Creating An Oral History. Part 2 - Using The Quotes
Last week, I covered becoming a narrator and arranging the interviews to use in my manuscript. Here, I look at how to record those interviews, using the quotes, and how to place them.
In last week’s post, I described how I took on the role of narrator to allow interviewees to provide the details I would use in the manuscript. This week, I look at how those interviews were recorded, how I picked out the quotes, and how I placed them.
Recording Interviews
Having confirmed a date and time for the interviews, I needed to ensure that I could use the audio properly. We’ve all experienced an interview before, either conducting one or being the interviewee, yet, while job interviews can be incredibly subjective, these interviews for the manuscript needed to be wholly objective.
Essentially, my job was to ask the right questions and allow the conversation to flow. To obtain the quotes meant recording the interaction itself and ensuring it was usable. Whether it was a video interview, telephone interview, or in-person.
Before AI got smart enough to provide live transcription (how quickly that’s all changed in a couple of years time), my options were limited. So I went old-school. Just like bona fide journalists, I used a recording app in my smartphone and recorded the audio, either coming from a computer speaker or in-person. For phone interviews, I used an app on my laptop. Of course, the audio was not great, but it was good enough. If anything, it quickly made me realise that if I ever wanted to do a podcast about the New Yorkshire Wave, I’d need to invest in some proper audio equipment.
At the end of each interview, panic would set in. I’d pray that I pressed the right button and that the audio recording had worked. Otherwise, the weeks arranging the interview, and the likely two hours conducting it, would prove to be an embarrassing waste of time. Over the next few days, I then set about transcribing the audio recording.
There are some products out there that can help, but many are limited, unless you pay out for the premium subscription. Typically, these programs will only transcribe half an hour of audio for free. Even then, they aren’t wholly trustworthy. You still have to go in and identify the speaker or amend some inaccuracies. Eventually, I decided on a hybrid model of using the limited half-hour transcriptions from a program, such as Otter.ai, and then putting the full audio recording through oTranscribe and producing a transcription of the whole conversation I could use where I could directly pick out usable quotes.
Identifying Quotes
I enjoyed every single interview I conducted and always hated transcribing them. These conversations would typically run over 90 minutes, as many interviewees enjoyed reminiscing, especially during lockdown. That posed a problem, as a conversation lasting at least 90 minutes is a lot of words to get through.
With a well-recorded interview transcribed shortly after the recording, it can be straightforward to make sense of the conversation. Leave it a few days, and you can quickly forget what was said. This can mean going over the audio over and over again to make sure the quote is correct, with the help of AI to, occasionally, back me up.
Once the interview is fully transcribed, I read it through and highlight in yellow the quotes I believe would prove useful. Typically, these are full quotes about a specific event or include an opinion that proves compelling. As a narrator with an inherent unspoken set of views, I would also choose opinions that I felt aligned with my own. To show some balance, I also included opinions that were compelling but would go against my own and those alongside it. After all, a healthy debate makes for great reading.
One of the proudest parts of the manuscript occurs towards the end. Jon Windle is discussing how single reviews would give him anxiety attacks. I’d then use quotes from NME Magazine’s Rick Martin about the ‘build them up to knock them down’ mentality of the music press to suggest that the two individuals are in the same room talking about the same subject. They’re not, yet that’s the interpretation I get, a back-and-forth rather than quotes taken from two separate interviews.
How To Place Quotes
Two years ago, I felt that the manuscript was in a good enough place to deserve publication. How wrong I was. Granted, I had completed around 40 interviews, yet the narrative was all over the place. Chapters would act as a list of events without any real context attached to them. I enlisted the help of an editor and the manuscript was moulded into shape. The editing process showed me how important the quotes were and how important placement was.
With the quotes highlighted in yellow, most of the time I knew exactly where they were going to be put. Early on, the quotes may need some padding, a few sentences to provide some context so they did not seem out of place. During the final interviews, with the manuscript set out as a timeline, that process became far easier.
Once I decided on the end-point being the first Tramlines Festival in 2009, I knew I’d have a full chapter to write about. If someone had mentioned what the inspiration for Tramlines was, I could use that early in the chapter as context. Once I could flesh out the organisation of the first festival, ostensibly after speaking to Timm Cleasby, Nick Simmonite, and James O’Hara, I could provide the whole narrative. The how, why, when, and where. Those later interviews could also include specific questions to fill in the gaps; for example, Dance To The Radio’s launch event, which has no online footprint having occurred in the early 2000s.
I could also use interviews as oral testimony. When I first heard ‘A Certain Romance’ by Arctic Monkeys, I imagined that Alex Turner’s lyrics were a profound observation collated over time. Perhaps from a few local gigs that went a bit raucous. Then I spoke to Mike Hughes and discovered that the song is based on a specific incident. Subsequent interviews with Jon McClure, Chris McClure, and Matt Helders fleshed out the details and corroborated the facts. Even though the culprit who sparked off the riot will remain nameless, that individual was identified during one of the interviews. Rather like a police investigation.
Using Quotes From External Sources
Not everyone quoted in the manuscript was interviewed by me. Some individuals were requested for an interview but, for whatever reason, it didn’t happen. So I found quotes from external sources to use and referenced them, typically newspaper interviews and podcasts. That’s a little disappointing yet proved a necessity if I wanted to include them to provide a full (or fuller) narrative.
Notably, I couldn’t secure an interview with Alex Turner, but he was quoted in The Sheffield Star. There were other sources that I simply wanted to use a quote from them on a specific subject, like Richard Hawley on the early 1990s in the Sheffield scene during Britpop or Nick Hodgson from Kaiser Chiefs about how the PIGS club night in Leeds was devised. Or Russell Searle and Sarah Williams about their time in The Research. Or Craig Wellington, to ensure that The Sunshine Underground were represented. With just a little research, I could find a relevant interview and select the quotes which fitted in just the right places.
The quotes were crucial to providing an oral history and I’d endeavour to speak to the right people. Obtaining the interview could take weeks, as could transcribing it. But it was worth it.