Play and Record

Available for over a year

Poet Paul Farley imagines himself a sound-recordist taping the Garden of Eden and recalls the impoverished soundscape of his childhood. Growing on the edge of Liverpool in the 1960s and given a simple cassette recorder for a birthday present he went in search of the sounds of the superbs inspired by the bird song records he borrowed from his local library. He pressed play and record on his Panasonic and eavesdropped on ... What? Not a lot, as it turned out. Instead his imagination went to work: the sound recordist's field notes from the Trojan War, during the Irish Potato Famine, lodged in the trenches of the First World War.... A radio poem with found, remembered and dreamt sounds. Producer: Tim Dee.