The Sound Engineer’s Daughter

Her father recorded local bands in a converted garage in Doncaster from 1979 to 2004 and kept everything.

Four hundred and eleven reels. Two hundred and six cassettes. A quantity of DAT that Ivy has been advised, by three separate people, to digitise immediately or lose entirely.

He died in 2021. The garage stayed as it was for two years because nobody could face it and because Ivy's brother wanted to sell the house and Ivy did not, and that argument took up the whole of 2022.

She started digitising in March 2023. She is a data analyst; she approached it as a data problem; she built a spreadsheet before she plugged anything in.

Four hundred and eleven reels at an average of thirty-one minutes is two hundred and twelve hours.

What is on them

Almost nothing of any commercial value, which she established early and which was a relief.

Three bands who got a single out. One who got a session on the radio in 1988. About sixty who did nothing at all, and rehearsed in her father's garage on a Tuesday, and broke up, and are now men of sixty in Doncaster.

The recordings are, technically, extremely good. Her father was better at this than the material deserved and everybody said so, including him, in a way that Ivy now recognises as one of the two or three genuine disappointments of his life.

The leader tape

Here is a thing Ivy did not know.

At the start of a reel there is a length of leader tape — plain, non-magnetic — spliced on to protect the recording. When you thread a machine, you run through the leader first.

Her father spliced his own leaders. Everybody did.

And when you record over a reel — which he did constantly, because tape was expensive and the same reel might carry four different bands across two years — you do not always start at exactly the same place.

So at the head of a reel, in the four or five seconds before the intended recording begins, there is sometimes a fragment of whatever was there before.

Ivy found the first one in July.

It is eleven seconds. It is her father saying, "—no, love, hold it further away, you'll pop the—" and then a child's voice, absurdly close to the microphone, saying: "IS IT ON?"

She is four. She knows she is four because the reel is dated and she can do arithmetic.

She sat in the garage and listened to it forty times.

The nine

There are nine of them across four hundred and eleven reels.

1985 (age 4): the above.

1986: twenty seconds of her singing something formless and confident, and her father, off-mic, laughing in a way she does not recognise at all.

1988: an argument about a biscuit. Fourteen seconds. Her mother is audible in the background, which matters because her mother left in 1993 and there are no recordings of her voice anywhere else.

1990: Ivy, aged nine, being taught what a compressor does. Her father explains it for fifty-five seconds, badly, at a level pitched far too high, with total seriousness, to a nine-year-old.

1993: four seconds. Her father alone, saying "right" twice.

1996 (age 15): Ivy telling him the garage smells. Him agreeing. That is all.

1999: thirty-one seconds in which she plays four bars of bass, badly, and he says "again," and she plays it again slightly better, and he says nothing, and the recording cuts.

2001: her voice on the phone, picked up through the room. She is at university. The content is entirely about a form.

2004: eleven seconds, the last one. Her father talking to himself while patching something, unaware, saying: "—she'll be down at the weekend, so—"

She was not down that weekend. She has no memory of that weekend and no idea what came up.

What she did with them

She spent four months trying to decide whether to make something of them.

There is an obvious piece here. She knows people who would help; there is a producer in Leeds who does exactly this kind of thing and who was interested, genuinely interested, and who said the word "beautiful" twice in one email.

Ivy said no in November.

She has tried several times to explain why, including to her brother, who thought she was being precious about it.

The closest she has got is this. The nine fragments exist because her father was not recording her. Every one of them is an accident — a few seconds of a life that survived only because tape is expensive and a man in a garage in Doncaster started a recording four seconds late.

The moment you cut them together and put music under them, they become a thing that was made. And the entire content of them, the whole of what they are, is that nobody made them.

The archive

She has finished the digitisation. Two hundred and twelve hours, done over twenty-six months, mostly at weekends.

She has traced and contacted forty-one of the bands. Nine of them have asked for copies. One man cried on the phone and then apologised for eleven minutes, which Ivy found she was completely able to handle.

The nine fragments are on a drive in a folder called heads.

She listens to the 1990 one — the compressor — more than the others.

Not because it is the best. Because it is fifty-five seconds long, which is the longest, and because in it her father is explaining something complicated to a child who cannot possibly understand it, at length, with total seriousness, on the assumption that she will get there eventually.

She works with data now. She spends her days explaining complicated things to people who do not understand them yet.

She had never once connected those two facts.