Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes
(Arena, 2021)
BBC iPlayer – Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes
Reviewed by Anthony C Green
1,836 words, 10 minutes read time.
I’ve written about Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop before, in relation to Paul McCartney’s admiration of her work, and their sole mid-sixties meeting, to which I link at the end of this article. But amidst the generally, so far, not well received 60th anniversary celebrations of Doctor Who, to which I’ll probably return in a separate article, it was nice to find this little gem, a full ninety-minute documentary on Delia tucked away as part of the often excellent and long-running Arena series on the BBC iPlayer.
Delia is of course best known for her work on the theme tune for Who, which first aired on November 23rd, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F Kennedy. Although not technically the composer of the tune, it was her manipulation of tape to produce the eerie electronic, futuristic sound of the theme that was crucial to its success. Her treatment of Ron Grainer’s basic melody was so radical that when Grainer first heard the finished work, he was said to have exclaimed: ‘Did I really write that?’
Although, like the Doctor himself, the theme has gone through many incarnations over the decades, it has always remained close enough to Delia’s original as to be instantly recognisable. Indeed, a ‘Doctor Who’ which began without it simply wouldn’t be Doctor Who. If we require evidence of this assertion, then you need only look at the two mid-sixties none-canon ‘Doctor Who’ movies starring Peter Cushing. You know they are not canon precisely because they don’t begin with it, though other reasons also soon become apparent.
It’s sad that only posthumously, twelve years after her death, aged sixty-four in July 2001, following long periods of struggle with alcohol and mental health issues, was she at last awarded a full co-writing credit for the Who theme, her name finally taking its place alongside Grainer’s as the final credits rolled at the end of excellent The Day of the Doctor fiftieth anniversary special in 2013. She was also depicted, albeit too briefly in the otherwise equally excellent An Adventure in Space and Time television, a dramatisation of the birth and early days of the show.
But Delia was about so much more than Doctor Who in any case, and finally, in this documentary, she gets the acknowledgement her role in the development of modern electronic music she deserves.
The programme utilises a drama-documentary format, written and starring Caroline Catz, who turns in a superb performance playing Delia in the dramatised sections. The beautifully, suitably eerie, weird and eclectic soundtrack was created by musician and performance artist Cosio Fanni Tutti, utilising material found on 267 reel-to-reel tapes, the ‘Lost Tapes’ of the title, which were discovered in Delia’s flat at the time of her death, in what Fan Tutti has described as ‘a collaboration across time.’
Excerpts from a charmingly scatty, clearly intoxicated radio interview she gave not long before her death are also inserted at appropriate moments throughout the film.
Through Catz’ words and performance, we see Delia as a geeky Cambridge graduate in mathematics and Music, at a time when female Cambridge graduates were still something of a rarity, especially in such arcane subject-combinations, telling an incredulous Career’s Officer that she wants to work in a field which allows her to explore the relationship between mathematics and sound/music, casually dropping in a reference to Pythagoras work on the subject as she does so. ‘Have you considered working with deaf aids?’ offers the out of his depth officer. Delia looks at him with a bemusement which beautifully mirrored his own: ‘No, have you?’
The documentary is full of such scenes, which show Delia to be a talented, strong-willed young woman with a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve, and an equally clear awareness that very few avenues existed through which she might achieve them.
In the Britain of the late nineteen fifties/early nineteen sixties, there was perhaps only one such avenue was open to her; and that was the BBC Radiophonic Worksop.
Despite being opened by the equally important electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram in 1958, the Workshop was very much a man’s world. It was also a place to which BBC operatives who didn’t really fit in anywhere else ‘sent,’ rather than a location of desire. The fact that Delia fought for the right to work in such an environment was seen within the Beeb as the height of eccentricity, but this keenness, once it was acknowledged, virtually guaranteed her the position she coveted.
We see the likes of Oram and Brian Hodgson, who would become her most important collaborator, doing their best in very difficult, cramped, under-funded circumstances to produce whatever sound effects would be required for this or that radio or television production using the limited equipment at their disposal.
These were seen as purely technical tasks. The idea that these BBC workers could also be creatives, fully-fledged composers using tape, found-sound and new-fangled ‘oscillators’ as the means to create new music was effectively born with Delia and her Workshop colleagues. Indeed, despite being accomplished on piano, violin, double-bass and harpsichord, Delia was informed on her arrival at the BBC in 1962 that they didn’t use the ‘m’ (music) word at the Workshop, their job was to create ‘special sounds’, certainly not to compose.
(Britain was rather behind the loop here in comparison to America. The husband-and-wife team Bebe and Louis Baron had produced a purely electronic score for the great Science Fiction movie The Forbidden Planet in 1956).
Delia was always under-appreciated for her work at the Workshop, and so naturally sought to establish herself as part of the emergent sixties’ left-fielf musical Zeitgeist through outside projects like the short-lived Unit Delta Plus trio with Hodgson and Peter Zinoviev, during which time her meeting with McCartney took place. This outfit gave perhaps their one and only public performance at the Million Volt Light and Sound Wave in 1967, an event whose main claim to fame is that it marked one of only two occasions when the Beatles still to this day unreleased Carnival of Light track was played.
Perhaps her most influential and ahead of its time work was the White Noise album credited to Electric Storm, where she again partnered Hodgson, with input also from David Vorhaus, another key figure on this scene in this period. The British DJ and writer Stuart Maconie has described the experience of walking alone in the pitch-black of the English countryside late at night with the album blasting through his headphones as being one of the most sonically mind-blowing events of his life.
Fascinating clips from archived interviews with the likes of Hodgson, Zinovieff and Vorhaus are also featured at relevant points in the documentary, which help to place Delia in the context of her time, and properly allocate to her the pivotal role she played at the centre of the British musical Avant-Garde.
Interestingly, Delia herself ascribed her love of what she termed ‘abstract music’ as having been influenced by the ubiquitous sound of the air raid warning during the Second World War. Having been born in Coventry in 1938, and remained there, the most bombed city in Britain, with her family throughout hostilities, her young ears would have heard a lot of that siren.
Delia would often seek work outside of the BBC under a pseudonym, to help her to make something resembling a living, for instance in the early 1970’s on commercial television Science Fiction rivals to Doctor Who, such as The Tomorrow People and Timeslip (the latter being a show very few but me seem to recall).
Although you may not know the name of many of the titles of much of the music Delia composed whilst she was at the Workshop, anyone who grew up watching British television in the 1960’s and 1970’s will recognise the music once they hear it, especially those familiar with SF, nature programmes, and the more slightly ‘out there’ end of children’s television.
She left the BBC in 1972, and by 1974 she’d reached such a state of disillusionment that she gave up music entirely, spending over two decades in a variety of jobs, including as an operator and English French translator for British gas, and nomadic wanderings, only returning to music as new generations came to appreciate her towards the end of her life.
One very telling scene in the film shows young people dancing enthusiastically to a beat-heavy piece of music she’d composed in 1971. It sounded more like something that would have emerged from the Rave culture of almost three decades later.
It is thanks to the likes of Cosy Fanni Tutti that the ‘lost tapes’ have now been digitally preserved, the originals stored at Manchester University. Selections from them have now also become commercially available for the first time.
And thanks to films like this 2021 Arena special, it’s likely that more and more younger people will discover something of the fascinating life and music of the woman behind the Doctor Who theme, and that she about so much more than Doctor Who theme.
It’s also telling that, in that late-life radio interview, though certainly sounding a little the worse for wear, she shows no sign of bitterness at the direction her life took. This point is reinforced by Catz, who imagines her ridiculing the obituaries that attempted to make her into a tragic figure.
She acknowledges her fondness for booze but does not accept any form of cliched ‘struggle against addiction’.
‘Never a problem, always a pleasure,’ Catz has her say, and though the actor/author is using license to put these words into Delia’s mouth, they somehow ring true of everything we see and hear of the real Delia here.
From her interviews and from the accounts of those who knew and worked with her, she seems to have been a truly lovable British eccentric who was a lot of fun to be around.
It’s hard to imagine a woman with a fondness for snuff and for describing herself as being ‘tickled pink’ not being fun to be around.
She was also, of course, a key figure in the development of electronic music, and an important trailblazer and role-model for the position of women in the arts in Britain.
This is a documentary worthy of her life and accomplishments, which also beautifully captures her idiosyncrasies. The music is great too, Fanni Tutti doing a fine job in turning Delia’s unknown home experiments into the perfect sonic accompaniment to this fine account of her life.
Anthony C Green, December 2023
My earlier article on Delia. Interestingly, her meeting with Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones is discussed in the film, but not the meeting with McCartney I covered here: Anthony C Green – A short article on the mid-sixties meeting… | Facebook
Leave a Reply