Two turntables and a microphone

I’ve been rereading my favorite William Empson book – see this Valve post – and noticed something new. There’s a really lively remembrance of Orwell, “Orwell at the BBC”. (Empson knew him there during the war. They alternated being Burmese desk editors even.) But this isn’t about that. Empson reports what may be the earliest case of ‘scratching‘, in the turntablistic sense. Or ‘hiccing’, as Empson renders it. This would be before ’43:

I chiefly remember two young disc jockeys who put on a very saucy turn with two gramophones and two copies of a record by Churchill; the familiar voice was made to leave out all the negatives, ending with ‘we will (hic) surrender.’

It’s not quite clear how elaborate the performance was – did they have a crossfader? why two copies of the same album? – but taking out the ‘nots’ in Churchill’s speech on a 40’s-era gramophone sounds rather scratchologically deft. Anyway, ’43 was earlier than Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, which wikipedia cites as among the earliest examples.

There are some good Orwell anecdotes in the piece.

Orwell mostly worked the India desk, and published a volume of political reflections by Indians, which included part of a speech by Hitler (which was supposed to constitute cautionary, unfavorable contrast.) “At this late hour he [Orwell] was really pleased to discover that Hitler too was receiving his due royalties, forwarded to him by the Royalty Department through neutral Sweden. The modern world, it now occurs to me, is liable not to realize how high-minded the whole affair was.” That’s great. Orwell published Hitler, and Hitler got royalties from it.

Here’s a story about how he used to conduct interviews with Indians:

At first the visitor would do most of the talking, with George increasing his proportion gradually; no doubt he had to lure the visitor into providing an entry for the tremendous remark which one learned to expect towards the end of the interview. ‘The FACK that you’re black,’ he would say, in a leisurely but somehow exasperated manner, immensely carrying, and all the more officer-class for being souped up into his formalised Cockney, ‘and that I’m white, has nudding whatever to do wiv it.’ I never once heard an Indian say, ‘But I’m not black,’ though they must all have wanted to. This no doubt was a decisive part of the technique; if he had used the phrase to actual negroes, from an official position, they would be likely to object, and he would have to stop; but the Indians, who of course chatted to a variety of people in the basement canteen, were clearly in no mood to complain. They thought he was a holy saint, or at least that he must be very high-minded and remote from the world. Nobody ever mentioned, to my knowledge, that this dread sentence was being prounounced; I never even mentioned it privately to George. In his writings, of course, he often uses shock tactics, but I actually did feel a bit shocked to hear them put into practice.

And:

The experience of being Indian Editor continued to work on him, and the early parts of 1984 were evidently conceived as farce about it, so that one expects the book to be gay. Many people get the impression that the author merely chose, for some extraneous reason, to make the later parts as horrible as he could. But one cannot understand either book [Animal Farm being the other] without realising that he considered having to write them as a torture for himself; it was horrible to think of the evil men, stinking Tories, who would gain by his telling the truth, let alone jeer about it triumphantly.

Orwell consoles himself that Animal Farm won’t mean much in Burma, where they don’t have mixed farming, like in England. “A year of two later, when I passed that area on my way back to China, every detail of English mixed farming was being explained to the Burmese on a comic strip of a vernacular newspaper, solely in order that they might relish to the full the delicious anti-Russian propaganda of Orwell.”