Just a little housekeeping squib of an update from me in these somewhat seismic times of upheaval here in Writhlington BA3.

On one positive note, those lovely people at Erudio have cancelled my student loan after 25 glorious years of never earning enough to pay back the few grand I begged back in 1999; at least in part to buy myself a leather jacket in a misguided attempt to look like Vic Reeves as Marty Hopkirk.

Changes in my sphere of occupation also mean that I am leaving behind the world of American guitar magazines after 5 honoured years at the fretboard, and will soon be starting production work on, among other titles, Woman’s Weekly! Having sung ‘The Ballad of Barry & Freda’ on stage more than once, you can just about imagine the sense of fresh honour I feel, as a wide-ranging magazine veteran…

Nonetheless, RIP to the great Guitar Player after 58 years, the last 65 issues having borne my name in the flannel panel…

All this life-changing business aside, however, this is just a little spot of combined mea culpa and shameless virtue-signalling, on the subject of audiobooks. The squashed tree form of book is a sore point with me right now, as we’re currently recording the Audible incarnation of my 100% official Fry & Laurie biography SOUPY TWISTS… and the plan to release a long-awaited paperback alongside the audio version next spring has provided non-stop heartache hitherto. And time is running intolerably short!

But with audio, for all that the painful monopoly we kowtow to is owned by the Satanic hordes of Amazon, at least I can feel that I have regained full control of all my books – it is a fair way to try and keep them alive and have a tiny trickle of income from listens. ‘Behhh’-ing into the microphone as Stephen Fry in snatched moments of baby-free solitude this year has been a positive pleasure, and I think Fry & Laurie fans will be chuffed with what we’ve achieved when it hits the digital airwaves next year.

But that doesn’t mean that you ever stop worrying about your existing audiobooks. Just listening back to recordings takes literally days of your life, and every last wrong pause or tic can give you sleepless nights. Or, by ‘you’, I mean ‘me’, of course… and if not, I suggest you back off a bit and worry more about yourself.

Here’s one particular example, a bugbear that sent me crawling desperately back to (terribly busy) Rakkit producer, m’colleague Kris Dyer, begging for fresh edits – triggering another heinous trundle through Audible’s nightmarish system for every painful update, any time I insisted a fix was required.

This is from ‘Fab Fools’, an outtake from the ‘Get Back’ sessions:

I am shame-proof enough to admit that I do sometimes still dip into these recordings on my Audible app, and it struck me like a stroke when it dawned on my clogged brain that the voice I had used for Paul McCartney in this spot of off-hand Beatle riffing was completely wrong! When you’re grabbing time in the home studio to get hours of audiobook recorded, sometimes you do have to just go with the rhythm of the thing and keep recording. Ideally, as often I do, to recreate the effect of a chosen extract from a book (and obviously, the trick is to never attempt a cheap impersonation of anyone speaking, just to convey the feel of the different speakers as you go along), you pause Audacity awhile and head to YouTube or wherever to remind yourself of the sound and rhythms of the clip you’re conveying… but not always. And the fact that Macca was blasting a cockney accent for John’s cod religious discussion programme rather than a broad scally one, had entirely fled my mind.

So I just couldn’t let that rest, for the very few consumers who both listened to my full audiobook and knew the OG clip well, it seemed to be selling those few people short. If indeed, anyone was even fleetingly aware of this at all before I wrote this blog.

Oh, and of course I’m not saying that the third, retaken extract is a perfect recreation of the raw Beatle chat either, but it is now far more in the spirit of the daft antics I originally selected that spot of dialogue to encapsulate.

I’m aways happy to hear from listeners who have spotted terrible sonic faux pas dribbling out of my storytelling gob. There are still teensy knots I wish could be easily ironed out amid my audio oeuvre – that time I said the film ‘All Is True’ came out in ’28’ rather than ‘2018’ in The True History of the Blackadder reading for instance (why not download it now and hear for yourself?). But I don’t want to bother poor Kris with that…

Nothing creates more pronunciation paranoia for me, of course, than Tales of Britain, and I currently have over 80 of those recorded and ready to round up to a full century before they hit the audio market. I’ve already spent eons editing in retakes of names like ‘Pwyll’ (which should be ‘Poychh’, not ‘Poo-ill’), and this summer’s tour through North Wales brought home to me at least a dozen other similar inexcusable errors already made in Brother Bernard’s existing audio recordings: ‘Dyfed’ (‘Diff-edd’ should be ‘Duvv-edd’), ‘Lleu Llaw Gyffes’ (‘Lloo-Llaw-Giffes’ should be ‘Llay-Llow-Guvves’), ‘the mystical isle of Gwales’ (‘Gwah-lis’, not the way you’re thinking it should sound, mate), and so on.

I’m faced with the quandary – do I totally re-record nearly all of my version of ‘Blodeuwedd’, or painstakingly splice in ‘Llay’ where I’ve lazily said ‘Lloo’? It puts me in mind of the legendary feat of Sir George Martin when the already recorded Goons-meets-Beyond-the-Fringe LP spoofing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ was stymied by EMI’s fear of legal action from the film’s studio Columbia, allegedly necessitating young-ish George to have to edit out every last ‘K’ preceding every single instance of ‘wai’ in the ridiculous send-up: creating ‘The Bridge On The River Wye’. And although no one had more audacity, he never had Audacity.

Time to bust some vowels. I’m going in…