From: James Guthrie interview
> Another piece that worked better than expected was the telephone operator. Roger was keen to illustrate the personal disconnect of being on the road. We were in L.A. at Producer’s Workshop so I phoned my neighbour, Chris Fitzmorris in London. He had the keys to my flat and I asked him to go there and said that I would call him through an operator. “No matter how many times I call”, I said, “just pick up the phone, say ‘Hello’, let the operator speak and then hang up”. I placed a telephone in a soundproof area, got on to an extension phone and started recording to ¼” tape. It took a couple of operators – the first 2 were a bit abrupt, but the 3rd was perfect. I told her that I wanted to make a collect call to Mrs. Floyd. “Who’s calling?” she asked. “Mr. Floyd”, I replied. Chris’s timing was terrific, over and over he would hang up just at the right moment and she became genuinely concerned. “Is there supposed to be someone there besides your wife?” I was playing her along saying things like “No! I don’t know who that is!” “What’s going on?” and she would try the call again. Unwittingly, she was helping to tell the story. Afterwards I went through the ¼” and edited my voice out, just leaving her and Chris. I sometimes wonder if she ever heard herself on the record.
Source: https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
> Initially, I was shocked at how slowly everything moved! I was used to working really quickly when producing and engineering albums. Suddenly it was like the brakes were on and often it was difficult to get the momentum going. Eventually, I adapted to the Floyd pace. One of the great things about working with this band is that you are allowed time to be creative, to pursue an idea even if it takes some time. The Floyd had a production deal to make their records and the record label never heard anything until it was done. The record was made purely and only by the people in the studio.
The creative freedom without commercial intervention - this is very cool. I can almost hear it in The Wall - how grand and elongated the songs are.
What a great interview. Thank you for linking
“The Floyd”?
Ironic that Have a Cigar was released four years before The Wall:
The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think
Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?Sorry, I don't see the irony. Anyway, having ''The'' as an honourific for band names was commonplace in the UK prior to the '70s, even if the band's name had not been stylized with "The".
It takes exactly the same amount of time to say as “Pink”
“The Floyd” is the name a lot of people who worked with the band use, it shows up on many texts and other documentaries.
I'm going to listen to The Stones, then some Skynyrd, maybe put on some Zeppelin or the Dead.
But not The Zeppelin or The Skynyrd.
Same, except I do love "Sweet Home Alabama" so it will slip through.
I am currently burned out on Zep.
That is what I'm saying, now!
The Zeppelin.... I might say "The Zep"....
I never got into The Zep. I much prefer Beatles.
It’s a term of familiarity. I don’t think it’s about efficiency of speech. Nicknames aren’t always about shortening names.
?
It’s an interview. Pink Floyd, The Floyd. Why would you say The Floyd?
Again, for people of a certain age or generation it was commonplace to prepend it. I find it endearing in a nostalgic way. I can infer from that person's use of it that he is of that age or generation.
Ever see someone mention "The Donald"? It's the same thing.
It's when something or someone gets so recognizable that they can be referred to in a singular sense. There are lots of instances of this throughout pop culture.
In the context of the interview, it's someone who was part of the "Floyd-verse" (this word is a mashup of Floyd and Universe, another common affectation). Pink Floyd was a remarkably famous band, and they still are. Someone that was part of the "Floyd-verse" naturally would have felt the band as all encompassing. It wasn't just a band, it was tour after tour, hit song after hit song, millions and millions of fans - and getting caught up in that made "Pink Floyd" seem far bigger than the sum of its parts. Calling that phenomenon "The Floyd" is actually very succinct, and portrays how large a cultural phenomenon Pink Floyd was and still is, 60 years later.
I have to wonder why you can't/won't understand this.
The band originally was The Pink Floyd (after changing their name from The Tea Set)
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But never The Floyd. Just as the band isn’t named after a man called Pink.
Curveball, the band is named after a man called Pink!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Anderson and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Council
It was named after a man called Pink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Anderson
Okay. Not named after a band member named Pink.
Unlike Pink, which is the stage name of the artist.
s/never/commonly\, in the parlance of the time\,/
"He keeps hanging up. And it's a man answering."
You can tell the operator was really loving that....
Too cheap to hire a voice actor, let's stress out some random telephone operator.
It's cool to hear how that came together as an improvisation. It recalls a simpler time when a major album (or movie, TV show, etc) could just feature your neighbor and a random telephone operator without signing releases and clearing rights.
It also gave Chris Fitzmorris (the neighbor) one of the greatest "random cool thing that happened to me" stories ever.
Musicians still release samples without clearing them
Yes, I'm aware. Although a major mega band doing so on a wide release album these days would be taking a significant legal risk - which is why it's now fairly rare. But back in 1979 it wasn't uncommon, to the extent that one of the then-biggest bands in the world could do so on their biggest album project yet.
It might be a notorious example but artists do take those risks https://www.billboard.com/lists/kanye-west-ye-sampling-lawsu... (not to mention the many artists that release music without licensing from the beat producers, which still happens regularly)
Alternatively, treating the “random telephone operator” as a prop and forcing them to be part of your project without consent is troubling.
It’s their job. I “forced” them to be part of my project of making collect calls hundreds of times.
I do not believe that you are genuinely troubled by this.
I mean... I'm not troubled by it, but as a person who has worked in a job where I received direct calls from the public that I had no choice but to deal with it, I am definitely annoyed on behalf of the operator. It's not the worst thing in the world, but... wow, what an annoying day. Can you imagine six months later, you hear your most annoying day at work played on an album?!
As a former telephone operator from this era who spent most shifts frantically bubbling scantrons as business men rattled off their calling card numbers and call numbers at lighting speed, I would have been delighted by this break in routine.
> frantically bubbling scantrons
I want to know more!
I assumed numbers were entered directly on a 10-key. Were they scantrons as a paper record, as an asynchronous way to enter the data, or?
Okay, Data.
Agreed. Not monstrous, but troubling.
It is bizarre that people are smugly dogpiling on you for showing a shred of empathy.
Excessive empathy is not a virtue.
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In the time, and given the nature, it is harmless. Certainly compared to modern attempts at pranks, advertised to the world instantly on SocMed.
I was wondering if they ever figured out who the operator was? I couldn’t find anything about her through my Googling. Seems like she should have some credit in the album for her brilliant contribution
The session singer who did "The Great Gig in the Sky" vocals on The Dark Side of the Moon famously got £30. She later sued and got an undisclosed settlement.
Great documentary about the backup singers that became iconic on rock songs and yet made next to nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWyUJcA8Zfo
Also on that album of course "There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark". Wasn't that just some random studio guy, on the spur of the moment, too? Simpler times, more creativity.
Pink Floyd wrote some questions down on note cards and asked random people in the studio, recording their answer. The Beatles were part of this, but their answers were too guarded and weren't used.
It may have been Jane Barbe (AT&T).
https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/miscellaneous-te...
I believe (unable to fully verify) she got a credit in the 2017 album “Is This The Life We Really Want? — Almost 40 years after the release of The Wall”.
https://www.discogs.com/release/10441646-Roger-Waters-Is-Thi...
This contradicts the finds of the author, this story means it was regular DTMF used while the author could not find that. Or am i missing something?
(Author here) No contradiction.
I think what happened is
1. The recording engineer dialled the operator. Could have been pulse dialling, could have been DTMF, doesn't matter.
2. Operator answered and the engineer said "I'd like to call London, collect, number 01xxx831".
3. Operator entered 044 1 xxx 831, and this was transmitted to another exchange in SS5 tones.
I didn't grow up in the USA, but a couple of people who did have said that, yes, they think that at least some of the time, you could hear the SS5 tones and also the initial conversation between the operator and whoever answered the phone. It may be that it depended on the operator, since they probably had a mute button, and maybe on the particular exchange the operator was in.
In the film, we hear from 3 onwards.
Hilarious. As a teen I knew that sequence sounded exactly like MF signaling one would expect on an international call. It was common knowledge of high school hackers that it had recently been straightforward to use a "blue box" to make free calls using that kind of tone but that it was quite difficult by 1985 or so to find places in the network where it would work inside CONUS.
(Phreakers in the late 1980s were frequently "carders" who stole MCI account numbers by methods such as systematic dialing, not to mention my favorite tactic of taking over an answering machine to change the message to "this number accepts all third party and collect calls" which will strike terror into a dentist office or church or other victim when they find out)
> record a real telephone in the US and accurately capture the feeling of a long-distance call
Aside from the signalling, it would be tricky to mimic the tinny hollow sound that came on a long-distance analog connection. Sideband modulation used to reduce the bandwidth, which requires an accurate local oscillator to reconstruct, lest the voice acquire a hint of Donald Duck. Hundreds of channels each separated by a few hundred Hz of gap, all slightly bleeding into each other, the warble of modems and murmur of other speakers making noise that's not exactly white noise in the background, a propagation delay of tens of milliseconds producing an audible electronic echo/ringing, etc. Lots of people at the time would have been familiar with that sound, and it would have been hard to fake.
So we know a couple of digits and the splice points. We also know the date. Phone numbers used to be public back then.
It would be fun to grep for the pattern in the matching phone book to see if someone in Pink Floyd's circles comes up.
Only problem is to get hold of a digital version of the phone book. It strikes me as odd how hard it is to retrieve information that used to be so ubiquitous.
Not too long ago police in Germany asked publicly for information about certain phone numbers related to the Madeleine McCann case. Apparently not even the police has an archive of old phone books.
Cassiepaper posted an interview[0] elsewhere in this discussion that says it was James Guthrie's flat in London (James Guthrie being their producer and engineer).
[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
On the cassette tape version of The Wall I had if you flipped the cassette over during this phone call sequence it would end up being right in the middle of another song (can't remember which one) which has this recording playing as part of the background. I feel like it couldn't have been intentional but who knows.
I’m betting subconscious but intentional. I’ve heard a couple artists talk about how they organize an album and there’s a vibe they’re going for but I didn’t get the impression any of them had it down to anything like a science.
Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz. It’s just two artists putting a story arc together by feel and getting the same shape. A bit birthday paradox, but a bit shared vibe.
In the case of The Wall, I would bet a certain degree of symmetry was being reached for. Few artists want to leave or start an album on a sour note, but there will be songs in the middle that are.
One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore, and I find that a shame. I used to start humming the next song on the album when I would hear things on the radio. Makes it worse when they trim the intro or outro for radio play though. I prefer the album version of Wish You Were Here, for instance.
My then-15 year old daughter surprised me a few years ago. We had just pulled up to the house. Instead of opening the car door, she put on Led Zeppelin I and we sat in the car listening to the entire album together. I honestly think that was the first time in her life that she put on an entire album to listen to.
And she did appreciate what an experience it was - like watching a movie when all you've ever seen were Youtube Shorts, or like reading a novel when all you've ever read were memes.
Most good albums have one song that was never released as a single, that’s just for the fans. So even beyond the “story” the album contaminates, they miss important chapters.
Anyone who talks about Tears for Fears, a side conversation about The Working Hour will start. Throwing Copper had five or six singles released over almost three years, but Pillar of Davidson is still my favorite song from that album, and one of my favorites overall. I could listen to Kashmir or PoD in much the same mood. They just build and build.
It would be similar to Patreon content today (though writers with Patreon or magazine articles often release collections later that have all of the rarer content. Martha Wells is the first to spring to my mind, and Naomi Novik for another)
For me that's very often the 7th song on an LP and usually starts its second side
Wow, I remember noticing this same thing back when I was exploring a lot of different artists. On streaming sites often a bands top songs will be ones that came out recently, or a collab they did with a more popular band, or a track that for whatever reason appealed to a wider audience. But those aren’t what you really want to hear if you’re trying to decide if you like that band. My strategy would instead be to go find either the bands earliest studio album or the oldest album that is well represented in their top tracks and skip to track 7. I never thought about why, but it definitely works.
> One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore
I’ve been looking forward to finding out how Aphex Twin has built projects around the streaming format. It may take many more years and releases until someone finds out something like the ten seconds from 0:30-0:40 on all his tracks work when randomly played together in any order, or something along those line.
It's a nice coincidence but I doubt it was intentional or even subconscious - The Wall was released in 1979, when casette tapes were only just starting to become popular (it was the same year as the first Walkman was released, which contributed hugely to their growth). The vast majority of record sales were vinyl and most bands would be concentrating on that format.
Alphaville's second album Afternoons in Utopia starts with quiet muffled word "night", then followed by few seconds of silence and then first song called IAO starts. The last song on that album is about Lady Bright:
There was a young lady named Bright
Who's speed was much faster, much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous...The first words on Pink Floyd’s The Wall are “… we came in?”. The last words on the album are “Isn’t this where …”.
Dream Theater has a string of 4 albums (over 6 years) in which each album starts with the soundscape from the end of the previous album. The last album in the cycle, Octavarium, musically and thematically finishes in a loop, connecting the end of the last song to the beginning of the first.
If memory serves, I believe record players that could flip the records were contemporary to the release of The Wall. My parents didn’t have a flipper but they had a player that could play a stack of records and The Wall was the first or second LP try bought to play on it.
That definitely works on an auto reversing tape deck, which it looks like existed for fifteen years prior.
Sharp made an auto-reversing turntable, it played both sides, front-loaded like a CD player. I have never seen one, despite being an old guy who is of that era. There were but a handful of turntables that could do this, so that’s a lot of production effort for a joke but a few were equipped to get.
There were a lot of eight tracks during that time, though, so sibling comment is more likely correct.
It is more likely a gimmick for the 8-track release.
Soon after the album came out, a morning DJ on one of the FM rock stations in Syracuse NY figured out the number and called it. They had a brief conversation before being hung up on. The DJ would play that conversation from time to time on the air.
This brings back memories of being a clueless script kid in the 1990s.
I knew those tones as CCITT5 tones.
In the days of blueboxing I had a 486 laptop that I acquired because the harddrive died and booted from floppys, a DOS program called 'The Little Operator' that played tones and a photocopy of a book about telephone switching.
You're right; I think CCITT5 is just another name for SS5, because different groups were writing standards. Bell called it one thing, CCITT (an international standards group) called it another thing. And then in the 1990s, the CCITT renamed itself to ITU.
Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5
SS5 was derived from AT&T's US MF signaling system, described in "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching" by Breen and Dahlbom, Bell System Technical Journal, November 1960. PDF here: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf
The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.
CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...
Fascinating article. See also
https://web.archive.org/web/20120314023131if_/http://www.alc...
for an early technical article describing the implementation details of the familiar DTMF "touch tone" dialing system, noting that the precise details differ from the final implementation — in particular, the high group frequencies increased from 1,094/1,209/1,336/1,477 Hz to 1,209/1,336/1,477/1,633 Hz, possibly to mitigate the "pulling" effect described on pp. 251–252 (though I can find no reference for the rationale).
I wish there could be a way for me to live through these times. Like world of warcraft classic, but for real life. I know that we're like years away from stuff like these.
Young Lust is the song where this operator is heard.
Not being an audiophile, it took me some time to figure out the specific song. My brother had The Wall album, and I enjoyed it, but I never listened to it on my own. I went back and listened to it again for the context.
I really enjoy music but I don't listen to it as often I'd like. I think part of the reason is that I have difficulty concentrating when there is audio in the background. Some of my software engineer co-workers can turn on music or a video while they work, but I'm more productive in silence.
I have the same issue. When I turn music on, I can't stop focusing on it and losing track of whatever intellectual task I'm on. The only thing I can listen to while writing/reading is white noise or nature sounds type of thing.
Also, having a show play in the background while I do something else like many people love to do? I can't do it.
This has changed for me over time. I’ve been trying to learn a new framework and working on leetcode problems. I used to put on an old album and go into Flow state, but now it’s too much at once. I dunno if it’s age or just being out of practice.
Less than fifteen years an ago someone caught me listening to music while watching an old movie and typing on my computer at the same time. I was like, I can explain.
Information society has dial tones too....
> https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-f...
Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?
We did that one already:
A while back I tracked down the video clip from the show Gomer Pyle that was used for the “But there's somebody else that needs taking care of in Washington” background audio.
Seeing that in its original context was jarring
I know what you mean. I recently did the same thing for the little bit from Gunsmoke at the beginning of “Is There Anybody Out There?”, e.g. “Is it unsafe to travel at night?” - incidentally spoken by actress Diana Muldaur, who later played Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek TNG.
Now I wonder if Frankie Goes to Hollywood sampled the voice on "Two Tribes" from some 1950's British government film.
"If your grandmother or any other member of the family Should die whilst in the shelter Put them outside, but remember to tag them first For identification purposes"
Almost. Not sampled from the original, but recreated by the same voice actor:
> Actor Patrick Allen, who narrated the associated public information films, recreated this narration … [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive#Cultural_i...
“Stewardess, I speak Jive.” Will to me always be the weirdest later screen appearance. June Cleaver arguing in jive is hard to beat.
Odd that the author thinks this sequence originated with the movie, when it's present on the album. He says "we know the number is" such and such without saying how.
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Not sure if it's been mentioned but 1831 on a keypad makes a triangle, or a prism, if you will.
test
Is there an AI trained on touch tone and other telephony signals? It would be kind of fun to decode historical tones in music and film more easily
There are few well-documented standards. There are ready-made solutions that have worked for decades. What do you think AI would add?
Yeah can we stuff an LLM in this distinctly no ML-required task...
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> The number itself was probably made-up: it's too short and the area code doesn't seem valid.
44 is the country code for the UK.
Author here.
Yep, 44 is the UK country code. The problem I got stuck on is that the rest of the number, 1831, didn't make sense. I assumed the number was complete, since it had the right start and stop signalling (KP1/KF).
It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020. The UK numbering plan has changed several times since 1980, but I couldn't find a time between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number.
Later on (in the addendum), it turns out that others took a look at the signal in the time domain and spotted a splice, i.e. digits are chopped out of the middle of the number, so the area code probably isn't there at all. It could be that the area code starts with 1, and then the phone number ends with 831.
A London number at the time would be from the UK (01) eee nnnn where e is the exchange[1] and n is just a number, and the 01 can be omitted if you're in the 01 area. For intentional calls it would be (+44) 1 eee nnnn, as you omit the initial 0 that on an internal UK call is an indication you're dialling an STD[2] number and not a local number. There doesn't seem to have been an 831 exchange at the time[3], so as noted in the article the cut to shorten the number is presumably somewhere in the middle.
In 1990 London was split into 071 (central) and 081 (areas), which meant in 1995 all landlines could have an 01 prefix, so London because 0171 and 0181 (and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle, although I think the Going Live one was better anyway) and finally in 2000 London became 020, with the 7/8 moving to the first digit of the local number (not that the split between local and area codes really matters anymore).
[1] Of course, in ye olden days before all this newfangled "dialling" you'd ask the operator for something like "WHItehall 1212", not 944 1212 (or later 930 1212).
[2] Subscriber Trunk Dialling.
[3] https://rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php has a list, although it seems to be based on a 1968 publication.
> you'd ask the operator for something like "WHItehall 1212"
I still remember my mom making me memorize our phone number when I was very young, "SPring 9 0273". It wasn't very long afterward that everybody switched to all number dialing though.
In the early 80s I knew two phone numbers - 999 for the police, 555 for home.
The exchange was in a tiny hamlet a few miles away.
> and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle
I thought I was the only one that had that number burned into my memory for all time!
I’m glad, for my sake at least, to hear I’m not the only one.
0181 811 8181 Edit: Thinking about it I think was was Going Lives number?
Going Live was before PhONE Day, so it was 081 811 8181 back then. Live and Kicking stuck with the same number when it took over, with it gaining the extra digit fairly early in the run.
Nar it was Live and Kicking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNPyQ-OOp0
But it’s easy to muddle the two shows given the time that’s passed and similarities between the two.
Show me… subscriber trunk dialing. I must know everything.
Hiya, I see that you updated your blog in regards to this previous HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285
It references a Telephone World article called ''Pink Floyd's Young Lust – explained and demystified'' with great analysis of the sequences heard.
The discussion is new to me.
I started analysing the audio because someone sent me a link to the film (The Wall) on youtube and asked me about the signalling. Once I'd decoded the telephone number, I tried googling it, to see if someone else had already figured out what it was (a US local number? the number to a US operator? the number a US operator called to talk to a UK operator? the number a UK operator dialled to get a London number?), but nothing came up. There's quite a bit of good discussion about that in the comments here.
A week or two later, I tried googling 'Pink Floyd Telephone Call', and found that the audio actually comes from the album, i.e. it's not just in the film, and a bit more information about how it was made, and put that in the addendum.
> It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020.
I used to work with telephony until 2011. While I worked in Sweden, I am sure this applies for UK, too.
There is no standard in phone number lengths, you can have all sorts of prefixed series, so for example if the area code is "1", then the number 0 could be routed to a destination.
So 04410 is theoretically valid.
Back then we even had 3-digit short form numbers (like 911) that we had to specifically deal with each phone operator for keeping.
It was used for pricey phone dating.
Except in the US, and a handful of other countries who do have fixed length numbering plans.
Was it always like that? The record was released in 1982.
I know in my part of the world we went from 2-digit local numbers to 3-4-5 digits, to 8 or 10 digits over a century.
My point being this is simply routing implementation details. Even USA has 911 for example.
I looked at a London telephone book from 1979, when I think the record was released.
Most of the phone numbers were something like 01 361 1234, i.e. seven digits after the 01 area code. The _361_ part was bold, so I think that was an exchange number.
A few numbers were something like "Placename 12345". Wikipedia explains why that was.
> I couldn't find a time between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number.
What about when outer London numbers started 081? Dialed from another country with the 00 international call prefix the number if could be a fragment starting from the second digit (i.e. 0044 1831xxxx)?
the change form 01 was a big deal, and BT ran some very amusing ads playing on snobbishness about where in London one lived.
All UK internal phone numbers start with a zero. However when you dial the UK from abroad, you omit the leading zero, so the UK version of the number in question would be 01831, which sounds a lot like an area code (though apparently is not one in current use)
I remember London area codes being 01 (or 0441 from USA) followed by 6 digits, so maybe 3 are missing. It would be interesting to see if that landline is still available, but with 1000 possibilities (01ABC831) maybe a google search might be the way to go.
This is correct.
In the 90's I recall London area prefix changed from 01 to first 071 (central) and 081 (greater) and then 0171 and 0181. Later still, those codes became 0207 and 0208.
I still notice old shop signs up with the old prefixes.
Interesting.
Normally, films use deliberately fictious numbers, e.g. in the US it's always xxx555xxxxxx. Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1. The Pink Floyd number is a bit unusual---it's not made up.
According to a previous analysis, the call was the album's "Chief Engineer James Guthrie who called his own London apartment", with a neighbour answering the phone. Someone probably knows roughly where James Guthrie lived in 1979/1980 and what the area code there was. But I don't.
> Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1.
Ofcom has set aside blocks of numbers within many different area codes for dramatic use[1]. The note on Wikipedia about 011x and 01x1 is that the reserved numbers in those (real) area codes usually end with 496 0xxx (so, for instance, 0114 496 0000 to 0114 496 0999 are reserved numbers in the Sheffield/0114 area - other 0114 numbers may be allocated to real customers).
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...
There are some hits in this old phonebook [1], but one needs to pay to view the records. Maybe some one else can do this.
[1] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1025/?name=Jam...
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Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)#Fiction..., the officially reserved block under the NANP has shrunk to XXX-555-01XX, but outside of XXX-555-1212 (directory assistance), and toll-free 800-555-XXXX there is little use of the range.
Somebody could contact James Guthrie since he's still alive and probably has his old apartment phone number written down somewhere (if not still memorized).
Okay. If the call was from within the UK then I think the 0441 code would have been Swansea, but that would have required 3 numbers being cut from the middle.
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See the note at the end of the article. It’s a real number but with some of the digits in the middle edited out of the recording.
Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. <shameless plug> If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com </shameless plug>
And what us the number in Knocking on Heavens door, the Guns n'roses version?
659 8890
That one's just ordinary DTMF. I recorded the audio, trimmed it manually and then made a spectrogram like this:
sox gun1.wav -n rate 4k spectrogram -m -y 500
(And google finds quite a few pages confirming those digits)
659-8890. You just better start sniffin' your own rank subjugation Jack, 'cause it's just you against your tattered libido, the bank, and the mortician, forever man, and it wouldn't be luck if you could get out of life alive.
Nice; Now do an analysis of The Telephone Call by Kraftwerk on the album Electric Café
[dead]
Odd. This and other PF audio figured in a dream last night. Then I came downstairs and saw this.
In a parallel universe, this thread is about the Beatles, where you woke up from the dream, found your way downstairs, had a coffee and somebody replied to your post.
Obviously we are all still in your dream. Please hold on asleep as long as you can as I treasure my existence and don’t want it to end.
As "you are just a figment of my imagination" is solipsism, "I am just a figment of your imagination" must be cosolipsism.