Walter Ryan: ‘Oliver Sacks meets Throbbing Gristle’
Trebus Record 2
Songs and Stories from the Centre – Trebus Record One was intended to be the first in a series of experimental collaborations between artists, composers, and people living with dementia. At a time when ‘art in care’ frequently meant colouring books, I wanted to make something with high production values that people would like to own.
Six months after releasing this first vinyl album (in 2004) I hoped to release a second, provisionally (and imaginatively), titled Trebus Record 2: More Songs and Stories from the Centre. I referred to it in my diary as TR2.
Bruce Nauman described his work as ‘like getting hit on the back of the head with a baseball bat. You never see it coming; it knocks you flat'. That was exactly what I wanted for TR2. I decided it would either be a collage of ambient recordings I’d already made in nursing homes and hospitals[1] or it would focus on one person (each track on Songs and Stories… involved a different care home resident).
Walter Ryan
I talked to Walter almost every day for two years, initially in a care home where I worked briefly as an activity coordinator, and then in a terrifying mental health unit where he was sent after attacking a nurse during a manic episode. He told me about his tough upbringing in Ireland, the physical abuse he received at the hands of sadistic priests, and his life as a street fighter, boxing for money outside pubs. I recorded our conversations and later adapted them into a script, which actor Peter Marinker from the Samuel Beckett Theatre Company agreed to record.
While Walter was in the mental health unit Songs and Stories… picked up rave reviews. Mark Gould writing in The Guardian described it as ‘a startling collision of Tom Waits, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Samuel Beckett’, broadcaster Jonny Trunk said it was ‘quite brilliant for reasons impossible to explain’ and Harry Eyres writing in the Financial Times said ‘The Trebus Project throws down a gauntlet to the world of contemporary art, so often obsessed by youth, sensationalism and celebrity’. I’ll write about the ideas behind Songs and Stories in another post.
Walter decided TR2 should be about him, and came up with the idea of recording his favourite songs. Between my visits, he wrote the titles of songs he wanted to record on the back of pilfered drug charts. TR2 soon became Walter’s Album.
A few days later I smuggled a small tape recorder into the hospital and we made a handful of recordings in Walter’s room while I sat on his bed – one of the other patients can be heard singing along during Walter’s booming rendition of My Way. I enjoyed the gritty, subversive quality of our work and sidestepping the need for an expensive studio - a friend described the project as Oliver Sacks meets Throbbing Gristle. This wasn't art therapy, and it felt new, exciting, and genuinely collaborative. We decided that the album cover should be a photocopy of Walter’s list of song titles.
Walter’s Album never happened. I got as far as recording a rehearsal of the monologue and drafting a press release before I put the project on the back burner where it’s stayed ever since[2]. The fact that his singing is pretty bad didn’t bother us (as other people in the unit could testify) half as much as the thought that people might laugh at the manic, over-excited quality of his singing, which I knew to be evidence of a temporary madness (he returned to living in the care home in a calmer state after about twelve weeks). Despite the positive reviews for Songs and Stories… I'd received criticism from some care providers and I didn’t want Walter to feel he’d done something silly. I decided to put the record on hold while I worked on a series of life stories that became the books Ancient Mysteries and Tell Mrs Mill.
Twenty years on I think Walter’s Album would have been great: over the past 10 years we’ve grown used to people with dementia on TV and the radio – perhaps even bored with them – but at the time of the Trebus Project record and books this hadn’t yet happened. People with dementia were largely invisible. It’s clear from his introduction that Walter knew what he was doing and was contributing on his terms.
It’s more than likely Walter’s Album would disappear without a trace if it were released now – people have more than enough to worry about without listening to the ramblings of old people. Nonetheless, I’d love for it to happen.
If you’d like to make a small donation to the project you can do so here via Paypal: cables.clegg@gmail.com
You can hear the album via this link: Walter's Album Play
Side 1. Walter’s story performed by Peter Marinker
Side 2.
1. Walter’s intro
2. Moon River
3. Danny Boy
4. Irish Eyes
5. You Made Me Love You
6. Shenandoah
7. My Way
8. I Gave Up My Senses
9. My Lord (Walter’s composition)
10. Come Let Me Love You
[1] Some of these recordings were used in the Radio 4 series Ancient Mysteries.
[2] Peter Marinker rehearsed the monologue in a theatre storeroom and I recorded him on an ancient Nokia phone. We both agreed that the poorly recorded rehearsal was a much better fit for Walter’s Album than an immaculate studio rendition we made a month later.