost loads of weight, but I thought it was really good that I was so thin.”
It’s not uncommon for people to struggle with life when they pop out of the education toaster. When Sarah managed to visit a doctor, he said he’d seen several other patients in similar circumstances. “That made me feel a lot better in the way that I wasn’t on my own, but sometimes you can’t justify being depressed. It’s like being at the bottom of a well and not being able to claw your way out. Still, slowly you do.”
She thinks she was on some quite heavy medication, and her parents were “absolutely fantastic”. Her mother probably made herself ill worrying about her, but Sarah wouldn’t have got through it without them.
The deep depression lasted for about a year, and she was just coming out of it when she met the love of her life.
“It’s a bit weird trying to explain it to Dan, and Dan’s family. That you’ve been through this. I mean obviously I’ve not sat down and talked to them, but Dan’s family think depression’s something that happens to somebody else, and is talked about in hushed tones.”
In the end, time and circumstances allowed her to gradually recover. She finally got a job that she wanted. A career job. “I think a lot of it was to do with fear of failure, or letting people down. The job helped, but then that sort of spurred me into a semi bout a couple of years ago as well. So, um.”
She has never suffered as seriously as she did after graduation, but she does have a problem with her hormones, and she’ll never know how much it was to blame. She used to suffer from extreme PMS. Rather than the classic rattiness, she was crippled by depression, self doubt and loathing for almost half of every month. She found it hard to get on with her job, where people struggled to take her ‘women’s problems’ seriously. But she’s been on some intense hormone medication for three years now, which appears to have fixed it. “I put some weight on, but I’m fat and happy. I think had I sorted it out when I was twelve, my life would have been a bit different.”
So does this story have a happy ending?
“I think I’ve got everything I want at the moment. If you believe in astrology I’m a proper Taurean. I like my home comforts. I like to be settled and now I’ve got the job. I’m in a relationship that’s good, and yet comfortable. Not derogatory-comfortable. And I like that. I like being secure. I feel quite guilty saying that, but I do. I’d like to be one of those people who can’t settle and goes off to India and all over the world, but I don’t want to do that. I suppose I’m a bit of a home bird, but I’m a happy home bird.”
Hurrah for happiness, and hurrah for Sarah - a truly sound bird.