'Bird Sounds In Close-Up', and the Legend of Victor C Lewis

Released on Hallmark / Pickwick in 1969, 'Bird Sounds In Close Up'  is the possibly the greatest LP I've reviewed in Electric Roulette's entire 48 year history. BSICU, as it is referred to by absolutely nobody, features 100 different "sound items" from the vocabulary of 40 British Birds, live in their late 60s natural habitats around the UK including Meadow Pipits, Yellowhammers, Cirl Buntings, Corn Buntings and various types of Tits.

The man responsible for recording and compiling this seminal work was Nature Sound Recordist Victor C Lewis. 1969 saw the release of numerous "landmark" rock and roll albums. The MC5's debut. Led Zeppelin II. Miles Davis' 'In A Silent Way'. 'The Best Of The Easybeats - Volume 2'. Perched head and shoulders above them all is 'Bird Sounds In Close-Up', and yet despite the critical plaudits heaped upon the LP, the life of it's creator remains clouded in rumour and mystery. What follows is an attempt to shed a little more light on the Victor C Lewis legend, through a close study of this, his defining work.

'Bird Sounds In Up-Close' has long been considered the Rosetta Stone of Victor C Lewis nuts like myself due to the 4 sides of dense A4 notes that accompany the LP, written by Lewis himself. In addition to this written commentary, there are two paragraph's written by Natural History Unit Sound Librarian John Burton, in which he describes Lewis' reputation at the time, and his relationship with the ornithologist.

'I sometimes receive phonecalls from him (Victor C Lewis) offering me new versions of recordings already supplied by him. "But Victor", I protest, "I've already got a magnificent Mistle Thrush song of yours." "Oh that", he scoffs, "This is a much better recording"  - John Burton

Lewis was deadly serious about his work, and he would have scoffed at Jesus himself if Jesus had  challenged his Mistle Thrush song knowledge as Burton does here. As a "prominent member of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society", Victor C Lewis did what he did not because he 'had' to, but because he was driven to by a lifelong passion for Wildlife Sound Recording, and if he was gonna do it, which he was, he was gonna do it right. And if doing it right meant making unsolicited phonecalls to the family home of "that punk kid John Burton" at random hours of the night for months on end until doing so suddenly violated some sort of court injunction Burton had imposed, then as a dedicated Wildlife Sound Recordist, Victor C Lewis had to be prepared to "go there". Years later, Victor C Lewis said "I can sit camouflaged up a tree watching birds through powerful binoculars for hours and people call it 'ornithology', but I do the same with John Burton's wife and they call it harassment." Double standard, people.

The Techniques & Technology Of Victor C Lewis

Of great interest to Lewis freaks like me are the   details we learn from the liner notes about the technology Victor C Lewis used in the recording of the album, and the idiosyncratic methods he deployed.

1. Camouflaging equipment is known as 'decorating' the equipment. Bits of bark and leaves and junk like that will do, but preferably not big pictures of coyotes, Dick Dastardly & Mutley from 'Catch The Pigeon' or those terrifying giant spiders that eat birds.

.2. The album features "All Natural Realistic Reproductions: No trick mixing, superimpositions or edited sequences", just like that other "as live" 1969 recording, "Let It Be" by The Beatles. Beatles fans will be interested to learn that the Blackbird heard twittering at the end of McCartney's White Album ballad was taken from a Victor C Lewis recording. Some months after the White Album had been released, Victor C Lewis called McCartney to offer him an improved Blackbird recording, to which McCartney protested "But Victor, I've already got a magnificent Blackbird recording". Victor C Lewis offered a trademark 'scoff' in reply. Classic Victor C Lewis.

.3. According to John Burton's notes, Victor C Lewis was "a perfectionist who shunned the use of such popular aids to recording wildlife as the parabolic reflector". Ie: he was a maverick. A loose cannon. A danger to himself and the whole damn Wildlife Sound Recording Society. They'd have got rid of him...but he was just Too Damn Good.

.4. "Various lengths of screwed tubular rods" were used in the making of this LP. Victor C Lewis considered the right to bare screwed tubular rods to be a constitutional right, and was heard to mutter on a number of occasions that if the "suit and tie urban liberals in Westminster" wanted to take his screwed tubular rods they'd have to prise them from his "cold dead hands". And as for un-screwed tubular rods? Give Victor C Lewis a break.

The Birds & Victor C Lewis' Relationship With Them

Having discussed these technical issues and dispensed with his 'shout-outs' (including Mrs S C Holland of the North Gloucestershire Naturalists Society, for her 'paitence and help in locating a site of the Marsh Warbler' - ornithologist code for 'we hooked up'), Victor C Lewis begins his written commentary, to be read whilst listening to the LP. This translates as three pages of this sort of thing:

"RECORD: Young Great Spotted Woodpeckers, and parent call. May 1967, Herefordshire.  When the parent alights at the hole it sometimes taps at the bark, perhaps to extract small insects."

Guess Bob Dylan's liner notes to 'High 61 Revisited' don't seem so hot now, right? The album breaks down into 4 'bands', or what Deep Purple organist Jon Lord would have listed on the sleeve of a 1970 instrumental solo album as 'suites', without really knowing what 'suite' technically means, apart from in the sofa sense of the word, and sort of not even then really either. These bands are: Farm & Homestead, Open Countyside, Woodland & Copse and Gravel Pit & Marshland. Each band comprises 10 different 'featured soloists,' which are joined in every case by the various other bird sounds and general natural ambient noise of their natural habitat. The Black-headed Gull track, for instance, also features contributions from a Reed Bunting, a Wood Pigeon and a Cuckoo. By common consent, the Wood Pigeon really nails it.

From the very beginning of his career, Victor C Lewis had expected the same high standards of professionalism from the birds he recorded as he did from "colleagues" like John Burton and Paul McCartney, which is only reasonable. Infact, few things could be considered more reasonable than expecting professionalism from wild birds. This desire for professionalism had developed over time into a tireless drive for perfection, and eventually into a frenzied, rampant megalomania. By the time he came to compile 'Bird Sounds In Close-Up' in 1969 Lewis' behaviour had become increasingly erratic and his methods increasingly unorthodox, perhaps even dangerous. As early as the early 1960s rumours had begun to circulate amongst the Wildlife Sound Recording community that Lewis was grinding up low-grade amphetamines and mixing them into bird feed at recording sites in order to keep his performers alert and awake during the marathon sessions he now demanded from them. Towards the end of the written commentary, he makes the following observation:

"The vocal efforts of the Reed Bunting are really very disappointing - just a stammering repetition of a few single notes."

Outtakes from 'Bird Sounds In Close-Up' reveal the extent of Lewis' disappointment with the Reed Bunting. Over a gruelling 5 hour pond-based session in Surrey, the Reed Bunting can be heard stammering the same "few single notes" over and over and over again, the performance never really improving. Victor C Lewis seethed with frustration in his hide, until eventually we hear him burst from the wooden hut to hurl a volley of enraged obscenities at the tiny bird. Criticising the vocal performance of a performer in such a blatant way would have considered highly unprofessional by the Wildlife Sound Recording community at this time, and Lewis must have been quite disturbed by the incident for him to have referred to it so explicitly.

The Unravelling Of Victor C Lewis

Shortly after the release of 'Bird Sounds In Close-Up' the Wildlife Sound Recording Society severed all communication with Victor C Lewis, and it is at this point that the Victor C Lewis trail essentially runs dry. Lewis had written to the Society in February 1970 stating his intention of being the first man to record a female Baird's Plover, and subsequently disappeared into the wilds of a Norfolk marshland reserve. Under mounting pressure from various wildlife organisations the Society dispatched a young ornithologist called Ben Willard to find Lewis and bring him home. Society records state simply that Willard's month long hunt was unsuccessful, and that Lewis' whereabouts remained unknown to them. Conspiracy theorists have long questioned this official line. For years there have been suggestions that Willard did infact manage to track down Lewis, but that the man was so wild and disturbed by months alone in the reserve that, fearful of even greater controversy, the Society instructed Willard to leave the broken ornithologist where he was found. One particularly dark version of the story has it that during his time in the reserve Lewis had actually "gone native", and that Willard had found him dressed head to toe in feathers, his vocabulary a garbled mixture of bird calls and broken English. According to this particular legend, Lewis' first coherent words to Willard were "I am the Buzzard king. I can do anything".

Clearly, this is not how fans of Victor C Lewis would choose for him to be remembered. Like Lee Mavers of The Las, Phil Spector or Brian Wilson, Lewis was a man driven to great work by a desire for perfection in his art, and then driven to the edge of sanity by the impossibility of achieving that goal. He paid a heavy price for his maverick genius, but the world is a richer place because of wonderful LPs such as this. Victor C Lewis should be remembered not as an demented crank-job, but as the visionary artist responsible for 'Bird Sounds In Close-Up'. When it comes down to it, an album consisting of nothing but an hour of twittering birds is way more punk, way cooler and way weirder than anything Captain Beefheart, Can or Sonic Youth ever put out. Anybody can hammer out three bullshit chords, sneer, be sexist and take drugs. It takes something else to make a record like this. I'll leave you with a quote from Victor C Lewis himself, as featured in the liner notes.

"It is gratifying to know that more concentrated efforts are now being made by various bodies and societies to assure the preservation of our wildlife in all it's forms. It is hoped that in the years to come records of bird song will become even more popular, but let us make sure that the gramophone record and the magnetic tape will not become the only means of 'listening to nature'." - Victor C lewis, 1969

Paul Fuzz

(All liner notes quoted from the original written commentary, "Bird Sounds In Close-Up: Recorded & Compiled by Victor C Lewis.")

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Back with a fuckin' bang!

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