Friday Flashback, 11 July 2025
Going back to the Riverfront Theatre, and the magic of reading out loud
A very short post this week – I’m making this free. Works has gone bonkers, my son leaves primary school in a week (cue many concerts, performances, parties, presents to sort, with which Mam is helping), and I am spending hours of the hottest days of a year inside a surprisingly cool recording studio, narrating an audiobook for a band.
I love reading out loud. Perhaps this is because I’m a gobby Welsh girl. I always have, even when incredibly nervous, back to when I was reading Psalms and Proverbs out loud in children’s services in chapel. I like wrapping my tongue around the rhythms and cadences of phrases, words, single syllables. I also love that I’m doing this job in the Cobra Studios in Newport, under the direction of the ridiculously lovely studio manager Jordan Day-Williams.
I recorded the audiobook to The Sound of Being Human here – available in all good places, etc etc – a fact which qualifies this post for being a Friday Flashback, I’m telling myself. I also had a magical moment at the end of that job: when I realised that the book’s last moments were with my mum and Ralph McTell in Newport’s Riverfront Theatre, the same complex in which the Cobra studios sit, next to the wide, muddy Usk.
I’ve also just read this piece over my lunchtime sandwich, about the power of reading out loud. It’s interesting. I’ll have more to write about this at some point. But for now, it’s back to the microphone, to read out somebody’s else’s words. Why not read this out loud? Live in somebody else’s interior rhythms for a while. It’s weirdly liberating.
OK so I did read your post out loud - I also love doing that, and have done since childhood. At primary school I remember thinking my turn toread in assembly didn't come round often enough, and at secondary school they made me play the piano, which was far, far more scary. I can't actually remember whether students read lessons there or not! Anyway this was indeed strange as it was neither Biblical cadences nor my own. I don't often read my own writing aloud but I hear it in my head. Just off in a moment to an event in Leominster, but have to add that my late sister was a huge fan of Ralph McTell, and when he came to Belfast in the 70s our Dad took time off work (unheardof in those days! but the idea that she'd get time off school to do it would have been even more unlikely) to queue for a ticket for her. She went to the concert all by herself and then Dad picked her up. Years and years later she went to one of his gigs in England and was so pleased to be able to tell him how much it had meant to her, when so few musicians came over to Northern Ireland - it was at the height of the Troibles. So I really enjoyed the mention of Ralph McTell in your book and in today's post. Performers probably don't realise at the time how much impact they have on the lives of individual audience members.