Young Turks

Delia Derbyshire - Electronic Pioneer19 July 2008by Caius Pawson

Delia Derbyshire was an electronic musician who came to prominence whilst working at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I first came across her when trying to clear the samples on El Guincho’s debut Alegranza. The sample in question was taken from Delia’s track Mattachin and used on El Guincho’s Costa Paraiso.

Delia Derbyshire – Mattachin
(Ignore the animation, it has no relevance to the music or the article, even though its interesting.)

What jogged my memory about Delia was a fascinating piece written about her in The Times, yesterday, based around her lost works (hidden somewhere in the depths of BBC HQ,) having finally been found and dusted off. I could give a full run down of her life and the story of the missing tape but you’d get far more out of just reading it yourself:

(Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Delia’s created ‘future’ sounding theme tunes, background music and soundbeds for BBC radio and TV programs. Her techniques, limited by the lack of technology in exsistence, consisted of recording a sound onto magnetic tapes, sculpting them with a razor blade, manipulating them with analogue effects and recording techniques (delays, echoes, reverbs etc) and then sticking each individual sound back onto that tape. The following is a video of Delia explaining some of the process:

One of her most famous bits of work is her classic Dr Who theme tune:

Written by Rob Grainer and Delia Derbyshire and arranged by Delia Derbyshire

Outside of her work with the BBC (which apart from including countless radio and tv themes, including recordings with John Peel and Barry Bermange) Delia was involved with a few other electronic music projects. Two of these are particularly interesting:

White Noise was the band Delia formed, in 1969, with long time colleague at the BBC, Brian Hodgson and American composer David Vorhaus. As a trio the band created An Electric Strom an album which even though it has been widely hailed as having laid the plan for future electronic music still avoids sounding just like an experiment in new sounds and actually contains beautiful song writing, melody and emotion.

White Noise – Love Without Sound

Just before White Noise came about, Delia and Brian Hodgson formed a group called Unit Delta Plus which not only set about creating electronic music but promoting it and its uses in film, television and radio too. Unit Delta Plus died out just before the creation of White Noise, but they did manage to involve themselves in the infamous show at the Roundhouse in Camden, The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. I can’t find out too much about it other than it was a night of ‘Electronic Music’, including a set by Unit Delta Plus, set to different light shows. The other band on the bill were The Beatles doing a one off piece of music called The Carnival of Light, which is reported to be a 12-15 minute long bit of music that includes Paul and John screaming over loops of noise and was reportedly banned from release by either George Harrison or George Martin (no one can work out who,) on the grounds that it was too avant garde. Sounds like a pretty incredible night.

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