The Corporation’s legendary Maid of Orleans studios have, at one time or another, been frequented by most of the famous musicians in the land. Once home to Ray’s Bionic Glock Shop, creators of incidental music for early television programmes, its endlessly long and confusing corridors spawned a myriad of crazy sound sculptures including the Doctor What Theme. And for the past sixteen years, inexplicably, it has been one of my places of work. Hello Cleveland.
It’s 7am on Sunday morning and I’m parking up outside the building’s long white façade. Upon entering, the security guard on Reception looks, quite frankly, put out to have to engage with another human being. I feel the same. It’s too early. Come 8am today we are going to have our work cut out because a film crew are invading with their own unique type of bizarre military organised chaos. They are making a TV documentary series about the history of electronic music. They will be filming Ray showing off a vintage bionic glock from a collection belonging to the Corporation. Which is curated by my friend and yours, the legendary Sir Roger Andrews, head of everything.
I use the term ‘curated’ loosely. It’s mostly bits and pieces packaged in bubble wrap and hidden in crumpled cardboard boxes stuffed into wonky metal cupboards around the building. Some items are ‘filed’ in Room 101, more of which later. The important thing is that Roger Andrews recognises the important difference between, say a piece of extremely valuable legacy equipment worthy of being exhibited in a museum, with a load of old tat. Which no-one else does.
Roger Andrews has set this booking up. In the trade, it is known as a ‘Roger Andrews Special’. This is when Roger Andrews dreams up something unfathomably complicated in his head and it’s everyone else’s job to try and reverse-engineer what he might be thinking.
Roger is a small, quiet and helpful man. I say man, he is actually half man, half rucksack. He walks quite fast but prefers to travel using a combination of white magic and MIDI message and can easily vanish to any room in Maid Of Orleans and back in a split second. The catchphrase during these bookings is “Have you seen Roger?”. Whereupon he sometimes apparitions, already having just done what you were about to do, and sometimes not, but then he appears when you phone him. None of his devices have ever run out of battery power. The trade-off being that precisely one minute prior to any live radio transmissions broadcasted from Maid of Orleans, the equipment has a tendency to drop out and then inexplicably restore itself, having been perfectly fine during the soundcheck.
The entire building is dark, and so I play a little game of Automatic or Not? with the lights. Interspersed by a few rounds of Switch Hunt.
I pull a giant lever to power up Room 333, where Ray and his fellow pioneers of early sampling used to work. Whiling away their days tweaking test tone oscillators with their toes, hitting piano strings with whistling kettles, and running five-mile tape loops to The Mothership and back via a secret hatch in the basement leading down to the Bakerloo line. This is one of two spaces I am to offer the film crew. The other is Studio 5 downstairs.
As well as the famous bionic glock, Ray will need two old tape machines, a rare vocoder and a vintage analogue synthesizer (now worth two million guilders). Roger has told me that he would set everything up in advance. However, there is no sign of any equipment anywhere.
I head downstairs to Studio 5 to throw a few more giant switches and play a few more rounds of Automatic or Not? No gear. Hmm.
My phone rings. A man called Luke and his crew of thousands have arrived at Reception. I head upstairs. Looking at the throng, I have no idea who is who, and just say hello to anyone and everyone then instantly forget their name. Aha. Here is someone who looks organised. “Hi, my name is Pop, I say. “So is mine” says Pop. “That’s easy!” says Pop. “Yes Pop, it is.” Pop seems to be in charge.
Luke asks me where to load in. He now seems to be in charge. I explain that one space is upstairs, and one is downstairs, but they are a few miles apart and it rather depends on where the filming is going to be. And that depends on where the equipment is. It is time to send a 16-bit trigger message to Roger Andrews’ brain via carrier pigeon. He generally responds just before you press ‘Send’. In the meantime, Luke and I do the sixty-mile round trip to view the two spaces and back, whereupon Roger Andrews both calls me and apparitions in Reception at the same time.
“Morning!” I exclaim. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today, but I sure am glad to see you”. “Ah yes, it got a bit complicated. I’ll explain later” he says. He never explains. “We’re in Studio 2.” My phone goes again. It’s Pete from the film company. Pete seems to be even more in charge. “Hello Pop” he says. “I’m in charge and I’m rather concerned you haven’t got the message that we’re in Studio 2”. “It’s ok, I have just received it.” I reply. “Sorry about the delay and the confusion. Load in at Door D.” The security guard interrupts me. “Because the crew has more than twenty people, the unreliable goods lift is therefore out of action.” He says. “Load in at Door C”. “Load in at Door C” I repeat pointlessly to Luke. “Let me show you where that is.” We do another sixty-mile round trip. “You’re going to have to carry all your gear down the steps. Sorry once again for the delay and confusion”.
Roger disappears to start setting up all the crazy stuff. As I mentioned, one of Roger’s many unique talents is hoarding old equipment. I have never known one person to gather up so much near-obsolete gear in my life. It lives everywhere, but most of all in Room 101 in a backwater of Maid of Orleans. Room 101 is a nightmare. It is full to the rafters with shelves upon shelves crammed with unsorted gear.
The master key for Room 101 is long-since lost, probably inside its four walls. In order to get in there, you have to go to the engineers’ room and borrow their spare key which is attached to a brass candlestick so that no one can lose it. If their room is locked, which it is today, you have to do the sixty-mile round trip to Reception to borrow their key, which is attached to a concert grand piano so that it definitely cannot leave the building.
Roger teleports to Reception, puts the piano and the key in his rucksack and disappears.
Meanwhile, I open up Studio 2 and play a quick game of Switch Hunt in the control room. Hundreds of people appear, all of whom seem to be in charge. They start setting up tables of croissants and asking for access to WIFI, which only works every other day. It never works if the visiting artists are taking a flight or staying in a hotel within the next 36 months.
Just after the crew have loaded in, Pete appears and says “Hey, this isn’t the right studio. It’s next door’. The crew then do some kind of crazy stop-frame animation thing, with tables of croissants and tea urns jumping from studio to studio all around the building, until everyone is in the right place and logged onto WIFI. It takes about 25 milliseconds.
Meanwhile Roger keeps disappearing and reappearing, during which time the other Pop and I try and reverse-engineer where he is by looking at some recce photos on Pop’s phone. I play detective and try to guess which room he is in by the distinctive vintage colour tone of the seamless flooring in the picture. I get it wrong about five times, during which we cover another few hundred miles of the building. We later discover Roger has been in a secret room that no one else has ever noticed. It houses Ray’s famous bionic glock, one of the world’s rarest electronic instruments.
I give up trying to find Roger and instead focus on collecting spanners and kettle leads and GPO to igranic connectors. I am quite good at this as I’ve tidied them all up into a special entropy-free zone.
Whilst we are setting up, a camera lady, who seems to be in charge, starts randomly wheeling valuable kit around to make the frame look pretty. She seems completely oblivious to the fact that the items are (a) priceless (b) plugged in to power and attached to each other with cables and © that I am lying on the floor right next to them like a car mechanic trying to find inaccessible output sockets of unknown connector-type. She does her best to run over my precious head at every available opportunity. I glare at her incredulously, which has zero impact. So, I ask her to stop it. Immediately she is at it again. If she takes Roger Andrews out, we’ll really be in trouble.
Then my phone rings. I do another sixty-mile round trip to Reception to collect Ray. Ray is not in charge. He is going to be interviewed about the history of Ray’s Bionic Glock Shop. He is wearing a kaftan with a brown lab coat on top. His glasses are upside down and he merrily spouts endless fascinating facts about the former activities that lay behind the 527 doors that we pass along the corridor before taking the stairs down to the studio.
From there on in it all runs very straightforwardly. Roger Andrews evaporates. We record for one minute whereupon the massive crew pack everything away via stop-frame animation teamwork in about 30 seconds. “Bye” says the other Pop. “I’ll never forget you!” “Bye!” I reply, and instantly forget her.
It then takes a couple of weeks for my weary head and body to work out where to put all the incredibly heavy equipment back. During the course of this, I find new routes and several other rooms I have never seen before, and probably will never again.
The building falls silent and somewhat eery once more. I throw some things into Roger Andrew’s scary lair and shut the door, slipping the latch and turning out the lights as I go.
Pop Shield 