Throughout his writing career, Anthony Burgess used a variety of recording equipment to document his personal and professional life. Using reel-to-reel tapes, audio cassettes and camcorder video tapes, Burgess and his wife, Liana, recorded conversations, readings, lectures, interviews, performances of music, and other scenes from the Burgess family’s daily life. The Burgess Foundation’s archive contains a substantial collection of audio recordings, including more than 700 cassette tapes, many of which have not been played for 30 years. Some of these tapes were used to record interim drafts of Burgess’s creative work, especially his poetry and translations.

To preserve these audio cassettes, and to make them accessible to researchers, the Foundation has sought expert advice from David Govier (pictured below), an audio preservation engineer at the North-West Sound Archive, based at Manchester Central Library.

David has been working with the Burgess Foundation to preserve and digitise its audio collections. In this episode of the podcast, Andrew Biswell talks to him about what he has found on the tapes, the equipment he has been using to digitise them, and the special techniques that are required to deal with a historic audio collection. You can also hear a few sample recordings from the collection.

The Burgess Foundation’s podcast is available to download from all the usual places, or you can stream the episode via Acast or Youtube below.

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