The secret to narrating a gangland memoir is restraint. The men who wrote these books don’t need me to make them sound hard. They need me to make them sound real, and the loudest performance is rarely the most believable one. After all, the toughest man in the room is often the quietest, or the most affable and charming.
What’s the mistake narrators make with gangland memoirs?
Playing the reputation instead of the man.
The temptation is to put gravel in the throat and menace on every line. Do that for ten hours and the listener stops believing you after ten minutes. Real hard men don’t announce themselves. Most of the ones in these books are matter-of-fact about violence, because to them it was just part of the working week.
My old improv teacher, Keith Johnstone, used to ask: what is the voice for, what does it do? The answer? It’s there to control the audience, unpalatable as that may seem. In a gangland memoir, control comes from holding back. A quiet line lands harder than a shouted one.
How did I find Lenny McLean’s voice?
By listening to the man and not the legend. Lenny was the most feared bare-knuckle fighter of his generation, but on the page he’s a storyteller first. There’s an honesty, a code of loyalty and respect, and whether you agree with it or not, you tend to admire his adherence to a set of principles, even if they’re miles apart from your own. Lenny had the ability to pick himself up, dust himself off and push on, no matter what.
I narrated The Guv’nor, which won the One Voice Award for Best Performance – Factual, and later voiced Lenny himself in The Guv’nor In His Own Words. That production recreates the original taped sessions with Peter Gerrard, so the job there was to sound like a man talking across a table, not a man performing his autobiography.
Should the narrator judge the subject?
No. I think of myself as a conduit, letting the words pass through me. It’s the listener’s job to decide how they feel about it.
Fast Eddie is a good example. Eddie Maher drove off with £1.2 million and stayed on the run for twenty years. He says he acted under duress. Did he or didn’t he? I chose not to answer that for the listener. I played it as an old-school caper from a bygone time, with just enough “good on yer” in it, and let people make up their own minds.
Gordon Goody in How to Rob a Train is different again: tough, dry and with no interest in legend-making. So I played him as a man setting the record straight after fifty years, not a man boasting about the Great Train Robbery.
What makes a gangland narration believable?
Three things, in my experience.
Authenticity. These men talk like the people they grew up with. A conversational, everyman delivery does more for authenticity than any amount of growling.
Respect for the facts. Real names, real places, real victims. Getting them right matters more than any accent.
Letting the story do the work. The events in these books are dramatic enough. My job is to get out of their way.
If you want to hear how it sounds, The Guv’nor is the best place to start.
About Karl
Karl Jenkinson is an award-winning British audiobook narrator and voiceover actor.
Book Karl for narration