Title: Off the Record

Author: Samara McDowell

In: Sport 32: Summer 2004

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, December 2004

Part of: Sport

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Band Rotunda

The room under the band rotunda on Oriental Parade is airless, stifling. It's the tail-end of summer. The two groups meet in here uneasily: there's something odd in the very idea of documenting, something disconcerting. There needs to be intimacy, and there needs to be not-intimacy. Very quickly the two groups come to reflect each other: there are mirror people playing mirror roles, facing each other, and not always smiling.

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Emma and Tara are the two representatives of the IAP. Emma has a perpetual cold. She sits huddled in cream fur, pretty and frowning and anxious and firm, all at once—sort of like the nicer of the sixth form prefects. She is, strikingly, pretty—she has long fair hair usually drawn back in a ponytail, and very large, very pale brown eyes; her voice is to die for in its sweetness, in the carefulness of its modulation. Women who get a certain amount of mileage out of being small, and pretty, and probably blonde, tend to have an issue with Emma: she's better at this than anyone else. She's good at what she does, too. She can be tough. Once she's reached or conferred toward a decision, she's pretty much immovable. She will let you know this, whilst creasing her twenty-six-year-old brow in anxious horizontal lines, to indicate how much she hopes you will understand her position.

Tara has hair as long and thick and black as Pocohontas. She wears it tied back. When you ask her why she never lets it down, she tells you she got sick of people coming up to her and touching it. Tara has eyes of a clear green. She grew up in a vegetarian household in a small town, and as soon as she left home became an avid advocate of red meat and fast living. She's innately distrustful of the doco crew: she wants to keep a distance between them and the musicians: she wants to be the conduit. It can be exasperating, it can waste time, it has created conflict; but rather than being about control, maybe it's her need to remain as close as she can to the music. Tara stopped playing, at all, when she came to believe she was never going to be as good as she wanted to be. This invests her involvement with the group, and her intimacy with each of the musicians, with painful urgency. Music's my life.

One of the soundies is demonstrating levels on a DAT machine.

‘So if you get the levels right, you can pretty much leave it alone?’ one of us asks hopefully.

The soundie looks startled. ‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘For one thing the level of the music is going to be changing all the time, and for another, you need to be able to respond fast to random dynamic changes.’

That's a cough, to laypeople.