Dear Readers, many years ago (in 1984 to be exact) I was working as an accountant at Fitch and Co, a rather trendy design consultancy based in Soho. One of the perks of working there was that we had a cassette player (later replaced with a CD player). As I sat right next to it, I had some control over what we played – we featured a lot of Prince, Madonna, Ultravox, and the band of one of the guys who worked there, which was called ‘Gay Bikers on Acid’. If you’ve never heard of them, I am not surprised.

Every so often, though, I would try to inject a touch of something more calming, and on would go ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’. Sadly, my fellow finance bods were not so impressed, especially when it got to the bits of the recording that sounded like giant farts, and so it was soon back to Roxy Music. However, I have always found the recording both moving and inspiring – to think that we share the world with such creatures fills me with awe.

The recordings were collected by cetacean scientist Roger Payne, who heard the recordings of Frank Watlington, a marine engineer who had recorded the eerie wailing sounds of the deep ocean. When Payne listened to them, he realised that the ‘songs’ repeated over time. He also discovered that all male Humpbacks in a given ocean sang the same song, but that it changed subtly every year.

Payne released the album in 1970 (so I was late to the game), and it quickly went platinum. It’s still the highest-selling environmental album of all time. In 1972 the ‘Save the Whales’ movement kicked off, leading to a ten-year global moratorium on whale hunting in the same year, followed by a complete ban on commercial whale hunting in 1986. We know that a few countries still hunt whales for ‘scientific’ purposes (I’m looking at you, Norway, Iceland and Japan) but overall a number of whale populations have grown, though, as we don’t know how large the original populations were it’s difficult to know how many whales there once were. I do know that Moby Dick describes whale pods so huge that they could crush whaling boats through sheer numbers, and Melville was a close observer of whaling.

Payne describes how he came to devote his life to whales.

“In the late 1960s he heard on the radio that a dead whale had washed up on Revere Beach (near Tufts University where he was working) so he drove out to see it. He found that souvenir hunters had already hacked off the flukes from the dead porpoise, somebody had carved their initials in its side, and a cigar butt had been stuffed into its blowhole. He later said “I removed the cigar and stood there for a long time with feelings I cannot describe. Everybody has some such experience that affects him for life, probably several. That night was mine.”

In addition to be a founder of the whale conservation movement, Payne went on to hypothesize that blue whales and fin whales can communicate across whole oceans using sound, a theory that has subsequently been proved. One of his last campaigns was to free captive orca Lolita from Miami Seaquarium, so she could be relocated to an ocean sanctuary in the Salish Sea. Sadly, Lolita, who had been in captivity for 53 years, died before she could be moved.

Payne died aged 88. 5 days before his death, an essay published in Time magazine had this to say:

“As my time runs out, I am possessed with the hope that humans worldwide are smart enough and adaptable enough to put the saving of other species where it belongs: at the top of the list of our most important jobs. I believe that science can help us survive our folly.”

You can listen to ‘Song of the Humpback Whale” here.

You can also hear Payne’s second album, which includes the songs of blue and right whales along with humpback whales here