The Importance Of Not Being Bean
I admit it, I used to smoke. A bloody silly thing to do, damaging to your health, foul smelling and expensive. See you can tell ex-smokers they’re worse than people who have never smoked at all. It’s probably the feeling that the dreaded cigarettes robbed you of years of activity as you wheezed after strenuous activity. Then there’s the mornings, coughing and spluttering into the bathroom until you cleared the kack from your chest. And perhaps most importantly the money you literally burned. Most packs of 20 are over five quid now, how did I ever afford it?
But there’s one thing I do miss from smoking, and it’s not the nicotine hit of that first drag. It’s the effect it had on my voice. My voice used to be much deeper and more gravely, on the telephone it had an unusual effect on the female of the species.
It was only the ciggies, I didn’t have to go to the extent that Mercedes McCambridge did to voice the part of the possessed Regan in the Exorcist – i.e. drinking raw eggs, smoking goodness knows how many packs a day, drinking to excess and not getting any sleep. Though that does sound like a few debauched weekends I enjoyed when I was younger.
I used to work in a call centre, taking calls from all over the UK. Now to people outside Yorkshire a Yorkshire accent is a Yorkshire accent. Often people from the south of the UK can’t tell whereabouts in Yorkshire you’re from, they even mistake Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Manchester for Yorkshire. So when I picked up the phone and started to talk they immediately decided they were talking to Sean Bean and as Sean had appeared in Lady Chatterley’s lover. You fill in the blanks LOL.
And Suze agrees. If you ask she’ll tell you that having spoken to me on the phone on a number of occasions before meeting face to face she already had a mental image of me that was quite appealing.
It must have been a shock when she saw me for the first time 🙁
However I’m happy to leave the Sean Bean voice behind. The ciggies are too high price to pay even for that. So why, I hear you ask, do I mention it? Well, the voice is back for a few days if only because I have an appalling cold and chest infection.
Even being ill has its benefits. 🙂
I mean, who of us doesn’t like receiving a call from a stranger with a sexy voice?
Tags: Sean Bean, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, accents, telephone voices, The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge
When I get a super bad cold…my voice gets all sexy, seductive sounding…LOL. I had a friend call me once who was all hot and bothered after he talked to me! lol
I get all sexy voiced when I know someone else is listening. I like to get people all stirred up! Master says that I used my sexy voice when I DJ’ed for an online station all the time. I don’t think I even noticed.
I’m not a very big guy either and I have smoked for a long time (15 yrs). I think it’s a big reason my voice is so deep.
Though we had talked on the phone prior, Jane actually picked me up on our first (blind) date and told me later that her first thought when I answered the door was, “Is your big brother home?”
Sean Bean is reow!!
My take on smoking varies by the day, some days I’m “what am I doing?” and other days I’m fine about it. The thing I can’t stand is the after sex smoke; I’m a smoker and I hate the after sex smoke, it’s so cliche. I’m not sure if it’s change my voice so much. I did the mini survey (of one) at home and it hasn’t changed that much over the last decade or so. My capacity to run long distances is shot, forget that, but I’ve never been a jogging fan.
The phone voice is a mysterious thing, gains more mystery as more people communicate via phone. Voice presents another factor in the attraction equation.