> 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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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>
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:
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”
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.
“The Floyd” is the name a lot of people who worked with the band use, it shows up on many texts and other documentaries.
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.
The band originally was The Pink Floyd (after changing their name from The Tea Set)
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....
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
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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:
The first words on Pink Floyd’s The Wall are “… we came in?”. The last words on the album are “Isn’t this where …”.
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.
Related:
Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981
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...
> https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-f...
Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?
We did that one already:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285
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.
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"
And what us the number in Knocking on Heavens door, the Guns n'roses version?
> 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.
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.
> 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...
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).
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.
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.
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>
Nice; Now do an analysis of The Telephone Call by Kraftwerk on the album Electric Café
Odd. This and other PF audio figured in a dream last night. Then I came downstairs and saw this.
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.