<Excerpt>

Imagine.
Six hundred million years ago
this bit of earth
on which you and I are standing today
was not here.
All that was here
was the ocean,
its habitual films of ice,
the air, the weather.
A planet still in the throes
of adolescence.

A million years ago,
the world we now call Soho
was alive
with the sounds of nature.
Nature in all its astonishing complexity.
Time went on.
We settled down.
We farmed.
We went to market.
We hunted – for pleasure.
Kings came and went.
And, bit by bit,
we added the plasticity of human invention,
great sonic waves of history,
to nature’s vast soundscape.

Here,
right here,
where you and I are standing
was one such place.
Below us
are the foundations of 3 houses
and around us
are the walls and floors
of what was first a munitions warehouse,
and then, most famously, the Bazaar,
an enormous two-storey indoor market.

This building
and those around it
came to personify the Soho of industrial Britain,
a place of pubs, interlopers, theatre,
a world of entertainment
an added layering
of raucous splendour
to the noisiest country on earth.

How natural
that at the peak of our power,
we should wish to capture
this rich tapestry of sound.
We had electricity.
We had film.
And we had Hollywood.
Why not
the sound of the world,
in all its sonic beauty,
delivered perfectly,
at our leisure?

<For the full script, see film>