‘Death to the Vikings!’: A day with the 82-year-old king of audiobooks

Seán Barrett is nowhere to be seen. It is approaching the end of morning rush hour at Marylebone Station, and I am looking for a man with dark wavy hair, a moustache and melancholy eyes. This, at least, fits the most recent black-and-white headshot of Barrett on his agent’s website.

Our train for Oxford is due to depart imminently. Have we missed each other? Has he already boarded? In my immediate vicinity, underneath the departures board where Barrett and I have agreed to meet, is a gaggle of Italian tourists, a young mother rolling a pram back and forth and an elderly gentleman with a straggly beard. The latter is slightly stooped and wears a ruffled creamy-grey mac and baseball cap, like a more-wizened version of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas.

I take several tentative footsteps in the man’s direction before I spot in his hand a printed ticket for Oxford and realise that Barrett has been standing in front of me for the past 20 minutes. After hurried introductions we head for the platform. Barrett, who is 82, moves at a slow shuffle due to a recent flare-up of rheumatoid arthritis. “That’s the ageing process for you,” he says, as we take our seats with a couple of minutes to spare.

Chances are you wouldn’t recognise Barrett either. Not his face anyway. But you may well have heard his voice — Barrett’s rich, gravelly timbre has made him one of the UK’s most sought-after readers of audiobooks, with close to 400 credits for narration on Audible, the leading retailer. (Stephen Fry, who tops polls of the “nation’s favourite voice”, has 193 credits.)

For some, he is the definitive English-language narrator of Scandi noir, having lent his voice to all of Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole crime novels and Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander mysteries. For others, he is Jackson Lamb, the irascible spymaster in Mick Herron’s hugely popular Slough House series. His portrayal of Satoru Nakata, the cat-finding savant in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore is “one of the great characters in the last decade,” according to a former producer.

But as we speed through the Chilterns, I find myself unable to reconcile Barrett’s “civilian” voice with the narrator’s drawl that he uses in his day job to convey a range of emotions from jeopardy and foreboding to humour and wisdom. There is a disconnect that I can’t put my finger on. It’s the same voice, all right, lugubrious and warm, almost accentless but for a faint Irish lilt. Yet I can’t tune into its frequency. Sentences trail off under the clatter of the train on the tracks. There are hems and haws. Finally, it dawns on me that I had been expecting him to engage in idle chat (we talk for a while about our shared love of Westerns) as he would read a thriller, complete with unerring diction and dramatic pauses.

We arrive in Oxford around 10.30am and head for the headquarters of Isis Audio Books. Nestled in a red-brick business park on the outskirts of the city, the office is located in an unprepossessing site, with carpet tiles, low-slung suspended ceilings and strip lighting that is a fraction too bright. There are no windows and the only sign of life is the far-off hum of a kettle boiling down the corridor. Barrett, who has been coming here for years, opens a door to a narrow soundproof cubicle at the back of the room. Upon spotting that there is a cushion on the hard-backed seat inside, he sighs with relief. “Oh, thank goodness. They didn’t have one last time, so I ended up using my bag,” he says sotto voce, motioning to the crumpled satchel on his shoulder.

Measuring about 6.5ft by 5ft, the cubicle contains a small table on top of which sits a tall glass of water and the manuscript of the book Barrett will be reading today — a sword-and-shield thriller set during the Saxon era, in the style of Bernard Cornwell. An Anglepoise lamp in the corner emits a dim glow.

Barrett’s producer, Jake, emerges moments later, sporting wispy stubble and a bandanna. He gives Barrett a respectful nod and ushers me into an adjoining booth containing a sound-control desk and Mac. I can see Barrett’s silhouette through a serving hatch-sized glass window in the middle of the partition, like a priest on the other side of a confessional. He is hunched over the table leafing through the manuscript, a Strepsils throat sweet clacking against his teeth. Jake, speaking through a microphone, asks for a soundcheck and Barrett obliges. He begins with a soft murmur before incrementally raising his voice until it reaches a full-throated crescendo. “Death to the Vikings!”

Jake twiddles some of the two dozen knobs on the desk, as Barrett gurgles water and performs some tongue exercises that sound like snippets of glossolalia. Then, after an instant of silence, he says: “Ready when you are, Seán.”

Born to Irish parents living in London during the Blitz, Barrett knew from an early age that he wanted to be an actor. Around the time he was 12, his father, a stuntman on the talkies, put in a good word with a producer, and Barrett found himself appearing in BBC’s children’s television at a time when it still went out live. At 17, he got his big break when he was cast as a young soldier in the 1958 war film Dunkirk alongside Richard Attenborough, John Mills and Bernard Lee. (Almost 30 years later, The Smiths used a still of Barrett from the film on the front sleeve of their single “How Soon is Now”.)

Barrett has plenty of stories about the days when he rubbed shoulders with some of the most famous faces of the 20th century. He recalls filming an adaptation of War and Peace in Rome with his hero Henry Fonda, “the first time I was ever truly awestruck”. And of a pre-Dolce Vita Anita Ekberg, whose beauty “had the Italian lighting men falling out of the gantry”. Then there was Suite in Three Keys, Noël Coward’s final stage play in the West End. “He kept asking if I was Welsh, and I said no, I’m Irish, to which he replied, ‘Well, that explains everything.’”

After these early brushes with fame, Barrett became what can safely be described as a jobbing actor, popping up in television dramas with bit parts in the likes of Z Cars and Minder. Later, there was an entertaining cameo in a Father Ted Christmas special in which he played a priest with a particularly boring voice.

In 1968, Barrett was in the bar one evening at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry where he was appearing in a play. Supping on a Guinness towards closing time, he was approached by Ronnie Mason, who at the time headed up the BBC’s Repertory Company, the broadcaster’s radio drama department. Mason had a proposition for the young actor. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you, sir, are an insidiously good actor,” he said in a deliberate Ulster drawl. “So how about you come and join my Rep?” Barrett agreed on the spot.

There was an entertaining cameo in ‘Father Ted’ in which he played a priest with a particularly boring voice

The Rep was launched in 1939 by Val Gielgud in response to radio’s growing influence. Early productions included an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, which was so popular that its lead stars Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley were mobbed by fans on their way in and out of Broadcasting House. Later, the Rep became a sort of finishing school for voice actors, who were required to work at speed, churning out radio plays and dramas by the bucketload. In contrast to working for theatre or television, actors could also play against physical type, allowing them to flex their vocal muscles in a wide range of parts. Barrett likens his early days at the company to “being at university”.

During the mid-1970s, a trend took off that would alter Barrett’s career trajectory yet again. Public libraries began stocking audiobooks in cassette form. The in-car tape deck soon arrived and, with the advent of the Walkman the following decade, a boom began. Audiobook publishing houses popped up in a bid to target commuters. It was around this time that Barrett was approached to do his first reading, a 21-hour unabridged version of Umberto Eco’s opus, The Name of the Rose.

“Sorry, Seán, bit of page noise there,” Jake interjects. “Can you start that sentence again?”

“Which one?”

“The one beginning ‘Empty my pisspot.’”

“OK, no problem.”

We have been in the studio for close to three hours, and Barrett has read about 65 pages. This is apparently good going. “Seán is definitely one of the quicker ones,” whispers Jake at the end of the session.

The novel — jam-packed with thanes, horns of ale and sentences beginning with “My Lord” — is an acquired taste, but Barrett’s interpretation is captivating, his voice measured, commanding and purposeful. Occasionally, Jake flags a missed-out word or mispronunciation, but Barrett essentially enjoys complete autonomy in the booth. He can narrate and read the characters any which way he likes. He gives the central Saxon characters rough-and-ready Yorkshire accents (think angry Sean Bean); none of them sound the same. He will soften his voice for women and children, unlike other readers who often — and quite lazily, in his opinion — simply raise their pitch. (“You can’t take the characters seriously if they sound like that.”) Sometimes, when Barrett isn’t happy with a sentence, he will ask to go again, geeing himself up. “C’mon, man, don’t gabble. Softly now.”

Breaking for lunch, we head for the kitchen and bump into Ben Onwukwe, the only other reader in the building today. He is about to start work on a cosy murder mystery series set in Botswana. Barrett and Onwukwe hug. The two go way back, having previously worked together on radio dramas “around 100 years ago”, Onwukwe jokes. The silence of the recording area next door has been supplanted by joking and impressions of plummy-voiced producers of yore. There is talk of fellow readers they admire. Barrett is a fan of Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who reads Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series. “Marvellous diction.”

At one point the conversation somehow drifts to celebrities, who apparently have a hard time reading their own memoirs. “They think it’ll be easy, but they often can’t do it,” says Onwukwe, who has a deep sonorous voice. “That’s why you’ll find autobiographies where they might read the first chapter or two and then give up. Then you’ve got a completely different narrator, which confuses the listener.”

“It’s the breathing they don’t get,” he continues. “They always complain they’re out of breath. They have this kind of breathy hesitancy. They just don’t have the —”

“Stamina,” Barrett cuts in. “They don’t have the stamina.” Onwukwe nods.

As to the question of whether reading can be classed as acting, Barrett is unequivocal. “It’s all acting,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re reading in a studio or doing a Beckett monologue on stage. It’s performance.”

People who excel at something often struggle to articulate just what they do that sets them apart. You can quiz them repeatedly on their methods, and the most insight you’ll get is: “I just do it.”

Barrett, an unassuming man, belongs to this category. He does not recall ever consciously working on his voice. He received no elocution lessons. There was no mentor as such, although he speaks warmly of Mason, who may have taught him to spin a yarn or two. “I suppose some people are vocally talented just as some people are musically,” says Barrett without much conviction. “I’ve always had an inclination to play with my voice.”

I press him again about influences. Having grown up in the postwar years when crowding around the radio represented a family pursuit, the wireless must have served as a lodestar of different voices. This resonates more. “I did love The Goon Show. I would run around the playground pretending I was Spike Milligan. But then again, so did everybody.”

Nicolas Soames, an audiobook producer, who oversaw Barrett’s readings of everything from Dickens and Beckett to Sheridan Le Fanu and Cormac McCarthy, believes his listenability is “a curious talent which I don’t think is teachable. The best readers,” he adds, “can bring subtle colour even to a third-person narrator whose character they might not need to inhabit throughout like the first-person.

Then there are the characters, Soames says. “It’s not just a question of accents, but of really creating the characters — especially Dickens novels, which teem with people from young children to grizzled old curmudgeons. Take Seán’s unabridged Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit or Bleak House. I can’t ever remember thinking, ‘Ah, that’s the same voice from the last Dickens.’”

Familiarity helps too. When a listener falls for a voice, they are likely to seek out that same narrator. Soames believes this is part of Barrett’s appeal. “His voice in your ear is like a family friend.” Intimacy, in other words. I am reminded of the opening monologue of Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices” Under Milk Wood, in which Richard Burton intones: “Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.”

It is approaching 4pm during the second session, and I am starting to understand what Barrett means about the job requiring stamina. The cosiness of the booth has been overtaken by stuffiness. We might as well be in a submarine. But Barrett’s tempo as narrator is unwavering. He continues to perform the bloodthirsty Saxons with gruesome gusto. If he’s phoning it in, you can’t tell.

Soames ascribes Barrett’s fluency to the time he takes to prepare for a gig, which can be longer than the reading itself. He tends to dedicate most of it to working on pronunciation. Sure enough, in his bag Barrett carries handwritten notes of each Saxon and Viking name with annotated phonetic guides. The book’s prologue begins with a verse in Anglo-Saxon English. It sounds like a cross between German and Dutch with some Icelandic thrown in for good measure. Barrett nails it in one take.

Barrett, whose wife is a speech and language therapist, is fascinated by language and its various intonations and sonic permutations. Doubtless this helps him to imbue the foreign-set books he reads with authenticity, particularly the Nordic noir stuff. When he was approached to read Wallander, the first thing Barrett did was seek out one of his wife’s colleagues, who happened to be from Skåne in rural southern Sweden where the books are set. They discussed what an English equivalent of the accent might be before Barrett eventually plumped for a West Country burr.

He rarely finishes a book from front to back before going into the recording studio. “That could take 13 to 14 hours and I don’t have the time.” Instead, he will skim until he has encountered all the characters and voices he needs to capture. Then it’s a case of breaking the book down into sections and setting a goal of how many pages to read over a recording day, which is usually in the range of 125-150 pages. “If I don’t reach my target by the end of the day, I know I’m not doing it properly.”

Despite his proclivity for “not hanging around”, Barrett expects to make mistakes as he reads. The goal is not to go into the studio and give a faultless reading, as this can have a restrictive impact on the acting. And besides, any mistakes can be rectified in the final edit. “Making mistakes is what acting is all about,” says Barrett. “There was this one chap who read his own book and didn’t make a single mistake during a 10-hour reading. It was flat, utterly boring.”

Barrett enjoys some jobs more than others. As a rule of thumb, he’ll narrate most things “as long as they’ve been edited properly”. He has turned down work. “A few years ago, I read a horror book that was pretty horrible. Full of violence and nasty sex. At the end of it, I said never again.”

He also believes it isn’t his place to read books with female first-person narrators. Not so long ago he was invited to read an Irish actress’s memoir, a commission he politely declined. “It needed a woman to read it.” Barrett put the production house in touch with a friend of his who ended up reading the book instead. But he doesn’t begrudge any contemporaries who take assignments solely for the money. “Look, a voice actor’s life is a precarious one, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking on a book that perhaps they weren’t the best fit for. But if you can afford to say no, that’s a nice luxury to have.”

Barrett, who gives no hint of retiring, has a steady stream of work stretching into next year. But few make a living solely from reading audio­books. For most, it’s a way of supplementing other income. Onwukwe, for example, is currently appearing in a stage adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption. Barrett sometimes takes on other jobs to make ends meet too. For those of a certain demographic, he is best known for his voice work on the Warhammer video games. Barrett plays the character of “The Advisor”, an elderly, blind wizard with a crow on his shoulder who provides tips to the players. It is a gloriously hammy turn, full of conspiratorial chatter and mirthless cackling. “Video games have taken the place of commercials as a gold standard for making good money as a voice artist,” says Barrett. A video game with a decent budget can carry an hourly rate of between £200 and £300, roughly three times the going rate for audiobooks.

Then there are the gigs so enjoyable that they don’t feel like work at all. It has been 12 years since Barrett first read the spy thriller Slow Horses, written by a then-relatively unknown Mick Herron. It was the first of Herron’s Slough House series, which follows a ragtag group of misfit spies relegated to the fringes of MI5 for past misdemeanours. Barrett speaks of protagonist Jackson Lamb — who farts, drinks and smokes his way through the books — like an apologist for the behaviour of a wayward friend. His Lamb is raspy-voiced, not a million miles away from the actor Trevor Howard towards the end of his career.

For Herron, whose series was recently televised on Apple TV with Gary Oldman playing Lamb, Barrett’s reading has brought an unexpected quality to the characters that he hadn’t envisaged when he originally set them down on page. “It’s difficult to pin down what he does,” says Herron. “He has an exceptional clarity of diction. And yet it’s not a sort of bland pronunciation. There’s gravel in his voice. He involves himself in the story. He’s part of it. When I listen to him, I can almost imagine him in an overcoat standing on a street corner.”

Herron says he still regularly receives emails from fans who claim they were turned on to the books by Barrett’s narration rather than purchasing a physical hardback. The two, who have met on several occasions, “both revel in the possibilities of the English language,” says Herron. “After all these years, I can’t really imagine anyone else reading them.”

The reading eventually wraps up around 5.15pm. Barrett munches on an apple as we wait outside the office for a taxi to take us back to the station. He seems content with how the day went and is on course to finish ahead of schedule. What of the book itself? “Oh, it’s fine. Well researched and everything. Although it’s probably not what I’d choose to read at home. I’m more of an Elmore Leonard guy.”

I wonder out loud if there are any Elmore Leonard books on Audible (there are several) and whether Barrett would choose to listen to them. He pauses before responding without a trace of irony: “Oh, I don’t think I’d listen to the audiobook. I much prefer reading a book in my head in my own voice. It’s what I’ve always done.”

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