Channel Fear
AIDS: The Unheard Tapes
Episode 1: Ignorance (BBC2 and iPlayer)
In 1985, I had got the job of dreams, oral historian to the parallel universe I lived in, thanks to a Greater London Council grant. My employer, the Hall-Carpenter Archives was based in the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Farringdon, and myself and a group of volunteers were honoured to record the life stories of diverse speakers, whose experience, in their totality, spanned the twentieth century. In the process we documented activism of many kinds, from the campaigns for Homosexual Law Reform to Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, sombre years of AIDS related deaths and red-top hate crimes, but also ones of passion and tenderness.
This is the setting of the first of the documentaries, Ignorance and, among the source materials used, are audio interviews we recorded with people living with HIV/AIDS, testimony which is held, alongside other collections used in the documentary, at the British Library. This episode tells the stories of vanguard campaigners and of how fear and anxiety were channelled in many creative ways by the communities and health care staff at a time when the next chapters had yet to be written.
The reviews and twitter posts following transmission registered a strong physical response from viewers, as in this small sample from #aidstheunheardtapes:
‘It breaks my heart especially as a nurse now to see how these men were treated at the time.’
‘Pounding heart watching AIDS: The Unheard Tapes.’
‘I’m near in bits.’
‘This programme is giving me flashbacks already’.
Two aspects of the production are mentioned regarding this powerful impact: the soundtrack, and the use of lip synching by young actors who embody the voices on the original C90 audio cassette recordings.
The Sound Track itself has a narrative arc:
Smalltown Boy, Jimmy Somerville
Forbidden Colours, David Sylvian
Searchin’ (I Gotta Find a Man), Hazell Dean
Love to Love You Baby, Donna Summers
Native Love, Step by Step, Divine
Why? Bronski Beat
Leave in Silence, Depeche Mode
Song to the Siren, This Mortal Coil
Terrence Higgins, among the first persons to die of an AIDS-related illness in the UK, had worked as a barman at Heaven and the club features in the documentary as a unifying site of both sexual abandon and the sacred. The advance of the disease is recounted by Terry’s partner who touchingly describes his dancing style – a human slinky – and then his progressive weight loss and death. As the health crisis intensifies, disco gives way in the episode to the lament: Song to the Siren, which references at least in title, Odysseus’s crew, lured to their deaths by Siren song until, bidden by the goddess Kirke, their ears are plugged with wax. A twitter post, commenting on the succession of men sharing the pain, fear and confusion of their HIV/AIDS diagnosis, describes them as ‘wreathed in the swirling majesty’ of This Mortal Coil.
The soundtrack prompted me to recall my own aural memory of the time, which would include Arvo Pärt, chosen by David, one of the episode’s witnesses for his funeral, and also the darker, more visceral musical intervention of the Greek-American composer and singer, Diamanda Galás, whose AIDS trilogy I attended at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on New Year’s Day 1988, the year after David died. Galás describes her work as exploring ‘the extremes of exaltation and despair’, something she does by channeling, through her extraordinary voice and technology, external forces, including the callously banal and the retributive, and rebuking them, goading them to show themselves.
You who speak of crowd control,
of karma, or the punishment of God: …
Do you tremble at the timid steps
of crying, smiling faces who, in mourning,
now have come to pay their last respects? …
from Let’s Not Chat About Despair, 1988
This world that Galás channels and spits out is covered in the documentary through headlines and media clips, and one post speaks of the religious fundamentalism and social and political conservatives that ‘tried to crush us at our most vulnerable’, but the soundtrack of recorded music fittingly is gathered from popular culture alone.
The second aspect picked up on in social media, the lip synching by young actors was initially resisted by a number of commentators: ‘You’d think actors lip syncing archive testimony would detract from the power of the words. It added another layer of poignancy,’ wrote one.
This artistic choice likely related to the constraints of the original analogue audio, but, as is known, limitations can conversely enable greater freedom, and lip-synching has many resonances with gay culture. Lip-synching has been described, for example, as a key technique in a drag artist’s toolkit which enables both a channelling of the past and a reinforcement of community feeling as performance commingles with popular culture. The black queer artist, boychild’s, performances which developed from drag club to art house in the USA consist of lip-synching to a recorded backing track of pop song remixes to subversive ends.
Importantly for Aids: The Unheard Tapes, the re-embodiment of disembodied voices allows a particularly powerful connection between the actors and those originally interviewed. Hugo Bolton, who plays the campaigner Tony Whitehead, speaking about the technical challenges of lip-synching said: ‘When I was practising I was moved but not in a cerebral way.’ The process, he said, of attunement to the patterns of breath and speech, allowed him to distill ‘the essence of what the true experience of something was’.
Just as lip-synching as a form has a distancing effect, the ‘characters’ are liberated from the setting of the original interview with the potential to be placed in settings that reflect diverse aspects of personality and community: a stylised sitting room, traditional boozer, theatrical dressing room, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
An important point is that the original recordings are long in duration and the speakers not involved in usual conversational turns with interjections and interruptions. They are enabled to go as deeply as they wish into an episode, and the silent interviewer (to avoid the ‘noise’ of normal active listening) holds close eye contact to compensate for the silence, enabling and forming part of the ‘flow’. This accounts for the richness of oral history.
AIDS: The Unheard Tapes was made by Wall to Wall Media, in partnership with the Open University, directed by Mark Henderson and produced by Morgana Pugh.
For further information about the Hall-Carpenter and other interviews used in the documentary and the full extent of the British Library oral history collections on HIV/AIDS see the BL blog:
https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2022/06/putting-aids-the-unheard-tapes-in-context.html
Terrence Higgins Trust, (founded in 1982): tht.org.uk
Reading
Stephen Farrier, Alison Campbell, That Lip Synching Feeling: Drag Performance as Digging the Past from Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, 192-209, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan
Diamanda Galás, The Shit of God, High Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail, 1996
Leila Riszko, Breaching bodily boundaries:posthuman (dis)-embodiment and ecstatic speech in lip-synch performances by boychild, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2017, Vol 13, No 2, 153-169
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