The Generalist

http://www.thegeneralist.co.uk/

Area: Audio archivist/blogger Age: 57 Nationality: British A lifelong writer and editor, John May is slowly digitising his huge archive of taped interviews and making them available under Creative Commons, alongside more recent interviews. So, rambling chats with Julien Temple and Everett True sit alongside a drunken Q&A with Douglas Adams from back in 1982. It's where "new journalism meets oral history" – a neat idea.

More from the Generalist

"The birth of the AudioGeneralist is the fulfilment of a long-term ambition. Ever since I did my first recorded interview back in 1973, with dolphin expert John Lilly, who was in London to publicise his book 'The Centre of the Cyclone' about his experiences with LSD, I realised what a precious and special thing it was, this small unrepeatable and unique moment of history, captured on a 90-minute cassette tape.

Spurred on by this notion, I then spent the next 30 years recording as many interviews as I could. What adventures I had along the way. I had tea with William Burroughs at the Chelsea Arts Club, discussed UFOs with a young Steven Spielberg in a fancy London hotel, and talked space travel with a bearded George Lucas at the then Star Wars HQ, opposite Universal Studios in Los Angeles. I met poets, painters, singers, writers and actors. I grilled scientists, activists, politicians and people from many nations. I bought Al Gore lunch on the eve of the 1992 Rio earth summit, when we discussed global warming amongst other subjects.

Years ago I went for a meeting with the British Library’s Institute of Recorded Sound and urged them to establish a journalism archive of such interviews which, to my mind, represented a valuable historical record of a range of important and often unsung creative individuals in all fields of life. It was met with some interest but nothing materialised.

As the years went by, the wall of tapes and latterly minidiscs grew higher and the pressure to do something with them increased. Then in June 1997 I became a blogger with ‘The Generalist’ which, for the last two years, has been successfully reaching out to readers around the world with a special brand of alternative and underground news, facts, thoughts and information – much of it drawn from the elephantine archives of what I call HQINFO – hundreds of boxes of books, magazines, clippings, posters, photos, correspondence et al which forms the entire back catalogue of my working life.

Yet brilliant as the Blogger software is, it was not possible to carry audio on it so, in collaboration with my son Alex, we decided to build the Audio Generalist in the hope of finding at last a way of bringing these dusty tapes back to life and broadcasting them out there in the world – for free.

The original intention was to begin by mixing some new interviews with archive material but as often happens in these cases, when you start down a new road, strange and unexpected things happened. Suddenly the opportunities to conduct a whole range of new interviews emerged as if by magic.

We live in a time when freedom of expression is under threat wherever you look, when media are more controlled and more tightly edited, when all thought and conversation is being reduced to soundbites. So we decided to go in the opposite direction.

For a start, these interviews are run at full length with a minimum of editing - to allow for the laws of libel and to maintain the interest of the listeners.

These longform real-life tapes will take you into the centre of intimate conversations which sound totally unlike mainstream radio. We believe we are pioneering a whole new style and approach towards journalism on the net.

This site - most importantly – is free its users.

To receive this recognition from Dazed and Confused makes us feel that we are on the right track.

Stay sharp."