We Catch Flies, Yer Mum – sparky, shambly lo-fi pop from Glasgow teens.

Joy Lips, Neon Playroom – Norwich duo’s euphoric anthems.

Black Thumbnail, Vol 1 – doomy feedback laden drum’n’bass from Notttingham quartet.

Hattie Catkin, Spider Diary – fragile, instrospective coming-of-age album from Somerset singer-songwriter.

Bums, Bums – no-frills garage punk revival courtesy of Portsmouth five-piece.

Phooey, Half An Hour Later You Feel Like Another One – cliché-busting rhymes from Merseyside’s Chinese MC.

Eskers, Suit of Moss – evocative folk-rock with airy harmonies from impressively-bearded Cumbrian quartet.

Callum MacAdam Trio, Chewy Suite – Challenging Edinburgh jazzers’ ambitious sophomore effort.

They Took Our Clothes While We Swam, Iffy Tablet – North Yorkshire collective’s soaring post-rock debut.

Stiffy, Good Gravy – thrilling DIY electronica from the mysterious Bristolian’s bedroom.

Tight Gloves, Loose At Last - joyful indie-psych from hotly-tipped Gwent trio.

Lady Brady, Last Taxi – classy and heartfelt soul from the 21-year-old Dublin chanteuse.

Last week I replied to a Twitter request from Professor Sophie Scott (@sophiescott), who was looking for volunteers to take part in a study at the Speech Communication Laboratory at UCL.

The study sounded interesting. And by interesting, I mean a bit bloody odd.

What pricked my interest in it was mainly the fact that I like putting on stupid voices. I’m saying this in a Norweigan accent right now. I’m sure you could tell.

I do occasionally do voiceovers on adverts. You may remember me as the voice of an animated Geordie purse on a BT advert. Yes, you remember that.

I also once did a Swiftcover ad but was replaced in their next campaign by heroin’s Iggy Pop, from Peaches featuring Iggy Pop, and The Rugrats Movie.

I would be good in radio comedy or drama or sketch shows, but no-one except David Quantick ever casts me in them. I don’t know why.

I digress.

I corresponded with Sophie - Professor Scott to the likes of you - and arranged to take part in the study last Monday lunchtime. Before I went, I was asked if I had any metal in my body. I said no. Except for fillings, which apparently are ok if they’re older than six weeks.

I went to the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, an anoymous building housing an MRI scanner, where I met Professor Scott. We travelled down in a lift to a windowless basement where I was thrust into a cage and discovered that if I pressed a button on the wall I would receive a biscuit hang on no, that’s Lost. We did, however, make our way to a room containing an MRI scanner. At this point I was asked again if I had any metal in my body, which I have not.

I was shown the scanner, and asked a few questions. One of the questions I was asked was whether there was any metal in my body. By this time, I had become bloody convinced there was some metal in my body.

You may have guessed by this point that the study involved me going into an MRI scanner. I have laid one or two clues about that.

In the study, subjects repeat the same phrase in forty different accents and in forty different impressions. As they do so, their brains are scanned. Both professional actors/impressionists and ‘amateurs’ are used and the results compared. It’s all about how fast hydrogen molecules move through fat and water, apparently. Professor Scott believes the results of the study may have implications for speech therapy.

The phrase used can be anything. I thought of using my favourite song lyric, but then thought it might be a little dry repeated eighty times. I was reading something about The Smiths at the time I received Sophie’s email, so lighted on a Smiths’ lyric as my phrase instead.

 This is how I found myself lying in an MRI scanner on a Monday lunchtime, wearing headphones and a visor housing an angled mirror, saying, ‘And in the darkened underpass, I thought “Oh God, my chance has come at last”’ in the voice of Peter Beardsley. If you’d told me that’s what I’d be doing a week or so earlier, I’d’ve struggled to come up with a narrative path that would have led convincingly to that destination.

Now even a professional professional will tell you, forty accents is hard. And forty impressions. So I mentally split mine into different sections. Good, Shonky, Basically Racist. The other problem is that some impressions are hard to do when you’re lying down. And harder when you’re lying down, you’ve got a cold and snot is burning the back of your throat. Saying ‘Heherr!’ in a Chris Tarrant voice under those circumstances can actually kill you. Assuming you haven’t already been killed by the huge magnet ripping forgotten shrapnel out of your abdomen. If you’re wondering, it is impossible to say anything, Smiths lyric or otherwise, in a Chris Tarrant voice without prefixing it with ‘Heherr!’. So some of the voices came out weirdly strangulated.

Fortunately, the quality of the impressions wasn’t important. In fact it transpired that while I was in the scanner, the volume in the control room was turned down for much of the time and they weren’t even listening. My professional pride should have been damaged by that, but frankly I was quite relieved. Particularly as it meant Sophie’s Irish colleague Carolyn didn’t hear me attempting the phrase in two different Irish accents and a Terry Wogan voice.

Later that day I received an email from Carolyn pleasingly titled ‘videos of your brain’. It contained videos of my brain. Here is a link to Sophie’s secret lab, where they keep disembodied voices in jars and try to transplant them into rabbits and owls, and read babies thoughts and then sell them to the makers of The Only Way Is Essex as programme ideas:

http://sites.google.com/site/speechskscott/

And here are videos of my brain. It's not processing the voices here. Just failing and decaying as normal.

(download)

Click here to download:

cor.mpg (1.23 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

axi.mpg (1.45 MB)

Here's all the World Of Lather columns I've written so far for The Guardian:

February:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/feb/26/daniel-maier-world-lather

March:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/26/soap-opera-television

April:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/apr/30/world-of-lather-eastenders...

May:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/04/guardian-world-of-lather

I am eternally excited to live round the corner from Olympic Studios, which may lack the cachet of Abbey Road but more than made up for it with an incredible roster of artists and songs. The Who recorded Who's Next there, The Troggs made Wild Thing, Led Zep's first three albums were recorded there and Queen were never out of the place. The Rolling Stones recorded Sympathy For The Devil at Olympic, a process documented in Jen-Luc's Goddard's otherwise quite annoying film, Sympathy For The Devil (One Plus One). You can see them in the main studio here:

Even Them Beatles did some stuff there. So I was truly saddened by the studio's closure a couple of years ago. The relatively good news is that it's being converted into a cinema - back into a cinema in fact, as this was its purpose before it became a studio in the first place. They had an open day yesterday, so I took some crappy pictures.

Here's a 360 panorama of the whole of the main studio. The middle and right hand side of the picture is where the control room used to be, on the left is the main studio. Click to embiggen.

One side of the main studio. Much of the soundproofing is going to be left intact as this obviously suits their purposes with the cinema in mind.

The walls feature these...I don't know what they're called, but I'm going for baffles. Are they baffles? These are long semi-cylindrical columns that could be spun to create the best acoustics for whatever set-up was, er, set up in there at the time.

Here's one of them spun round a bit.

Honestly, if you'd been there, you'd've spent ages just spinning them. Here's a stack of them after they'd been removed from the smaller neighbouring studio:

Here you can see the end of the ceiling where it met the old control room, which has now been demolished. This gives you an idea of how much the original space was reduced by the addition of soundproofing.

The new owners plan to keep one small studio going as a nod to the building's previous use. Local mid-life-crisisers will be able to do stuff there just to say they recorded at Olympic. Yes, I am talking about me.

Sadly. there's little ephemera lest from the studio days. A bunch of stuff was chucked out when the studio closed - Stones masters chuck in a skip and so on. I can't express my devastation that while this was going on I must have been half a mile away...doing something that was not rescuing Stones masters from a skip. One thing they have kept is the strips used on the mixing desk to assign channels to different instruments:

They all must be from the studio's last months, though:

I'm looking forward to seeing the results. There's going to be a members' bar, a restaurant and other bits and pieces. Based on their Founder Membership deal, I worry about it being prohibitively expensive. But at least it's not flats.

http://blogs.abc.net.au/sa/2010/09/the-final-episode-of-the-bill.html?site=ad...

A few months ago I did a talk about the Victorian explorer, scientist, proto-Eugenicist, meteorologist, inventor and eccentric Sir Francis Galton. You'll notice I just tucked away the Eugenics bit in the middle there.

I'm doing it again, twice, in September at Holborn's Conway Hall.

Do come along. I may add some bits for the first one, and take some away again for the second but neither should be more than an hour.

It is a lot more fun and accessible than I seem to be insisting on making it sound. After all, I'm about as academic as a hand towel. Galton was an extraordinary man with a legacy of incisive and misguided, timewasting, foolhardy and socially unacceptable ideas. I will not be concentrating on the incisive ones.

Tickets:

September 21:

Viewers coming late to ITV’s coverage of tonight’s World Cup semi-final between Holland and Uruguay might have sensed something amiss. Something different about the commentary which perhaps they couldn’t quite define.

Had they watched from the start, though, they would have heard commentator Clive Tyldesley apologise for the absence, due to illness, of regular summariser Jim Beglin.

The presence of a second voice in the football’s commentary box is now well-established. An expert, by virtue of playing experience more entitled than the commentator to analyse the action, but free of his burden of describing the game moment-by-moment, is evidently reckoned by each of Britain’s sports broadcasters to add colour and insight to the viewer’s experience. Which more often than not, they do.

In fact the in-play observations offered by the summariser frequently seem a more natural conceit than the pompously-labelled ‘analysis’ of the studio pundits, who, when it comes down to it, are merely solving the problem of how a broadcaster fills in the minutes the players spend recuperating at half- and full-time.

And yet...

ITV’s Holland v Uruguay coverage was, if not a revelation, a sweet memory of how things used to be. For viewers old enough to remember football coverage of the pre-digital era, each World Cup stirs up nostalgic flashes of tournaments past. The Dutch team’s Pong-era shirt numbers did their bit to spark a 70s reverie and while Tyldesley’s commentary may not have had the requisite quality of sounding like it was being delivered down a phone line that might be cut off at any minute, his solitude in the commentary box subtly suggested a less aurally cluttered time.

In the absence of a summariser, there was white space. Gaps in speech which let the coverage breathe. Tyldesley himself was a man gently transformed by the experience. His relationship was with the viewer, not with a colleague. It was rather nice. You suddenly realised how much the former used to be the case and to what degree the attention – maybe the loyalty – of the commentator has been divided by the now ubiquitous second presence at the microphone.

More than that, Tyldesley’s lone-striker role gave him back the right to an opinion.

The natural order is that the commentator plays straight man. Strong opinion is the dominion of the summariser.  Whoever the BBC pairs up with Mark Lawrenson must accept that the latter is both Statler and Waldorf. Sky’s Martin Tyler has the authority to take a position on what he sees, but the experience to give the excitable Andy Gray all the space he needs.

Tonight, the absence of the summariser was maybe most tangible after Diego Forlan’s equaliser. The degree of culpability of Maarten Stekelenburg, the Dutch goalkeeper who failed to keep out the Uruguayan striker’s longshot, was exactly the kind of bone that the commentator would normally have left to Beglin to chew.  But Tyldesley, like a newly-abandoned lover turning to an empty pillow, had no-one to ask about it. He suddenly had to rediscover the knack of expressing an opinion for its own sake, not as feed-line, neither to be contested nor backed up.

Again, nearing full-time, Tyldesley enjoyed the freedom to make a reasoned choice of his Man of the Match, rather than asking someone else for theirs. Still, suddenly having no-one to bounce off led him to seek validation for his choice, somewhat forlornly suggesting that ‘the boys in the studio’ might have something to say about it.  

Don’t worry Clive. It may have felt like it, but you weren’t on your own.