He’s got the perfect voice for radio, gruff and gravelly, slow and measured so you can catch every word. His new series is not, as you might expect, on 6 or 1, or even 2, but on 4. Jarvis Cocker’s Wireless Nights (late on Thursdays) is quite a coup for the former Home Service, the Pulp frontman bringing a touch of street cred to the network once proud to be considered middle-of-the-road.
Cocker promises that his series will wander through aspects of the night, drawing on the stories of those who stay awake through the witching hours. Tilly, a young shepherdess, is facing her first night shift alone, struggling to keep alive a ewe who is giving birth to twins. The legs of both lambs are out but their heads are stuck. The chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge talks about his work as a ‘deliverance minister’, called out at night by families in great fear of something they’re not sure of. He says a prayer, or two, reciting the words from Compline — ‘Visit this place, O Lord, we pray, and drive far from it the snares of the enemy.’ The pilot of a Boeing 747, on an overnight flight from Las Vegas to Gatwick, recalls his boyhood, catching the bus to Heathrow with a pack of sandwiches and a Thermos of tea and spending the day camped out on the Perimeter Road watching the planes coming in to land. ‘That’s me now,’ he tells Cocker, proudly.
It should have been my kind of radio — snatches of other people’s lives told straight to mike and woven together in such a way as to draw out surprising insights, intriguing connections. But instead it was irritating, Cocker’s digressions only occasionally striking a chord.
Wireless Nights (produced by Laurence Grissell) is made by the team behind the award-winning Lives in the Landscape, which also intercuts conversations on a theme to create wonderfully vivid aural portraits of British life. Cocker himself has won a Sony award for his 6 Music series, turning DJing into an art form, much as Bob Dylan has done with his American radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Cocker is trying too hard. He wants to impose his personality on the programme, deliver his perspective, be the frontman, which on 6 Music, indulging in his specialist subject, works perfectly. But on 4 he needs to allow the stories to unfold in their own time, their own way.
In the first programme on Thursday he’s on that overnight flight from Las Vegas (in first class, of course), wondering about the people who are living 35,000 feet below him. The device of the flight is intended to be the connection, the binding thread. But every time Cocker interjects with his own thoughts he has precisely the opposite effect, bringing us out of the world he is creating and making us conscious again of our own.
For the second programme he goes on ‘a nocturnal exploration of the human condition’, urging us to ‘see with our ears… to build a picture of the night-time world’. He talks to Mark Daniels, who spends his nights in a shed on his allotment, waiting for the badgers to emerge. It’s after dark, snow has settled, there’s no one around and little for the mike to pick up except the sound of Mark unscrewing the top of a whisky bottle and an owl hooting in the distance. We are right there with Mark, our joints also stiffening in the cold night air, nerves on edge in the shadowy gloom. But then Cocker butts in, ‘Can you see that, listener? Can you?’
The connection drops off immediately. The mystery of words in the air being translated into pictures in the mind is lost. We’re not allowed to see with our own ears but only through Cocker’s.
On Book of the Week for Radio 4, Nigel Lindsay has been reading from Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra. In 1968, Krause was a guitarist playing studio sessions in Boston and New York when he was commissioned to create an ‘ecological’ album called In a Wild Sanctuary. Much of the orchestration was to be created out of ‘wild sound’, which Krause had to record himself. He went out into the great woods of California with his studio mikes and earphones to capture what he hoped would be birdsong. But it was October, the birds had fledged or migrated and there were very few around. Instead he heard through his earphones ‘the muted ambience’ of the woods, the ‘constant, reassuring whisper of a soft breeze in the upper reaches of the forest’.
In that instant his ‘acoustic sensibilities’ were transformed and he began travelling the world as a ‘bio-acoustician’, preserving moments in time in specific locations, not as postcards or photographs but as snapshot soundscapes. Through his earphones, instead of hearing passively, he began listening with total engagement… seeing not through his eyes but his ears.
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