Decades before the first-ever female Doctor Who challenged perceptions that only a man could inhabit the role of Time Lord, an unknown composer was quietly realising the series’ theme music at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
That theme, elaborating ideas by Ron Grainer, would create a sensation on inaugural transmission in 1963. It would go on to become one of the most recognisable and influential TV theme tunes of all time.
Yet despite being lauded by many as one of the great pioneers of electronic music, its creator has only recently – and since her death – begun to be more widely recognised. Doctor Who is an early highlight of a career which saw her elegant musique concrète and electronic sound synthesis grace an astonishing range of media from drama and documentary to live theatre; experimental art to progressive rock. Collaborators and co-explorers included such diverse figures as Luciano Berio (whom she assisted at the 1962 Dartington Summer School), Roberto Gerhard, Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney.
‘Quite something for a working-class Coventry girl’: who was Delia Derbyshire?
Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) first joined the BBC in 1960 as a trainee studio manager. By her own admission she’d already achieved ‘quite something for a working-class girl from Coventry’ upon graduating in maths and music from Girton College, Cambridge.
But she’d also tasted disappointment in being rejected for a job at Decca Records on the grounds that they ‘didn’t employ women in the recording studio’. Determined to pursue her ‘passion to make abstract sounds’, she badgered her BBC bosses until they granted her transfer to the mysterious Radiophonic Workshop in April 1962.
It was an unusual move. The Workshop had been created in 1958 to supply sound for radio, and did not employ composers but rather temporary ‘studio assistants’. Derbyshire drily noted that ‘it was only by gradually infiltrating the system that I managed to do music’, and her contribution was hugely significant at a time of socio-cultural change and shifting interest from radio to television. Yet she received little public acknowledgement, since output was attributed to the Workshop rather than individual employees.
Music and sonic art way ahead of her time
Delia Derbyshire left the BBC in 1973 – and then music itself for many years – disillusioned by the restraints on her creativity and developments which saw mass-produced synthesizers replace the oscillators and wobbulators, found sounds and tape manipulation she adored. But during her tenure, and increasing moonlighting on external projects, she set a benchmark for excellence at the cutting edge, producing music and sonic art way ahead of her time.
She later commented of her BBC work, ‘most of the programmes I did were in the far-distant future, the far-distant past, or in the mind.’ A project that combined all of these was Inventions for Radio (1963-65), a series of four experimental programmes made with playwright Barry Bermange. As the title suggests, the series aimed to showcase radio as an artform, combining intuitive and electronic processes.
Via a collage of ambient sounds and recorded interviews, each programme explored an existential or spiritual theme through the lives and imagination of ordinary people. Titled: ‘The Dreams’, ‘Amor Dei’, ‘The Afterlife’ and ‘The Evenings of Certain Lives’, the result was a vivid blend of text, sound and music that, Bermange noted, had a parallel in Berio’s radio work in Italy. So it’s fascinating that – post-Dartington – Derbyshire’s jottings for ‘The Dreams’ should include the enigmatic indication, ‘Beriobashes – long, low / Slow cross from one to the other’.
Strongly visual in her working practice, she was delighted when Bermange presented pencil sketches when asked about sounds for ‘Amor Dei’: ‘he drew me a beautiful Gothic altarpiece and said, “That’s the sound I want”.’ Her response was a tolling exegesis of time which influenced Jonathan Harvey’s 1966 Symphony: reportedly, ‘he liked the breathing quality of the chords’.
‘Impossible for electronic music to be beautiful until Delia came along’
Delia Derbyshire and Jonathan Harvey were friends, and in 1958 they had travelled together to Brussels for the premiere of Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique. She never fully stepped into the world of the avant-garde, remaining a maverick on its edges. But in 1963-64 her creative expertise was combined with Gerhard’s to award-winning effect.
The Anger of Achilles is described in the BBC Programme Catalogue as an ‘epic for radio in three parts by Robert Graves, from his translation of Homer’s Iliad‘. The music, it notes, was ‘specially composed … by Roberto Gerhard, with special effects by the B.B.C. Radiophonic Workshop.’ The programme was awarded the Prix Italia for ‘literary or dramatic programmes with or without music’.
There was no mention for Derbyshire, who had collaborated closely on the score. Nonetheless, word of her brilliance continued to spread, and in 1967 Derbyshire’s work on the TV documentary The World About Us prompted a boss to remark that it had been ‘impossible for electronic music to be beautiful until Delia came along’. Her imagination was fired by the programme’s subject, the nomadic Tuareg people of the Sahara, and the resulting Blue Veils and Golden Sands marks a highpoint.
Blue Veils and Golden Sands: a haunting masterpiece
Brian Hodgson was a close colleague with whom Derbyshire co-founded Unit Delta Plus to create and promote electronic music (1966-67, with synthesizer pioneer Peter Zinovieff) and the experimental trio White Noise (1968, with musician David Vorhaus). Of Blue Veils, just after her death he said, ‘It still haunts me. She used her own voice for the sound of the hooves [and] virtually all the filters and oscillators in the workshop.’ More recently he commented that Delia Derbyshire remained ‘unique in the kind of sound she produced’.
Part of that unique sound – used in Blue Veils and other soundscapes – came from her transformation of a favourite ‘tatty green BBC lampshade’ struck with a soft mallet: ‘It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it. I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop’s famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.’
She caused a stir by running the longest-ever tape loop in BBC history
The description is an insight into Derbyshire’s mathematical rigour and poetic imagination. She maintained that she always went ‘back to the Greeks and the simple harmonic series’, and her attention to detail was legendary. Often working at night, she caused a stir by running the longest-ever tape loop in BBC history ‘out through the double doors and then through the next pair; just opposite the ladies’ toilet and reception’.
Shakespeare, prog rock, Yoko Ono and more
Outside the BBC, Delia Derbyshire was active on a number of fronts: from theatre productions including Tony Richardson’s Hamlet (1969) and Peter Hall’s Macbeth (1967) to films such as the latter’s Work is a Four Letter Word (1968) and a now-lost film with Yoko Ono (1967-8) which comprised a ‘wrapping of the lions in Trafalgar Square’.
These projects, too, were largely created under a collective umbrella since the BBC frowned on extracurricular activities. Little did they know that Kaleidophon – a studio project created by the White Noise trio to encompass that and theatre work – secretly recorded some of the iconic prog rock album An Electric Storm (1969) after-hours at the Workshop. To divert attention, Derbyshire would sometimes use a pseudonym, Li De La Russe. In light of the Stravinsky quotes on ‘Firebird’, a track on the album co-penned with Vorhaus, the anagram seems both witty and knowing.
A cult figure for younger artists
Just as she remained outside the avant-garde mainstream – and despite brief encounters with Pink Floyd and Paul McCartney – Derbyshire avoided the experimental rock scene. Yet not only was she prescient in refusing to see boundaries between art and popular genres, she later became a cult figure for younger electronic dance and ambient artists like Orbital and Sonic Boom, with whom she’d begun to work at the time of her death.
Excited by the new, more ‘organic’ types of music technology emerging in the 1990s, she returned to the studio. But by then alcoholism had ravaged her, and she died before completing any projects. Soon after, 267 tapes and heaps of documents were found in her Northampton attic. Now archived at the University of Manchester, new information continues to emerge about this brilliant, rebellious figure who, in doing ‘a lot of things I was told not to do’, forged so many pathways to the future.