Alan Gray & Michael Barrett Cassette Recordings 1994-1996

[jmenges]

Find links below to 15 audio recordings made by former policeman and private detective Alan Gray in conversation with Michael Barrett from 1994-1996.
I've included the length of each recording and my subjective opinion as to the audio quality.
Casebook has not edited or altered these recordings in any way. They are just as we received them.

16 August 1994 00:18:41 (fair-poor)
31 August 1994 00:59:58 (good)
24 October 1994 01:14:31 (fair)
4 November 1994 00:47:48 (fair)
5 November 1994 01:30:14 (poor)
6 November 1994 00:43:02 (poor)
8 November 1994 01:09:22 (poor)
6 December 1994 00:06:08 (fair)
10 December 1994 00:32:36 (fair)
12 December 1994 00:31:26 (fair)
2 January 1995 00:10:30 (fair)
26 January 1995 00:29:58 (good)
29 January 1995 00:27:15 (fair)
8 April 1995 00:32:10 (good)
30 September 1996 00:37:53 (fair-good)


Thank you to Keith Skinner and James Johnston for making these available to Casebook.



JM

[caz]

Hooray! Many thanks to all three of you for making this happen.

Love,

Caz
X

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Many thanks to all involved.

[rjpalmer]

Can an interested party clear up the following?

A. Page 154 of Ripper Diary: The Inside Story refers to a Barrett/Gray tape dated November 7, 1994, but none of the tapes listed in JM's initial post have that date. Can we assume that this is an error and not a missing tape?

B. Another tape is dated January 26, 1995, but I've been informed by email that a large swath of that tape (but not all of it) duplicates the tape that is dated as January 2, 1995. There must have been a mistake made when transferring the tape to a sound file (?) Which is the correct date?

---

To give some context here, transcribing these tapes requires headphones (to drown out background noise in your environment), the ability to quickly play back the last ten seconds or so possibly five or more times each time, and to do that for maybe two to three hours per day for a week or more just to produce as accurate as possible a transcription and a meagre 15 pages or so of dialogue - and even then you may end up with more inaudibles than 'audibles'.

If anyone knows a way to do it faster without losing any fidelity, I'm all ears ...

What are arguably the most crucial tapes, dated 4-8 November 1994 are almost entirely inaudible.

I know someone who does sound engineering on a professional and semi-professional level, and has much experience with software used to 'clean up' bad recordings, and I sent him one of the sound files to monkey around with. He has made some progress, but he believes the task would be greatly improved with a higher resolution MP3 file. He noticed that a low resolution had been used to create the file. There are ways to eliminate incidental and background noises, but since the resolution is so poor, the software can't be of much help. A higher resolution sound file would help. Perhaps this is too much to ask, but if you can get one to me by way of experiment, I can let him work his magic; he's willing to try and clean it up and has the equipment/software to do it.

One point of my own. When Keith first mentioned the tapes a few months ago, he suggested that Barrett didn't know he was being recorded. More recently, he retracted this and suggested that Barrett did know that he was being taped.

To me, I'm not so sure this has been resolved. In some of the early tapes, Barrett doesn't seem to know he's being recorded. Since we can't hear the context in the later tapes, it is uncertain, but my 'sound' engineering guy, when he listened to the file I gave him, referred to it jokingly as an OSS operation. He thought that Barrett might have been taped secretly. For one thing, Gray's voice was a lot louder than Barretts, suggesting the microphone was near him, which is backwards if he was attempting to record Barrett--why wouldn't he have had the microphone close to the person he was interviewing rather than closer to himself? Further, my sound guru noticed something was rubbing against the microphone repeatedly, and he wondered if it could have been the fabric of Gray's suit or his pocket. Perhaps if we could hear the context we would know.

RP

[Iconoclast]

Can an interested party clear up the following?
A. Page 154 of Ripper Diary: The Inside Story refers to a Barrett/Gray tape dated November 7, 1994, but none of the tapes listed in JM's initial post have that date. Can we assume that this is an error and not a missing tape?

I imagine that Keith and James have read this by now but I'll follow it up with them nevertheless.

B. Another tape is dated January 26, 1995, but I've been informed by email that a large swath of that tape (but not all of it) duplicates the tape that is dated as January 2, 1995. There must have been a mistake made when transferring the tape to a sound file (?) Which is the correct date?

Right enough, the tape that is listed as January 2 1995 consists of the last ten minutes of the January 26, 1995 recording. I don't think I was previously aware of this so - again - I'll mention it to Keith and James in case they haven't seen seen your post. (Possibly it was a different copy and somehow the '6' got missed off?)

What are arguably the most crucial tapes, dated 4-8 November 1994 are almost entirely inaudible. I know someone who does sound engineering on a professional and semi-professional level, and has much experience with software used to 'clean up' bad recordings, and I sent him one of the sound files to monkey around with. He has made some progress, but he believes the task would be greatly improved with a higher resolution MP3 file. He noticed that a low resolution had been used to create the file. There are ways to eliminate incidental and background noises, but since the resolution is so poor, the software can't be of much help. A higher resolution sound file would help. Perhaps this is too much to ask, but if you can get one to me by way of experiment, I can let him work his magic; he's willing to try and clean it up and has the equipment/software to do it.

Once again, I'll mention it (the MP3 format) to Keith and James.

One point of my own. ... In some of the early tapes, Barrett doesn't seem to know he's being recorded. Since we can't hear the context in the later tapes, it is uncertain, but my 'sound' engineering guy, when he listened to the file I gave him, referred to it jokingly as an OSS operation. He thought that Barrett might have been taped secretly.

Having suffered to listen to as many of these tapes as my sanity would permit, I am 99% certain that Barrett did NOT know that he was being recorded every time. Nevertheless, it is clear that he is aware that he is being recorded on at least a few occasions. I don't know why some but not all are surreptitiously recorded but I can only assume that Gray was desperately hoping to catch Barrett in an unguarded moment in order to finally source the 'truth of the hoax' for the viper Harris.

For the benefit of those who cannot bring themselves to put themselves through the tortured comedy of the whole gamut of the Gray-Barrett tapes, I can reassure you all that none of these tapes ever produced any evidence whatsoever of Barrett's hand in a hoax and - on the contrary - they do contain a long litany of Barrett lies and manipulations to keep his 'pal' (Gray) in the game. One of my favourites is when Barrett tells Gray he's going to kill himself and Gray asks him to hang on until he (Gray) gets paid. Honestly, it would be pure Comedy Central if it wasn't so tragic.

Spoiler alert: Barrett doesn't do it.

[Mike J. G.]

Find links below to 15 audio recordings made by former policeman and private detective Alan Gray in conversation with Michael Barrett from 1994-1996.
I've included the length of each recording and my subjective opinion as to the audio quality.
Casebook has not edited or altered these recordings in any way. They are just as we received them.

16 August 1994 00:18:41 (fair-poor)
31 August 1994 00:59:58 (good)
24 October 1994 01:14:31 (fair)
4 November 1994 00:47:48 (fair)
5 November 1994 01:30:14 (poor)
6 November 1994 00:43:02 (poor)
8 November 1994 01:09:22 (poor)
6 December 1994 00:06:08 (fair)
10 December 1994 00:32:36 (fair)
12 December 1994 00:31:26 (fair)
2 January 1995 00:10:30 (fair)
26 January 1995 00:29:58 (good)
29 January 1995 00:27:15 (fair)
8 April 1995 00:32:10 (good)
30 September 1996 00:37:53 (fair-good)


Thank you to Keith Skinner and James Johnston for making these available to Casebook.



JM

There's my Saturday night sorted, then...

[caz]

Alan Gray was the only person who could have clarified precisely when Mike did or did not know he was being recorded, and also when he used the same tape to record conversations taking place on different, not necessarily consecutive days. Where Gray gave the date and time at the start of a tape, that date was used to identify it, even where the recording ends and resumes on another day using the same tape. One has to listen carefully to each tape and be aware when one conversation ends and another begins, in order to catch if Gray gives a new date and time or says nothing, leaving it to the context - where it's audible.

Everyone is now free to do exactly what Keith and others have tried to do, and work out for themselves what appears to be happening, where and when, on each occasion this oddly matched and unmatched couple meet for another gruelling round of truth or dare. It is far from straightforward and it would be nice if this thread could proceed with no aspersions cast on anyone's previous or future observations based on the tapes in their current condition. Personally, I can only tell who's talking on the rare occasions when I can actually hear what's being said!

Listening to Stephen Bradshaw today, testifying at the Post Office Inquiry, I can understand why he was compared by some wag to a private investigator from the 1970s. He sounded to me very much like our very own Alan Gray from the early 1990s!

Love,

Caz
X

[Scott Nelson]

I can't even understand the "good" quality ones.