Meet the sound man who travels the world with Sir David Attenborough

Chris Watson captures the sounds that help make nature programmes such a success.

Next time you marvel at Sir David Attenborough spying on monkeys deep in the jungle, give your eyes a rest and use your ears.

It takes a legendary presenter and ace cameramen to capture all this nature in its glory, but there’s also a genius with a microphone capturing the sound!

Chris Watson, from Sheffield, is the man who records every twig breaking beneath David’s feet, the whoosh of the apes jumping from tree to tree, or the ominous slap of a crocodile emerging from the water.

After falling in love with his first tape recorder as a child, he was destined for a life of sound, but Chris insists we can all enjoy it and make our own recordings.

“There must have been something about recording sound, because my parents gave me a recorder as a kid and soon I was recording everything, Mum in the kitchen, the birds in the garden, everything!” laughs the talented Mr Watson.

When he grew up but failed to grow out of his obsession with recording sound, Chris was a member of highly-popular electronic band Cabaret Voltaire, playing to large audiences worldwide.

His love of music has continued, but these days, he records birds for Radio Four, and devised a project that saw recordings made by kids being used to calm patients at a children’s hospital.

Oh, and he travels to every corner of the Earth with Sir David or by himself, recording everything from icebergs creaking to wind howling or telegraph wires buzzing in Australia, and frogs chatting in swamps.

“I get together with David all the time,” says Chris, who’s also worked on Bill Oddie Back In The USA and Springwatch, among countless TV, film and radio shows.

“We were in Qatar a few weeks back, for a radio recording, and I did an interview with him he started off as a sound recordist, with old portable valve tape recorders.

“I’m going away with him again soon, and he makes a brilliant travelling companion!

“There are only two places I’ve been where I felt totally swept away, and those were the North and South Poles. At the South, there was only one way to go wherever you looked north.

“At the North, a few months later, I was looking down to where I live with my wife Maggie, in Newcastle, and then realised the point on which I stood was where every time zone on the planet converged.

“Sometimes, the idea of things really stretches you!”

You might be surprised to learn that, for all this globetrotting, Chris reckons the birds in his backyard are still the toughest to record well, but that anyone can get a good sound recording in an ordinary British street.

“There’s a massive, growing community of people who are into this, and it’s much better than taking photos,” he insists.

“It transforms things, whereas photos are deeply unsatisfying. You could be away, say, in a market in Thailand or up in the Highlands, and record the sounds there.

“You get home, put on the headphones to listen, and you’re instantly transported back there. That’s the power of sound, and it just doesn’t happen with a two-dimensional photograph. There are loads of affordable hand-held recorders out there now, and anyone can try it.

“I just like the next thing I’m doing. I was on the edge of Bristol recently, doing a feature film, recording motorways and things I rarely do. I really enjoyed it.

“But recording the starlings in the back garden is still the hardest thing the transients of the ultra-high frequencies are so challenging.

“This time of year, I usually put the remains of our turkey out, with a microphone inside, give the birds something to eat and recording their conversations close up.”

To learn more about this amazing man, visit his site.