Canals on the Today programme again

Yesterday morning, just before a quarter-to-eight, there was a report by Nicola Stanbridge on NB Chiswick and its musical tour of the Grand Union Canal. Listen again available here for a week: go to 1:43:10.

Here is a transcript:


Justin Webb: It is, er, seventeen minutes to eight.

Sarah Montague: A 1930s narrowboat is being used as a rather unusual stage for a series of concerts on the Grand Union Canal. Folk and ambient music inspired by the once-thriving trade route from London to Birmingham will be performed, beginning tonight at the canal museum. The musical narrowboat will then travel north to various leafy watery locations through the month. Nicola Stanbridge reports.

(sound of boat engine starting)

Nicola Stanbridge: The 70 year old engine of the Chiswick narrowboat strikes up. Bob Wakeley has redesigned a space - the old horse feeding area at the front - as a stage for singer Lisa Knapp and electronic music whizz Leafcutter John.

Leafcutter John: Yeah this boat was built for the Grand Union Carrying Company. Between the wars, 1937. But they still built these boats to expect the horse to tow. And the front cratch area was where you'd have the horse feed. So even though they were built to have an engine they assumed that these engines would never work - you'd have to go back to the horse.

Lisa Knapp: This is the stage area, they've put this wood here, where we're going to perform. The thing that really struck me I think was how serene it actually was - it wasn't a windy day like today though, and so obviously you are greatly affected by the weather ... you're effectively living outside really.

NS: Take me through some of your research. How do you evoke the canal?

LK: I think we've been most inspired by people who actually worked on the canal.

(music)

Richard Mack: I'm Richard Mack, I was 21 years old in the fifties, when I started on Regent's Canal, driving the horses that were pulling the barges. My horse, he was a grey, er, shire, you had to learn how to throw your ropes across the locks from one side to the other, looking after your horse.

NS: Were they looked after?

RM: Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, we had one guy, Nobby Clarke, he used to polish his mount, every morning with a bit of helmet (?) he used to rub her down and...

NS: Did they ever fall in?

RM: Aha, yeah, Nobby Clarke did with his little ginger mare, yeah, he did like a beer.

LK: We've also used, and with John's hydrophone and ability to record the sounds of being on a canal boat and around water.

LJ: It's like a microphone that works under water

NS: The sound of the water lapping underneath this narrowboat.

LJ: Drips, creaks, as you say, the lapping of the water.

NS: And your piece of equipment just cost about ten pounds to make rather than anything that's very professional, very expensive...

LJ: Less than ten pounds, a really interesting way of exploring underwater space. It's a very different sonic space than when sound is travelling through air - it's a very different sound. This boat is 1930s, so a lot of the sounds it makes are quite old, so there's a lot of beauty in that as well, beauty in the sound of the engine, there's a lot of beauty in the way that the boat creaks as it moves (underwater engine noise) Anything that's got a fundamental pitch like the engine sound, has got a tone to it. You can play different layers at different pitches and get a chord out of that sound, get polyrhythms. So there's really interesting kind of things to play with. (music) We've taken samples of sound that we've recorded in the canals and of the water. (music) And for that we were trying to make an instrument that had some of the aspects of the canal, so we used glasses filled up with water as our instrument, that makes the drone in the background.

LK: It's actually inspired by the ice pit. This canal museum is on the site of an old ice pit. They used to import ice into cities for hospitals...

NS: Before the days of refrigeration.

LK: Exactly, and then the barges would sort of take it up and down and this ice used to sort of come from Norway, all that way just be stored... So that piece to me evokes that cold sort of...

LJ: Glacial sound

LK: And there are some lovely pictures of canals frozen over and they would actually be frozen in, so really is living in the elements, isn't it?

LJ: A kind of beautiful thing, and a kind of slightly melancholy aspect if that's song maybe sort of tied in with that.

(music)

LK: The area around a lot of the canals is very beautiful and in summer, beautiful reeds and rushes and birds, really idyllic piece (?) of wandering canals and rivers

(music)

Justin Webb: Nicola Stanbridge reporting for us from the Grand Union Canal. It is thirteen minutes to eight, time for Thought for the Day...