Thrilled to have an article in AUDIOFILE magazine, the audiobook world’s ‘bible’. Here it is:-<\/p>\n
Gordon Griffin
\nOn August 10 and 11 of this year, Gordon Griffin went into a London studio and recorded ELEGY: THE FIRST DAY ON THE SOMME, by Andrew Roberts. It was the award-winning narrator\u2019s 700th audiobook. Seven hundredth! His voice was as crisp and mellifluous as ever.<\/p>\n
The audiobook industry didn\u2019t exist when Griffin began his acting career in the 1960s. Instead, it was a role in a BBC Radio drama that gave him the first hint of his future. \u201cI was cast as a 16-year-old character even though I was 24. It was a revelation. As long as you sounded right and people believed your voice, you could play anything.\u201d When audiobooks appeared, he spotted the possibilities immediately and sent a work sample to the address that he found on the back of an audiobook. \u201cI got my first assignment. Four books.\u201d He was off through scores of mysteries and lots of fiction and history.<\/p>\n
During the run up to 700, the industry changed significantly. \u201cIn the beginning, we were told to imagine the listener as a little old lady who knitted and couldn\u2019t see well,\u201d he laughs. \u201cNow everyone is listening. It\u2019s so exciting.\u201d Griffin records for unprecedented stretches. \u201cGenerally, nine to five, several days a week, week in and week out.\u201d He uses \u201cno potions or sprays\u201d to keep his voice limber, instead crediting luck and lots of preparation. He reads and annotates every script–he was working on five when we spoke–underlining key words, making character notes, and writing down the phonetic pronunciation of foreign words. (He once called an author to investigate a particularly abstruse term only to learn that the writer had invented it.) Occasionally, when a \u201cwonderful writer uses eccentric punctuation,\u201d he re-punctuates to help himself not trip over, say, a semicolon that should really be a comma. \u201cWhen I do all this, the book will flow. When it flows, it really takes off. You can just sail.\u201d His voice lifts with an imagined current.<\/p>\n
Even when \u201csailing,\u201d there are books he doesn\u2019t love. \u201cBut it\u2019s irrelevant what I think. I\u2019ve got to give it my best shot whatever the book is like. We narrators have a responsibility to honor the writer no matter what. We\u2019re between them and the reader, saying,\u201d–he dips his voice invitingly–\u201c\u2018Listen to this. Come on a journey with us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin has developed a talk called \u201cSpeaking Volumes,\u201d about the making of audiobooks, which he delivers to reading groups and libraries when he\u2019s not working. Mostly, though, he is working.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t set out to break recording records. It just happened, and here I am 700 books later. As an actor, this is the perfect job. It\u2019s a play in which you are the director and casting director, and you perform all the parts. Imagine! What a privilege.\u201d– Aurelia C. Scott<\/p>\n
[OCTOBER\/NOVEMBER 2015]<\/p>\n
\u00a9 AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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Thrilled to have an article in AUDIOFILE magazine, the audiobook world’s ‘bible’. Here it is:- Gordon Griffin On August 10 and 11 of this year, Gordon Griffin went into a London studio and recorded ELEGY: THE FIRST DAY ON THE SOMME, by Andrew Roberts. It was the award-winning narrator\u2019s 700th audiobook. Seven hundredth! His voice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordongriffin.com\/ggnewsite2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}