Hello and welcome to the Sound on Sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this special episode we're going to be exploring the Delia Derbyshire archive.
Delia Derbyshire lived from 1937 to 2001 and is one of the pioneering figures in the development of electronic music in Britain, at least. As well as undertaking many independent commissions, Delia worked in a department of the BBC called the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1962 to 1973, producing a distinctive body of work that explored, as she termed it, psychoacoustics.
Delia's most famous work is probably her purely electronic realisation of Ron Greiner's theme tune for the then new BBC sci fi series called Doctor Who in 1963. This was created using tape, a piece of metal string and machines not intended as musical instruments such as a white noise generator, valve oscillators and a beat frequency oscillator they nicknamed the wobulator.
More about these shortly. Many modern artists cite Delia as an influence and inspiration, including Aphex Twin, Portishead and Nenita Desai, while samples of her work appear in a number of hip hop tracks. Delia's archive arrived in Manchester, England at around the same time as I did in 2007. I suspected this gem of electronic music heritage could be a rich source of inspiration and education.
So I instigated a small charity centred around the archive called Delia Derbyshire Day. We honour Delia each year on the 23rd of November, which was the date the Doctor Who theme first beamed into British living rooms. And we also design and deliver projects throughout the year, promoting equal opportunities in electronic music and supporting developing artists.
You can visit the Delia Derbyshire archive at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester, England. This ever expanding archive collection includes digitised tapes of Delia's working processes, not the finished BBC pieces, films she did soundtracks for, as well as paper items such as working notes and newspaper cuttings.
Please see the show notes for links on how to access the archive and find out more about Delia Derbyshire Day. In this episode, you'll be hearing from Mark Ayres, composer and BBC archivist, David Butler, a researcher of Delia and her archive at the University of Manchester, and then experimental electronic music artist, Cosi Fanitouti.
Let's start with a taste of Delia's music. This is one of my favourites, Dance from Noah, an early example of four to the floor electronic music made for a kids TV programme in 1971.
So now I'm talking to Mark Ayres, a trustee for Delia Derbyshire Day and also a key person in the creation of the Delia Derbyshire Archive. So Mark, I wonder if you could start by telling us that role that you've had in the creation of Delia's Archive. Yeah, hello. Um, It goes back quite a way, uh, in that, uh, I was very involved in the last days of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, uh, cataloguing their collection and, uh, making sure that, uh, That was properly preserved and obviously now trying to, you know, release as much of it as we can on records, et cetera.
Um, but Delia, uh, and I became firm friends in the, in the last few years of her life. I had corresponded with her for a bit and then first met her in 1993 when we made a documentary for the, would you believe, uh, 30th anniversary of Doctor Who, uh, called Doctor Who, 30 years in the TARDIS. And that's where we met.
And we carried on corresponding and telephoning one another regularly from, from then on. Um, and then when Delia died in 2001, her partner Clive was sorting out her house and found all these boxes in her attic, which were basically sort of supermarket cereal boxes. You know, those big boxes that all the cereal packets arrived at the supermarkets in, full of tapes, most of which were, Loose, not in boxes, and all of which had labels on them, or rather had at one day had labels on them, but they had dried out while they were in her attic, and all the labels were at the bottom of the boxes, so that didn't help.
Uh, but Clive didn't really know what to do with them, so he handed them on to me via Brian Hodgson. So, first of all, Brian picked them all up from Clive's, and then went through them all and, and sort of worked out roughly what was there, and then passed them all on to me. As tends to happen with a lot of these collections, they end up with me, and I then kind of not know what to do with them.
Because they take an awful lot of time, I mean, it takes a lot of time to preserve, but they also take a lot of time, you know, to listen to, to transfer, to catalogue, and, uh, you know, I've also got a day job and a family. So, what happened was, David Butler, uh, bless him, uh, contacted me, being an interested academic, wanting to do something academically on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
And I, uh, Applied to him, not negatively, but I said, well, you know, the BBC Radio Phonics Workshop archive is stored at the BBC, it's not particularly accessible, I'm cataloguing that, um, as best I can at the moment. And then I had this brainwave and I said, but I do have this other lot of boxes here, um, which I haven't got time to look at, would you be interested in those?
And he said, what are those? And I said, well, they're all of Delia's tapes. And of course, his eyes, I could hear his eyes lighting up on the telephone. Um, so, so that, that's what happened. And, uh, by agreement with, um, with Dealers Estate and with Brian Hodgson, David came down to my studio for a couple of days and we went through all the tapes provisionally, you know, listening to some of them, trying to work out if we could, which label belong, belonged with which tape.
That was not always. remotely possible, but we made a Catalog of what was there and just numbered all the tapes so that we we had a basic inventory of what was there and then off David went with a car full of full of boxes and the University of Manchester John Ryland's library have been dealing with that catalog ever since I am, you know, consider it Yeah, I continue as a consultant for the estate and obviously now as a trustee of Delia Derbyshire Day with you Caro Mm hmm, and that's all to do, you know, it's all to do with preserving this collection, but also, you know finding out exactly What makes it tick, how it relates to other things that survive, you know, we're starting to join it up with other collections like Desmond Briscoe's own tape collection, personal tape collection, Brian Hodgson's personal tape collection, because of course they all intersect.
They're all working together. They all, they all, um, you know, cross over. And eventually we're, we're beginning to look now at how it, um, you know, finally fits in with what, You know, it was Delia, Brian and Desmond's day job, which was, of course, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Uh, so it's a very, very long project, very involved, but very exciting.
And what do you think the archive, the audio in particular, can tell us about Delia's process and the technology they were using or misusing? Yes, the Radiophonic Workshop, I mean, electronic music back then was, was, was new. I mean, talking the 60s and even into the early 70s, you know, it was very new discipline.
It started out. quite literally with people experimenting with electronic circuits. I mean, one of the pioneers in the UK was Tristram Carey, and he became interested because he was a radar operator in the Navy. And he, you know, spent his, his life listening to shortwave radio transmissions and hearing all those weird interferences and cross modulations you get on shortwave radio.
And amusing himself by, by finding music within that. And it is, you know, you listen to those, uh, frequencies clashing and, you know, crashing into one another and over modulating and distorting and delaying as they bounce around the globe, it, it, it, uh, They do have a weird sort of horrific musicality about them and Tristan wanted to harness those sounds and tame them to make music and that's where a lot of these experiments came from in Germany It was slightly different, you know, Germany set up two electronic music studios one in Cologne, which worked purely with electronically generated sounds And they were creating devices to create electronic degenerated sounds, um, and making music out of that.
In Paris, they were working entirely with found sounds, so they're using the tape recorder as a way of harnessing the sounds we hear around us and making music out of that. It's called music concrete. So they were two very different disciplines. In the UK, the BBC basically wanted a way of making The kind of sound effects you couldn't get from the sound effects library, you know, you could, you could get the sound of a door opening and closing from the Foley stage, you could get the sound of, well, I don't know, a load of tin cans falling over either from the Foley stage, or from the sound effects library.
You couldn't get the sound of a nervous breakdown from the sound effects library. So what does that sound like? And that was where Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram came in. Uh, trying to find ways of expressing different kinds of emotions and actions for radio. You know, they always say that radio, the pictures are better on radio, but they're only better if you give the audience clues.
And Desmond and Daphne were particularly interested in finding new ways to give the audience clues for emotions and ideas that hadn't been expressed before in radio drama. That's where that came from. Yeah, and if we just think of a couple of examples, like, you know, the machine they called the wobulator, and then the Jason valve oscillators, these weren't even intended as musical instruments.
No, they were trying to find ways of sourcing the kind of sounds they wanted to use. And the Radiophonic Workshop always used music on credit, but it was certainly interested in electronic sound. And the only real sources of electronic sound at the time were pieces of test equipment. The idea of most of these bits of gear was to generate A tone, which was a reference tone, which you put into the input of, say, an amplifier, and then you put some kind of measuring equipment on the output of the amplifier, and you could measure distortion, you could measure frequency response, you could measure dynamic range.
But these devices were designed to create pure tone. Well, that was great because you could use those pure tones in the creative electronic music. The Jason oscillator was literally an oscillator which created audio tones, uh, for test equipment There's another way of finding these things, you know, there's a company called Heathkit who made kits for home electronic enthusiasts to build their own, uh, devices.
And one of these oscillators was literally a Heathkit kit that they bought loads of these, the engineers put them together and that became, um, a source of sound. The Wobulator was made by Brule and Kaya and it was a low frequency oscillator, but it was a low frequency oscillator, which could itself oscillate.
So it wobbled. It was literally a sound which went up and down fairly slowly, and therefore it wobbled. So it was given the name the wobulator. But basically it's what we would now call a low frequency oscillator. And. A lot of those early pieces were made by manually playing the oscillator, so you could adjust the oscillator to give you the pitch and the tonal quality that you want and then record that pitch onto tape and then use tape to manipulate it.
Or, say the Doctor Who theme, the opening ooh ee ooh, as we call it, in the Doctor Who theme that was Delia literally manually playing the oscillator by using the pitch dial on it, and then recording that to tape and then echo and delay. Um, so yeah, it was, it was pretty, it was pretty, Very, very inventive what they were doing with, with equipment that wasn't designed for that purpose.
The first bit of gear that, which really was designed for that purpose, which came in purposely designed as a scientific instrument for producing sound for electronic music purposes, was the EMS VCS3. And that was designed not as a performance instrument, it was designed as an instrument which would create sounds, which you would record onto tape, and you would then manipulate your sound.
Using tape techniques, Tristan Carey, who was one of the, you know, guiding lights behind that and really sort of drew up the specification for the VCS3, that's what he wanted. He wanted a way of creating electronic sounds, electronic tones, which had a shape and a character, which he would record tape and then manipulate using tape techniques.
That's why it didn't have a keyboard on it. And there's some wonderful examples of, um, of Delia experimenting or creating sounds, should I say, with the VCS3, with, um, is it? And the Noah, the, the animals, the elephant sounds and all the rest of it that are there in the archive. Yeah, you, you, you asked just now, you know, what is it about the archive that illuminates technique?
Well, one of the things that really illuminates technique is in those early days, uh, everything was made on tape. And they didn't have multi track tape recorders, so each line of music was a separate line of edited tape, a separate piece of edited tape. The way the final productions were mixed was that they would line all these bits of tape up on four tape recorders next to one another, and they'd press play all at once, um, and they'd hope the play, the tapes stayed in synchronization.
Um, and that's where the, the final mix came from, you know, even the Doctor Who theme was done like that. I say even the Doctor Who theme was done like that. That's the way they worked in 1963. Mm. What was great at the end was that in case they needed to go back to those sounds or needed to do a remix, all those little bits of tape they made, all those separate tracks, were wound onto another spool with big long leaders between them.
And what tended to happen also was, you know, if they were really diligent, all the little sounds they'd use to make up those. Those, those tapes would also go onto that archive reel. So you pull a reel out of, say, the Great BBC Radiophonic Workshop archive, and it'll be a 10 inch reel of tape, and it'll be packed.
Um, it may well be that only the first minute or so is the final master. What comes after that is all the work in progress, if you're lucky. And that's what's fascinating. That's what's fascinating about these collections and about the archives, what they can tell you about the way These pioneers worked so Delia you take a piece of Delia's say blue veils and golden sands.
Yes I was just thinking of that one. I love that way. You can hear her voice Recording her own voice playing a note on a piano recording her own voice and then building it up. Yeah, indeed I mean what what Delia did for that was she literally played a note on a piano to pitch herself Then sang that note then played another part Another note on the piano to pitch herself sang that note.
Um, she did it all with the tape running very fast. So what's in the archive is actually, um, a slowed down tape because she wanted very low pictures, but you can hear these very low now, slowed down piano notes, and then Delia's voice, which again is also pitched down, but that the process is there. And then.
After that, there's a piece of Leda, and then there's all the little sounds she cut out of her voice, and then there's another Leda, and then she starts cutting them together in a rhythm, and then there's another Leda, and she's starting to make up the voice track for the piece, and then there's another Leda, and she starts adding echo to it, because she's overdubbing it, and then another Leda, and she's adding Tape delay and, uh, spring reverb to it.
And then you get, it goes on like that. And then she starts again with another sound and does exactly the same thing. And at the end of the tape, you get the final mix.
Delia wasn't the only one, you know, there were other people in the workshop doing amazing work. What makes Delia special is that she was Delia, you know, she was, she was, she had this unique approach to the work, you know, she was a mathematician, she was a musician, uh, she was someone who'd lived through the war and heard the bombs dropping on Coventry, uh, she was a woman in broadcasting, all of that stuff, um, illuminates what she did, and it's what makes her so important in so very many ways.
So for some of us digital folks, um, what do you mean by when you say leaders on the tape? So recording tape, to those of you brought up with iPhones is, is, um, is a mysterious substance. Um, in its basic form, it's a very, very, very long strip of plastic. Um, for master recording, it's generally quarter inch across and very, very, very, very thin.
Um, and these can be thousands of feet long, you know, on a, on a, on a 10 inch reel of tape and they're coated with iron filings, um, very, very finely ground and stuck to the plastic with a binder. And as you record on that tape using your tape recorder, those iron filings are magnetized with plastic.
Permanent magnetism, which is put into those filings by a electronic coil, the recording head. Um, and that's how the audio is recorded. Leader tape is literally plastic tape with no, uh, no iron filings on it. So it's not recording tape. It's just a piece of tape, plastic tape. You can stick between recordings and it's a great way.
They come in all sorts of different colors, you know, white, red, yellow, green, blue. And you can write on them with a China graph pencil to, to label your label, the and, uh, It makes finding a band on a long reel very easy because it's a bit like for those of you who are now looking at vinyl, that's the nearest, the nearest analog I can find.
You look at vinyl and you can see that those longer run out grooves, the scrolls between tracks, that's where you drop your style as if you want to play a particular track. On a reel of tape you spool through to that leader to play that particular track. Fantastic. So, if you had to choose one piece of audio from the archive to say was kind of one of your favorites, what comes to mind?
Well, I mean, I think my favorite tape in the archive is that makeup tape of, um, of Blue Veils, um, because it is so illuminating of Delia's process. And the fact that she is treating her own voice, um, as one of those sounds is something that makes it incredibly personal, because when you've listened to the final recording, you can't actually really tell that it's Delia's voice.
It's a texture, um, and I think that one of the magic things about so much music that was made in those times was that Delia's voice. Yeah. It is organic, it grows, it's not performed, it is created, it is nurtured. Um, in a way that, uh, you know, a lot of contemporary electronic music perhaps is not. And I think that's what's fascinating about it.
But everything, you know, DLF behind, Such a wealth of material. And, and when you look at it in conjunction as we are now trying to do, you know, with Desmond's tapes, with Brian's tapes, with all the other tapes, you know, John Baker also, you know, was a, a genius creator of concrete jazz, I call it. I mean, he literally made jazz music outta music concrete.
He could make music concrete, which that remember is little bits of cut up tape. Mm. But John uniquely could make music concrete. Swing and I mean really swing absolute genius said so all of these recordings really shed light on incredible processes, which are now. You know, long gone. I consider myself very lucky.
I started life in the analog era. So when I started out, we were still cutting tape. And I, I feel very privileged to have lived through those periods. Because I think having physically cut tape, having, you know, Literally lived through that era when all your sounds, all your work was on little bits of recording tape, um, which you could physically cut together.
I think it gives you a really unique way of looking at how things are constructed, which you don't quite, I mean, you know, digital editing is fantastic and frankly now I wouldn't go back, but digital editing with an analog sensibility is what, you know, I think those of us who were brought up in that era do.
Well, it was so physical, wasn't it, as well. And that's the thing that we're always trying to do with the digital is we're almost trying to take away the technology to get back to that human craft, you know, the physicality of music and having something, making something musical. And so it's almost like you're having, we're having to do that work to bring back that.
I know David Vorehouse talked about when they made an electric storm in 1969, how Delia was his teacher and it was almost like a dance, a movement, how she moved around with those tape machines. Yes, there's that film, piece of film of Delia, um, working at the workshop, create, creating the track, which we now know as Pot au Feu, um, when she's recording that, uh, those little sounds, the little gourd, which is a percussion sound, the little pluck string, which is going to be her instrumental sound.
A marvelous piece of film, where over about two minutes they show her cutting it up, making a tape, re pitching it, making a line, syncing it up on multiple tape machines with a tape loop, um, and the fluid way in which she does that, you know, without really thinking about it, it is, because that's the way she worked, you're right, it is a dance, it is a, it is a creative process with which she is a dancer.
totally in tune and with which she is totally at home. Um, and it's, it's magic to watch. So in terms of your role, both with the, with Delia's archive and with the estate with Dr. Hu and also Delia Derbyshire Day. Yeah. Let's say what's your hopes for the future of the Delia Derbyshire archive? I hope that the archive continues to inspire.
I think the educational work that we're doing is extremely valuable. Um, I hope that it will continue to inspire new works. You know, it's, it is, you know, we commission new works every year. That again is valuable. We're using Delia's example, uh, to inspire new pieces of work. My big hope beyond that is that we finally join all these collections together.
Um, Delia and Brian were notorious for sort of working on things at home and then taking them into work and they'd end up, say, on a radiophonic workshop piece on the BBC, then they'd end up on something which ended up on a library, and then they'd work on something which is basically the same thing which ends up on an electric storm.
So there was all this sort of cross pollinating going on between what they were doing at the BBC, what they were doing with their private commissions, all of that. And what they were doing, you know, their private endeavors like unit Delta plus and, and, uh, and white noise. And that is something we're only just beginning to join up, you know, see how all that, you know, it's not just what their involvement was, but how all these musical elements that they were creating.
So traveled around sample libraries. Sample libraries. Indeed, they are sample libraries. Um, How all these elements that we're creating sort of traveled. And, and that is a, that is an amazing thing. You know, I, I, I hope in, in due course we might make some of those actual sounds available. You know, so that people, um, Composers can use them in creating new work.
I don't want people to try and pretend to be the Radio Phonic Workshop or John Baker or Delia Derbyshire. I want people to be original. I want people to look at what Delia and John and Brian and Desmond and everyone else did and be inspired to create their own original work from that inspiration. And if we can create new composers who are Being similarly forward thinking, similarly creative and similarly inventive and hopefully similarly inspirational passing it on.
Next in my journey of unpacking the Delia Derbyshire archive for this sound on sound podcast special. I'm talking to David Butler from Manchester University. Um, hello and welcome David. Hello Carol and hello everybody else. And I wondered if you could start with letting us know what's your Roel, your work related to Delia's work.
So I'm based in the drama department in the Music and Drama building at the University of Manchester. And I'm one of the lecturers there. And I helped to bring Delia's archive to the university back in the mid 2000s. So it's been here since 2007. But I first contacted Mark Ayres, who had been entrusted with the archive.
I contacted Mark round about 2002, really to ask if there was anything the university could do to help with work that he was doing at that time on the larger archive of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which he had helped to salvage. When the workshop closed down in the late 1990s. And he said that the BBC themselves wanted to retain control of the radiophonic workshop collection, which is, I mean, it's substantial.
It's 3000 plus tapes going right back to the origins of the radiophonic workshop in the late 1950s. Wow. So, you know, he was, he was working on that and that would remain with the BBC, but that he had been. Interested with another archive, maybe we would be interested in, uh, helping out with that. And when he told me what it was, I just, I mean, it was just, you know, just extraordinary.
And, you know, just getting to see and hear and read, um, things which, you know, you thought you would never ever get to see these, um, these things or hear this work again. So that's how it all started. And the collection came to Manchester in 2007 and I got funding so that we could digitize the tapes in Delia's collection.
And at that point, the archive was the core archive that Clive had left and passed on to Mark was paperwork. Relating to mainly Delia's freelance projects, but some BBC productions in there as well, letters, newspaper clippings. She kept all manner of bits and bobs, you know, information about programs she was involved with.
Uh, so radio times listings, but also interviews with her in various newspapers, local and national newspapers. Things she jotted down on the back of envelopes Uh Letters from various companies, you know, nothing was thrown away, but all these reels of tape and our main job was to get the funding to digitize them and then find a secure permanent home where they would be.
in appropriately environmentally controlled conditions, um, given that the vast majority of this was magnetic tape. And the person who came over to help with that was Louis Niebuhr, who's a, an American academic who specializes in British electronic music. Uh, Louis, Since working on the digitization of the tapes, uh, Radiophonic Workshops, the first full length academic book on the workshop.
We worked on the digitization together, listed the vast majority of them, but I did some of the digitizing as well, and we did that on an old STU eight 80 Real to reel tape, uh, tape machine from BBC Manchester on Oxford Road, as was, it's, it's long since it's gone now it's BBC's over in, uh, media City and Salford, but they had no further use for it and they very generously let me take one away.
Um, so I trundled it down Oxford Road. It's built like a Sherman tank. So the digitizing was done pretty much in the summer of 2007. Some of it, uh, by the time Lewis had to go back to the United States, there was still a few tapes left to be done and I completed those. So mainly in terms of the audio and the paper items, it's really around her freelance, if you like, work or sketches of BBC projects.
So it might be worth sort of clarifying what's not in the archive as much as what is in there. Well, the big one that isn't in there, of course, which a lot of people I think, would assume would be in there, of course, is Doctor Who. Um, there is some Doctor Who in there, actually. There's, uh, some of the makeup elements for the notorious, so called, Delaware version of the Doctor Who theme tune, which was done in the early 1970s in the wake of, uh, well, Doctor Who was clocking up its 10th anniversary.
It began in 23rd of November, 1963. And, uh, The Radio Phonics Workshop had acquired in the early 1970s a number of synthesizers which were manufactured by EMS, which was co run by Peter Zanoffy, who David had known for a number of years. Collaborated closely with for a short period of time with unit Delta Plus.
So they had got a VCS3 and also a Synthi 100. Which was known as the Delaware, um, named after Delaware Road, which was where, uh, the Riddaphonic Workshop was based in the BBC's Meadowvale Studios. And this version is in the, um, Delia Derbyshire archive. And hardly anybody, um, that version never UK, but it, it was, Dubbed on to, um, some episodes of Doctor Who, which were, uh, sold to Australia.
And so some Australians got to hear this version. It was only on a, like a handful of episodes. Um, Dee Dee was never happy with it. Uh, it was worked on by Paddy Kingsland and Brian Hodgson and Dee Dee producing it. And she pretty much sort of like disowned it. Brian, you know, sort of quite, Um, vividly said it was an idea that should have been strangled at birth as he put it.
Um, and that you can hear elements from that in the archive, but the original that is not there, uh, in terms of all the, you know, the component parts and the different developments of that. And that is at the BBC radiophonic workshop tape archive, which is. in Perryville at the BBC Archive Centre. And that's where you'll find most of Delia's BBC work.
I mean, there are some BBC productions in her archive at Manchester. Very prominently is Tutankhamen's Egypt, Uh, which is one of her final projects at the BBC. There is elements from the first two inventions for radio, which are these wonderful speech and sound pieces that she collaborated on with the dramatist Barry Bermange in 1963 64 and into 65.
And the first two of those, the dreams and Amor Dei, they're very well represented in our archive at Manchester, both in terms of paper documents, but also the, uh, the makeup material, especially for Amor Dei, actually. Um, so with Amor Dei, she's, her source for that is a recording by the, um, a boy chorister, uh, It was one of Benjamin Britten's favorite voices, uh, John Hessey.
That was a pre existing recording. And so Delia took that recording and then isolated it. The many of the vowel sounds from that recording and took the, the attack of the sounds, um, looped and extended the vowels to give her just these, or to enable her to build up these clusters of sounds, just these wonderful, gorgeous, expansive ambient chords, all sculpted from this recording by this boy, Corissa, and you can hear on one of the tapes, you know, in the process of chopping up Corissa, All the individual vowel sounds and then beginning to manipulate them.
I think one thing this really does is it really builds that picture of how she was really part of the ecology. She was at that time, she really part of the, the sort of burgeoning landscape of electronic music in England and, and, and abroad. So in that sense, it really does make sure that we don't fall into that trap of her being a lone genius.
Yes, it's always a risk. Um, and, and that's, I mean, that's something that in particular, I think that women artists have particularly, you know, had that projected onto them as if that, you know, that they're exceptions. You know, one of the things that the archive does reveal is just how many people she was connected with.
Um, whether through her own projects that she was involved with or people who came to the workshop to talk with her, to, you know, to ask for her advice and then the most famous people, you know, obviously people like Paul McCartney who wanted to go and speak with her. But you know, there are other people, Brian Jones, Pink Floyd visited, uh, the radiophonic workshop.
She was giving talks. Um, She assisted Luciano Berio at the Dartington summer school with a week long course in electronic music. She was involved with the Society for the Promotion of New Music, which was set up to encourage awareness of new music, and so she was involved with them. So you really can make a case for her being at the forefront of growing the public's awareness of electronic music.
and electronic sound in the 1960s. And there's something around the history and development of electronic music, isn't there? Because there's things like the setting sheet for the VCS 3 or her measurements for tape and how it was so maths related, because it has to be, had to be, because she was working on tape, but also her preference of maths and music, so harmonics, subharmonics.
Yeah, massively. I mean, this, this is one of these archives where you can actually see the artist's method, you know, and there are, there are several productions where you get a really good, you know, intricate insight into the, you know, the, the gradual development of, of a project, both with the paperwork and with the related audio, when it comes to the synthesizers, again, I think the archive.
is particularly valuable at demonstrating that she had a more complex relationship with synthesizers again than is sometimes reported. She herself is on record as, you know, being quite critical of synthesizers, but in later life, you know, she would say, reflect back on that and, and said, well, actually it wasn't so much the synthesizer that was the problem.
It was the people and what they were doing with them that, you know, that was the issue, you know, sort of like the really tight deadlines. And the kind of projects that would be, you know, being requested there, but she reflected, you know, later on that, you know, she said, actually, I think they could be using so much more creative than they actually were, and that she'd love to get inside them.
And, um, as she said in one interview, you know, do something more human with them. So the archive, you know, does give you again, uh, a different take on that, on that sort of like rather more sort of like neat, straightforward. View that she just didn't like synthesizers and it's you know, it's not quite as simple as that and you can see things like him Dope sheets of the VCS three, um, which are just asking for, you know, an artist to come along and recreate those settings.
We did try actually the nice guys gave us the I VCS three app. And, um, we did, we did try that. And I think we got close to what she was at. what she produced, but not exactly because it would have been different for lots of different reasons. But yeah, it means that you can do that. And I think, yeah, Delia does consistently inspire and there's something about having that reflection of someone else's process feeds into then how you reflect on your own.
Yeah. I think it's also worth noting how Delia's voice, isn't there some kind of elocution lesson audio in there to make us realise that we think her voice is that BBC received pronunciation of that era, but actually she would have had to doctor her Midlands accent in order to be employed by the BBC at that time.
Very much so, you know, and even, yeah, I mean, that began before that, you know, while she was at school with that pressure, you know, And then going up to Cambridge of having to transform her voice. And, and, you know, I've, I've, I've made this point, uh, saying a little bit about it in the, the biography of Delia that I'm, I'm writing at the moment is that, you know, we often think about Delia of transforming the human voice through electronic means and cutting up tape and, you know, but in the 1950s, she was transforming her own voice.
Um, and through, you know, sort of, um, educational and sociocultural means of shifting that voice into a, you know, into a different form in the tape archive, you know, some of the most interesting revealing moments, uh, Delia sort of off guard, just introducing a cue or directing somebody. So she's not being interviewed.
She's not putting on that more formal. BBC voice and you, you just hear, you know, in a more relaxed moments, a different inflection. Yeah, they, they give you an insight into it in her unguarded moments, I think, and they're quite revealing. Right, so, most awkward question. Um, if you were to pick one favourite piece in the archive, let's go for the audio, um, off the top of your head without thinking about it too much, what would it be and why?
Well, this is an evil question, Carol, as you well know, and I could hear it in your voice as you asked it. It was the donations from Elizabeth Kosmian. For two houses and the unmade demo cue from the two houses from 1980 and the demo cue from the early 1980s One is Delia not working with electronics In a prominent way it's a score for piano Well, yes, although sometimes I wonder whether some of that is also just the fact the nature of the tuning of the piano and you know, the actual, the recording of it as well.
Um, but I think that there may well have been some processing done on it also, but it's, um, I'd be quite curious to know like what, you know, what the specifics of that have actually are. That and then the demo key of the unmade film, which is electronic and. It does sound again, it can't be 100 percent certain, but I'm, I think it's a vocoder and that's really interesting because she did not have access to a vocoder when she was at the Radiophonic Workshop.
Peter Zenofiev was developing one, but the vocoder that the workshop bought didn't come until after she had left. So that's just, you know, it's really bittersweet because you're hearing her use, Something or a process which is not something that she had when she was there, you know, and indeed there were the occasional project in the 1980s that we know from Clive Blackburn, her partner, that she was, you know, Um, going to Adrian Wagner studio every now and again, and that she created music for a document, an ITV documentary about Stonehenge, which sadly is not in the archive.
It may be that somewhere along the line that, you know, that tape has fallen by the wayside, but we know that she did it. Um, and so, you know, we're still doing things into the night. So I think those two, because they totally change the story of Delia's life. This notion that she stopped, you know, engaging creatively and creating music in particular.
after she left the BBC.
Hello, cozy, fanny tooty. Lovely to have you as part of this Delia Derbyshire Archive special podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Wonderful. So you've worked with Delia's Archive on a couple of occasions that I'm aware of. I wonder if you could tell me about those projects and what your interaction with the Archive involved.
I went to the Archive initially with Caroline Katz when we were working on her film. about Delia because I was doing the soundtrack and we went together to the archive to go through the audio files initially because that's what we wanted to sort of investigate really and see what kind of sounds that she, she worked on because they weren't just the finished pieces that she, that we were listening to, they were also the sound sources for those finished pieces.
So I was particularly interested in, in where the sounds began. So what interested her most and inspired her to then go on to create these wonderful cut ups and tape, um, compositions. That to me was, um, a revelation really. And it, and it, I felt quite privileged to be able to do that. And that's what I think Ryland's is amazing for, is that you can go in there and you can dig deep into Delia and find Delia there.
She's just sitting waiting for you really. And, and that's what, I found most amazing, but other than that, going, I went much later, but I'll talk about that later as well, when I was writing my book, but listening to those, um, audio files with Caroline and we're both making notes as we went through them as to what we thought would work well to, for the film and the images that she was going to create, which hadn't been done by that point.
Um, so sitting there and listening to those takes was. just quite wonderful. It was like going into a daily as well, especially when you hear a voice sort of giving instructions and things like that. It was very special. Yeah. And there's just so much variety there, including of course, not just her own work.
It's, it's all the stuff she was listening to that time, which I think is also another just as important insight, isn't it? Yeah, because you, you kind of, I didn't expect to see that really. I don't know why. Her taste was really, um, diverse, you know, I mean, from what we, what she would have called pop music back then to jazz and music concrete, all kinds of, um, sounds really.
Which says an awful lot about Delia, I think. Yeah, exactly. And then you also said you went back for your project of ReSisters, the book. Yeah, I went back, um, when I was doing research for my book ReSisters. Because I, I particularly wanted to go to the archive of her, um, school books and the few objects that they'd, they'd, they'd found in, of the chimney, you know?
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I wanted to go back to where Delia began, rather than go to Delia when she was already almost fully formed in a workshop, um, to see what she was like as a child. Because I think there's only, is there 14 years between us or something? Mm hmm. So, reading her, um, school books, her essays and things like that, and her physics book in particular, was really enlightening, because that was just like, massive, because I, I went, I went looking for her music book, And it was just like hardly anything in it.
And I thought, have they missed a book? Or is this just the second book that she was starting off with, you know? But, um, but no, it was, um, the physics book that was the most exciting because she was talking about the use of the voice and all these different things. Um, that's what she was into, you know, incredible.
And how did that fill out or complete in some way your, your picture of Delia? It showed me because I, I knew that she, she was really into physics and she, she knew that sound, that what is physics, sound, sound is physics. So that was her, her, her field really. So that joined with music and maths, obviously.
So when I saw this, I could completely understand where she was coming from because she was looking outside. The music box completely into non music, if you like, to then create music. And that's what fascinated me most, because not only was that like a massive amount of information that she'd put in this book, but a lot of the information she'd gone independently to find out.
Because, you know, that was something that she wasn't supposed to be doing at school, if you know what I mean. Ah, right, okay. Yeah, she went out, she went further than the curriculum because of her own interest in it. Wow, and it's such a solid foundation for working in sound and music, because, yeah, she was an engineer, as well as an artist, as well as, you know, so many other things, a technician.
But that gives you that foundation, doesn't it, that think of that young age, she was already trying to fathom out what is this intangible thing. mad thing we call sound and music. Yeah. Cause she would have been what, um, she was at high school then she would have been under 15. And I think when I was looking at these books, she was only about 12 or 13.
And when you try and measure that, you know, you sort of think in your own mind what you were doing at that age. She really was exceptional. I think. And did you see the, um, have you seen the Latin? exercise books where you've got her homework, where she says, um, she conjugates the verb audiare, to hear in future.
And she says the future of audio is dot, dot, dot. And for me, that just zoomed out and magnified. And I was like, she was the future of audio. And she had no idea at that point. No, she didn't. I mentioned that in my book, actually, because I did come across it. And, um, And she got, her teacher didn't like it.
She said, this is basically nothing to do with what you're asked. The question was nothing to do with that. See me. Yeah. Yeah. I love this. Yeah. Why write this in red? Yes. Yeah. What are you on about? Those foundations are really quite amazing. Are the, um, the Catholic cards and all that stuff, is that all in there as well?
Yes. Yeah. I found those fascinating. Because that was a, the personal family side of Delia, and they were from um, female members of her family. Ah, okay. It's like a little um, collection really. So did that link quite nicely with Marjorie Kemp then, who's also the other featured woman in your book?
Absolutely, because both were Catholic. Right. I mean, Margie was um, hardcore Catholic, where, I mean Delia, at that time when she had those cards, was Catholic, practicing, but then stopped, you know. She was a lax Catholic when she was, by the time she was at the um, BBC, working in a radiophonic workshop. And that was what interested me about Amor Day, is because I thought she had a really good background into doing some, some sounds for that, and the fact that the sound that she chose was the chorister as a starting point.
And she would have heard that as she was very young, I'm pretty sure, because it was a very common and well known liturgy. Right. So, um, she was informed well, I think, and really suited to do the music for that. Yeah. So we, we are asking each, each guest to pick a piece, a favorite piece from the archive to talk about and you picked Amor Dei, a vision of God.
Um, so yeah, tell us why you picked this. Because I, I found that it said, It said something about Delia other than her competence in doing something so well to go with the voices that we're talking about. Two lots of voices, one in favor of Christ and faith and the other who, and the others weren't at all.
But the fact that she chose this um, Christian liturgy as a starting point. Which she, she began pure and then deconstructed it and reconstructed it in her own way. Um, she was told not to use any electronics, uh, no electronic sounds. So she stuck with that brief, and she used voices, but she completely made them different to what they started out, which is what she, you know, that's her forte.
Yeah. So, and in such a beautiful way, and sensitive way, because Like I said, at that time, she was like, um, a lapsed Catholic, so she would have had her own opinion about this whole, um, particular vision of God, or not. And, uh, that was what was interesting, because when I, and the, the Rylands was fantastic for that research for me.
Because, um, when I looked at her notes when she did it, they were just so detailed, and her analysis of it was phenomenal. And, uh, I mean, I, I write in the book what, what she, what she said, and um, I could just tell you briefly. She, where she just, she said that she would like, take the fragments of voice, and then she would like, cut, switch, scan, and then she'd do all kinds of, um, different things to them, and then bring them all together again.
But she was working, she was working with, um, With ideas like to do with Stockhausen and things like that on these which seem very small little pieces of music But it tells you a lot about how Delia's mind worked and how beautiful she thought these sounds were so she was working with something That was already beautiful and making it even more beautiful in her mind.
And to think that was just one, one project going on amidst many, because that was a busy time for her, wasn't it? 1964, 65. Yeah, I mean, she worked two weeks, she worked two weeks just getting these to a point where she thought that they could work for what she wanted them to do. So what actual material was there around them all day?
You mentioned the notes, but audio as well. What's, what's in there that you were able to, tap into? I, well, like I said, I wasn't looking at Amodei. It was only when I, when I did my research and I, I came across her notes, which were, you know, like I said, were really detailed.
So it was more of the notes in the archive then than the audio that, that informed you and, you know, enchanted you around this piece. Absolutely. About, around everything. Right. It was, it was literally Delia's written notes. It was Delia. That's her handwriting. And, um, her thoughts and everything spilling onto the page that gave me the actual really great connection with her.
There's some wonderful language in there, isn't there? There's the heartbeat, bass, bump and bleeps and the bloops and I love all that kind of personal language, but we know exactly what frequency range she's talking about. We all know the difference between a bleep and a bloop. It's lovely, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
The other thing for me as well in her, the more, the paper items, is all the visual. There's lots of, you know, sketches, drawings, maybe graphic scores. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, she, she was like, I think you said earlier, she, she was, she was an artist, you know, she was, she was, she wasn't just a musician at all.
She, you know, she went, she worked visually with sound, you know, you were saying, I mean, she would do these drawings and she would, she would talk about these sounds. You know, like, with this Amodei, as we all know, she was, she was told that it had to be like a, you know, a gothic altarpiece, and she was given the drawing, you know, for that.
So, um, she worked from that, and she knew immediately what, uh, Barry Ramage meant, you know, when she, when she saw the drawing, she knew it. Yeah, wonderful. Um, so why do you feel, you know, Delia's archive might be important and what do you think it can offer us now? I think it's incredibly important because you have Delia in there, literally.
Like I said, she's, all, everything that goes on in her mind is, is in these notes. Even, you know, saying how long she's worked on something or someone is coming along to pick something up at a certain date. There are all those things going on. And, um, So you have a connection with her, which is just so valuable, rather than, um, because with the audio as well, you can hear Delia talking about how things have got to be delivered at a certain, uh, certain time and date when she was working on the Egyptian music.
And, um, and I think for anyone that wants to, um, research Delia, I think Rylands is essential, because it's the only thing that we've got. of Delia that remains, other than the music, well the music's there as well. Yeah, and other than the finished music. So with Delia Derbyshire Day we commission artists to interact with the archive, mainly women artists, and being contemporary women artists yourself, does it have any value for you personally to be able to look back and Connect with Delia, but also in some way connect with yourself and your own practice a bit more.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because there are times when I was, um, working and, and discovering all different aspects of Delia's practice and, and her life where we actually joined forces almost, because I can remember thinking, Oh yeah, I feel exactly the same. And her choice of sounds to work with when I initially listened to them with, um, Caroline.
I was listening and I thought, I've just come from doing my own album 2T. And these sounds were so like the ones I've been working with that, um, I preferred frequencies and, and everything and I thought, Oh, wow, this is, um, yeah, I'm on a nice wavelength with Delia here. And I think I can't help having that feeling of some kind of, I don't know, is it reassurance, validation?
I don't know what it is, but there's something there about, you know, obviously, we're not the same, everyone's, you know, whether you're the same gender or not, there's lots of other differences. It's finding those points of connection. I find some kind somehow kind of, I dunno, emboldening, heartening. Does that make any sense to you?
Yeah, absolutely. Because you, when you're working in isolation, even if you're working with other people, you, you, you're kind of thinking, I don't know. Is that all right? You know, is that right? Does that question mark? And, I mean, Delia had it as well, so yeah, there's that connection is that everybody sort of like questions, what they're doing, you know?
Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes for further information, as well as links and details of other episodes in the Electronic Music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts, so you can check out what's on our other channels.
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