Summer Camp - All There Is

Pop band Summer Camp have recorded a short piece for a BBC Radio 4 documentary based around cut-up archive samples of people talking about dating. The show’s producer Eleanor McDowall describes the project:

“Short Cuts is a weekly BBC Radio 4 series offering a showcase for delightful and adventurous short documentaries – true stories, radio adventures and found sound. Each week, the programme addresses a different theme – this edition’s is called ‘Faking It’ – and in it we aim to offer a selection of compelling personal stories and ingenious and adventurous storytelling. For example, last week’s programme featured the story of a man who secretly recorded his life for years, alongside the Newsnight economics editor (and former musicologist) Paul Mason’s transformation of the UK GDP growth rates into plainchant.

For ‘Faking It’ we wanted Summer Camp to put together a ‘documentary song’ offering a guide to manipulating your way into someone else’s affections. The song features the biological anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher’s advice about how to manufacture this state (for men a low voice – it’s a key indicator of high testosterone and a sign that you’re a good mate, or echoing the language someone uses – words like ‘adventure’ or ‘loyalty’ will – in the right person – trigger feelings of love). This interview is intercut with the voices of lovestruck teenagers from the BBC archive, which as Elizabeth mentions in her blog, seem remarkably similar to the way we talk about love and loneliness now. I think they’ve done a beautiful job of bringing out the musicality of the language and playfully drawing these elements together.”

And Summer Camp’s Elizabeth Sankey describes her own thoughts on the project.

“We’ve been working on a song for the brilliant Radio 4 Programme, ‘Short Cuts’. It was a really exciting project for us. We were given archived BBC recordings by the glamorous producer which we then turned into a song about dating and relationships that we named ‘All There Is’. The recordings were from 1969 and 1984, and it was amazing to see how much (and how little) had changed in terms of people talking about love and relationships.
What had changed: – the people had names like Doris, Bill and Gladys
What hadn’t changed:
– anything else.”

You can listen to Summer Camp’s documentary contribution at the Radio 4 website or you can stream it below.