How I unwittingly made an analogue podcast in 1996
Podcasting might seem like a firmly 21st Century phenomenon, but it’s origins lie much further back than that
It’s 1961, USA, and a heartbroken Sheryl O’Connor (Juliette Lewis) wanders into the local bowling alley late at night. The customers have long gone but the young guy who loans the shoes, Rick (C. Thomas Howell), is there. Sheryl is returning the bowling shoes she ran out in a few days earlier when she was informed by a cop of her father’s sudden death. As she tries to explain herself to Rick, she starts to cry.
There has been a flirtation between the two characters earlier, but this scene signals the start of their relationship. They have an after hours bowling session, then, he leads her over to the voice o-graph machine in the bowling alley.
The voice o-graph, or record o-graph, was a miniature recording studio booth, coin operated, and located in a range of public arenas in the US and Europe, including the UK. You could use it to cut a record of yourself singing, or, you could talk and cut a record of yourself talking as Sheryl does in the film That Night.
Recording’s apparently exist of birthday greetings and letters home and a young girl singing The Beatles ‘She Loves You’, amongst other ephemera. But in That Night, the record’s cut by three of the characters are intended to serve as time capsules. Recordings in which they talk about moments in their lives when they were in some kind of crisis, when something momentous has happened. They are not intended to be heard by a large audience.
While the birthday greetings and letters home were probably not meant to last long, the recordings made by the characters in That Night are closer to being a sonic archive: What an archivist would call a ‘life document’. They have been created for documentary purposes, not for entertainment value. In one sense they are akin to recording your therapy sessions on your phone, but in a wider, deeper sense they are a sonic predecessor to todays podcasts.
They key here lies in the sheer accessibility of the technology: It was cheap, it was available, everyone had access to it, it was easy to use. All the maintenance and technological graft was done for you, you literally had to put a small amount of coins in the slot and start talking.
Because we’re talking about tiny shellac discs rather than a 45 minute LP or, heaven forbid, a 79 minute CD, you wouldn’t be able to record the equivalent of even one episode of Best Pick, so it’s not an entirely fair comparison, but it is a comparison because it was totally DIY. To borrow a line from legendary punk band The Desperate Bicycles: “It was easy, it was cheap: Go and do it”
On the subject of music, perhaps a more obvious predecessor to podcasts, one more relatable and easy to get your head around than the voice o-graph, would be the tapezine, a phenomenon that emerged from the cassette and fanzine culture of the 1990s. Super Trouper, a UK tapezine, is a good example of this: It was formatted like a magazine show, with review sections, music by unsigned bands, and other features. It also had it’s own specially recorded theme tune. Sounds like an episode of Standard Issue or Reasons To Be Cheerful, doesn’t it?
The truth is, it was nowhere near as polished as those two UK based magazine format podcasts are, plus it was solely about music and they aren’t. But in structure it was much the same. The main difference would be the delivery and the fact that it arrived through the letterbox in a jiffy bag and you had to pop the cassette tape into a tape machine and press play to listen to it.
As a 1990s fanzine writer, I did experiment with the tapezine format myself. Why not? We had at least one hi fi system with a mic socket and play/record function on the tape deck. We even had a microphone, which I’d purchased from Tandy’s years before with the vague idea of experimenting with recording spoken word poetry. We made the first one on my mum’s hi fi, but the finished one (by which time we’d worked out that we needed a script and some kind of structure) was recorded in my sister’s bedroom on her hi fi. It includes an impromptu cameo from our mum, off mic, calling us down for our tea.
No one listened to it, but we didn’t mind: It had cost us nothing but time, and it had entertained us if no one else.
I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat because of the knowledge that the British Library have all my teenage fanzines in their paper archive. Heaven knows how I’d feel if they’d also got my tapezine in their sonic archive.
Because, really, today’s podcasts, whether they aim to inform, entertain, or both, do serve as a sonic archive. A guide to the first few decades of the twenty first century. They are indicative of the times not just in terms of what they choose to talk about, but by the very format in which they choose to talk. Podcasts are solitary listening, they play to our increased solitude and ‘headphones in, heads down’ lifestyle. The boom in wellbeing and productivity podcasts also says a lot, as does the thirst for true crime podcasts. Given the violent, noisy, high tech, high stress world we live in, all of those subjects are reflective of the tools we use to deal with life.
It might be hard to see the sonic origins of the podcast in the voice o-graph, or in the tapezine, but I do believe that both can be regarded as the podcasts natural ancestors. Podcasting for an analogue age. The sheer whimsy of spending a few coins on making a permanent sonic record of yourself talking is up there with creating a podcast about inanimate objects. We should acknowledge that.
