SOUND GUY
If you worry you’re an underachiever, Simon Hayes’ CV might not be a comfortable read. BMX prodigy, jujitsu black belt, Hollywood Oscar winner, thank goodness he only recently discovered road cycling.

Growing up in East Sheen, a stone’s throw from Pearson HQ, Simon Hayes states that he wasn’t particularly academic, his teenage years occupied by hip-hop and sport. At the age of 11, he caught the 80s BMX bug and soon began racing, for a factory team. Just four years later, in 1985, he won the European BMX Championships, in Barcelona. Hayes, now 51, is what might be termed an overachiever.
At 16, he was a runner for a company making commercials; by the age of 21 he was working for himself, as a freelance sound mixer, and by his mid-twenties had graduated to feature films. Today, he is one of the world’s leading Production Sound Mixers, one of the film business’ go-to men. Fortune favours the busy. “When I started in the industry,” Hayes explains, “Britain wasn’t making many films. So, I worked on commercials to pay the rent but took every opportunity to work on shorts usually for free”.

Its been emotional.
In 1995, Hayes worked on a short film, with the working title The Hard Case. The director was a certain Guy Ritchie. Two years later, Ritchie had turned that short into his first feature, with Hayes as his Production Sound Mixer. The project was called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. “I was incredibly fortunate in the beginning,” Hayes recalls. “Guy’s work helped put British filmmaking back on the map.” Not to mention Hayes’

Yet this particular hard case has a soft centre. Specifically, that Hayes is one of the leading sound mixers for musicals. “When I did Mamma Mia,” he says, as if talking about a plastering job, “we recorded a couple of Meryl Streep’s numbers with her singing live. Very few thought I could pull it off but it worked." As for Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, in 2012, he recorded the entire film live and subsequently won an Oscar, in 2013. “The world needs happy films,” Hayes explains, “and musicals suspend reality.” Amen to that.


On 20th June 2020, the summer solstice, Hayes rode to Stonehenge and back in a day, clocking up the 202 miles in 21 hours. He is also in thrall to the sporting longevity a road riding habit can offer. “Unlike jogging,” he says, “it has no impact on joints, so you can continue into old age. In Richmond Park [his local ride], I see so many older people cycling at a good level – I regularly get overtaken by men in their 70’s.

At Pearson, we’ve been converts to the benefits of road cycling for 160 years. We’re thrilled to welcome Simon to the fold. So thrilled, in fact, we took the liberty, as Lock Stock’s Hatchet Harry might say, of asking Simon to combine his Oscar-winning sound expertise with his newfound love. The result is a unique recording, featuring sounds every rider will be familiar with. On 25th May, as dawn broke in Richmond Park, Hayes mic'up both man and machine, in order to record himself on a lap of the west London cycling mecca.

Totally wired.
“We used the very highest level of film kit on the lap,” he explains. “One mic on the cassette to record the gears, another on the headset to capture wind noise and speed, plus a stereo pair above both my left and right ears to record my breathing.” The result he says, will show “what level of effort is required from a 51-year-old leisure rider”.

A specially commissioned graphic, which interprets the recording as a soundscape, is featured on a new Pearson t-shirt named Totally Wired. Each line indicates the noise levels of the gearing humming their way around the famous London lap in light blue, shared with altitude in white. The larger gates of the park are highlighted in red, starting at Roehampton, and Simon rode anticlockwise.


Buy Totally Wired t-shirt here >
1 comment
Nice article
Holdsworth guy!