Aeolian Tones (Village of the Angels)
It’s November 21st, 2021. Adele and Ed Sheeran remain, but they’re joined this week by Taylor Swift’s ten minute expansion of “All Too Well” along with Sam Fender and Switchotr featuring A1 and J1. In news, Russia nearly fucks up the International Space Station by blowing up a satellite, the UK government ditches large swaths of its high speed rail plans in the north, and the US government passes the Build Back Better Act, a massive post-pandemic spending bill. Alex Jones is found liable for defamation against the parents of Sandy Hook children, while Kyle Rittenhouse is found not liable for murdering people in Wisconsin. Two days later, as this airs, another right-wing terrorist drives an SUV through a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing six.
On television, meanwhile, Village of the Angels, which, as the saying goes, if I had a nickel for every time in 2021 the BBC aired a program about Doctor Who and psychic messages sent across time via analog media I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. The other time came back in May, when BBC Four aired Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. This is a strange film—a hybrid of an older short film by director Caroline Catz (who portrays Derbyshire) that has been expanded with a swath of talking heads footage (David Vorhaus, Peter Zinovieff, Madelon Hooykaas, and, most notably for Doctor Who nerds, Brian Hodgson) and a separate thread tracing Throbbing Gristle alumn Cosey Fanni Tutti’s creation of the film’s soundtrack via manipulation of the eponymous legendary tapes—a collection of 267 found in Derbyshire’s attic following her death in 2001 and subsequently housed at the John Ryland library in Manchester. The result is strange, surreal, and ghostlike, which is to say utterly appropriate for a study of Derbyshire.
Catz’s Derbyshire is a sort of frustrated visionary, seeking only, as she explains in her job interview for the Radiophonic Workshop, to “create sounds that have never existed in the world before.” Which, of course, she did, and spectacularly, most obviously with Doctor Who theme, which the film devotes a sizeable chunk of time to. It starts from Ron Grainer’s scant account of the tune—the film depicts it as a hastily scribbled score and a set of adjectives like “wind bubbles” and directions that it should sound “familiar but different,” and be comparable to the well-funded twenty piece French ensemble Les Structures Sonores. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to be clear, is a bunch of low paid weirdos in a basement with a bunch of aging radio equipment. Derbyshire volunteers for this plainly nightmarish job, and, of course, absolutely crushes it.
But what the film does a remarkable job of highlighting is the scale of how she accomplished this, creating individual pieces of tape for each of the notes she wants to use, at times calculating both the setting for her oscillator to produce the note she wants and the amount of tape needed for the duration. Most strikingly, we see the act of its recording, which requires Derbyshire and an assistant (listed in the credits as “Radiophonic Workshop technician,” but presumably meant to be Dick Mills) to simultaneously run four separate reels of tape so that their component parts all synchronize correctly. “This will work,” she says of her preposterous contraption, and of course it does.
What stands out here is the physicality of it—the literal chunks of magnetic tape. There’s a historical moment when the Doctor Who theme is not yet a piece of music that has ever been played or listened to, even though the four strips of spliced together tape that collectively contain the recording exist. There’s an uncanniness to this—a sense that these, more than the unexpected attic archive, are the real legendary tapes, imbued with genuinely totemic power.
This obviously isn’t how anything works anymore. Segun Akinola—whose take on the Doctor Who theme is one of the few bits of the Chibnall era to broadly acquit itself—worked from the original sounds of Derbyshire’s version, but fundamentally, Akinola just loaded nth generation copies of Derbyshire’s tracks into a DAW and started applying software effects to them. He proceeded to add samples of drum sounds he recorded, but there too it was a matter of feeding the samples into a computer and building a software instrument out of it. Nowhere in the process is there some artifact that shimmers with aura, as Benjamin would have it. There’s just folders full of files with names like “Series 13 Theme Final Version C Revised with Filter Sweep ACTUALLY FINAL THIS TIME” or whatever.
I’m not saying this out of some atavistic notion of analog supremacism. There are obvious advantages to being able to, as Akinola did, simply pitch-shift one of Derbyshire’s bass tones down an additional octave with a couple of mouse clicks—a job that would have required Derbyshire to go and re-engineer the actual tone or adjust the tape playback speed. Likewise, when the resulting sound was thin and unsatisfying because all the mid-range tones dropped out, Akinola could easily add dry signal from the original back in, run some equalization on the two versions, and round it out with a synth tone. Derbyshire couldn’t come close to this, and certainly not trivially. The range of possibility has dramatically expanded.
But that’s a double-edged sword, at least in terms of Derbyshire. Or, perhaps more accurately, a zero-edged sword, because the thing that’s been lost here is that very frontier to which Derbyshire was drawn. One doesn’t need to fetishize 1960s audio equipment to appreciate the fact that it was a period in which the space of possibility was in constant flux. You don’t even need to look at the experimental fringe of music to see that. The year before Derbyshire created the Doctor Who theme the effect pedal was invented, sparking a rush of new sonic possibilities around the guitar; for all that Jimi Hendrix was a technical master of his instrument, his most influential moments came not from how he played the instrument, but from successfully identifying the things that could be achieved with newly developed equipment like an octaver or a wah pedal. Similarly, the lighting strike radicalness of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” doesn’t just come from Ringo playing what’s basically a proto-breakbeat, but from the band embracing a paradigm shift in which recorded music became not an effort to capture a live performance but an effort to sculpt something within a studio—a move that made heavy use of the same sorts of tape loops Derbyshire was working with.
It wasn’t by any means easy to engage in this sort of innovation—these are enormously talented and creative people we’re talking about. But the combination of creatively talented people and an unstable notion of the possible allowed for a sizzling boldness that simply does not exist in a world in which virtually any form of sound manipulation one might want is not only possible but easily accomplished with consumer-grade equipment. That’s not to say that modern music sucks. It’s just that it exists in a context of refinement and variation, as opposed to one of transformative innovation. As, frankly, do most creative fields. Film and visual art and theater aren’t exactly brimming with paradigm shifts either, and they haven’t been for decades. There’s little place in the modern creative landscape for a Delia Derbyshire.
This isn’t just a matter of technological determinism either. The reasons the contemporary landscape is inhospitable to the likes of Delia Derbyshire are many. The Radiophonic Workshop was, at the end of the day, a product of the post-War British tendency to value and, more to the point, fund hobbyist tinkering. And it’s part of the same landscape as the British Arts Council, the Art Lab culture from which people like David Bowie and Alan Moore sprung, and for that matter the basic fact of the welfare state and free tuition to arts colleges. For that matter, it’s part of a world in which entry level positions in the arts with living wages exist in the first place, where media consolidation hadn’t yet created a business model based around funnelling all the money up to the C-suite, and where consumers had not yet been trained into thinking reflexive brand loyalty constituted an aesthetic. All of these are things that render the world of 2021 a place where expanding the notion of the possible feels quixotic instead of enticing.
Then again, as Catz’s film makes clear, the 1960s were no peach either. The film does not avoid dealing with her alcoholism, which is most commonly cited as the reason for her music career’s eventual disintegration. But it largely rejects this interpretation in substance—certainly it declines to depict things like her Radiophonic Workshop colleagues’ brief attempt at an intervention. In the closing moments, Catz provides in-character commentary on her own obituary, reading out the claim that she was a “hopeless alcoholic” before remarking, “actually, I was a rather successful alcoholic,” and flatly rejecting the idea that she “left the BBC a disillusioned woman.” This does not appear to be an actual obituary, but rather a summary of the Mail on Sunday’s typically sensitive one, which opened “Her body wrecked by alcoholism, her good looks all but obliterated, Delia Derbyshire slipped almost unnoticed from coma to death in a Northamptonshire hospital1,” and which contains all of the claims Catz has her reject such as her supposed collaboration with Jimi Hendrix (“I glimpsed Jimi once”) and her propensity for wearing Mary Quant (“What, on my wages?”). Tragically, the film declines to address the obituary’s claim of a near-miss threesome with Yoko Ono.
Catz prefers a more pragmatic account of Derbyshire’s departure from the BBC. Throughout the film, she depicts Derbyshire chafing endlessly at the hard realities of living out on the frontier of possibility, and by her own isolation on that frontier. Over and over throughout the film she tires of collaborators and projects. She talks about her propensity for “reverse adrenaline,” in which she simply runs out of interest in projects when it comes time for the deadline. Her interest is purely in that edge, and in pushing it. And this is, plainly, exhausting. More telling, however, is precisely what Catz depicts her as reacting against, which was largely the rise of synthesizers and the computers that would soon diminish the realm of the impossible, “Are the sounds interesting enough,” she sniffs at an early attempt at using computers for music. “These sounds have nothing to them,” she scoffs at an early synthesizer.
This was, of course, not a permanent state of affairs, and late in life she experimented with computer-generated music, but it remains striking that she was so viscerally averse to the technology even as she remained vocally and adamantly forward-looking. And yet there is an inescapable sense that the problem was simply that when she looked at this future she could so plainly see its diminishment. Frankly, when all the future has to offer is 2021, who’d want it?
1. A fun fact, if only to a somewhat narrow audience that is almost perfectly coextensive with my readership, is that Derbyshire spent the last two decades of her life in the Semilong district of Northampon, just across Grafton Street from Alan Moore’s beloved Spring Boroughs, where she lived the next street over from Melinda Gebbie. Derbyshire’s social life, alas, appears to have been largely confined to music friends she spoke to on the phone, and there’s no evidence she ever met Gebbie or Moore, who likewise makes no mention of her in any of his exegeses of the city. All the same, she plainly fits the character of the place, and, given her bisexuality, can safely be assumed to have fucked Lucia Joyce in an escapade unrecorded within Jerusalem.
Paul Fisher Cockburn
October 7, 2024 @ 5:35 am
“… it exists in a context of refinement and variation, as opposed to one of transformative innovation.” That seems to be the way of things, whether you’re talking recording technologies or mobile phones. (I mean, compare the hardware differences between iPhones 15 and 16 with those between earlier smartphones and the original iPhone.) it just seems to happen more quickly these days.
Paul Fisher Cockburn
October 7, 2024 @ 5:47 am
Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to see a play about Delia Derbyshire, “Standing Wave”, performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow (and on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the following year, I think). Though largely biographical, it understandably didn’t take a linear approach to her narrative, looping to and from the publicly recognisable “hook” of the Doctor Who theme to explore her personality, sometimes slowing down scenes or cutting them up. Whether it’s fair to call her “the missing link between the highbrow world of Stockhausen and the underground pop psychedelia of early Pink Floyd,” I’m no sure, but I do remember a very thought-provoking evening.
More details here: https://wikidelia.net/wiki/Music_for_the_years_of_the_BBC_time_lords
Ross
October 7, 2024 @ 8:34 am
Every once in a while, I stop and find it remarkable how early the people working in film took an interest in the things you could do with film that couldn’t be done in other media. It took until the 60s for musicians to seriously get interested in how recording studios and technology could produce recorded music that was something other than just trying to capture a live performance (Or at least, until that sort of thing became mainstream; I don’t mean to imply that no one ever did that sort of thing), and television likewise took until what, the 90s? to stop primarily being oriented around beaming stageplays and vaudeville into houses (and even then, when TV started migrating en masse to doing something you couldn’t really do in other media, it was mostly “What if movies could be ten hours long?”). But movies doing things you couldn’t do on stage didn’t just start early, it was “respectable” early. It nailed “Let’s make the audience think they’re going to get run over by a train” before the turn of the century.
(Went to a high school production of “Murder on the Orient Express” over the weekend, which is a complicated plot to ask teenagers to perform while putting on a variety of outrageous european accents. It did have a cool special effect when Poirot uses a spirit lamp to reconstruct the burned note, revealing that the killer had written “Press F11 To Exit Full-Screen”)
3rd new ear's dreem
October 7, 2024 @ 12:42 pm
a Derbyshire Ono Joyce threesome is an AO3 just waiting to happen.
Coral Nulla
October 9, 2024 @ 12:09 pm
In my head only there is a version of Doctor Who where the theme tune is produced by SOPHIE rather than Murray Gold… But this piece might be the best summary of what it’s like to be an artist right now. The most cohesive expression of our era that we seem to have is to express all eras at once, hopping between periods and aesthetics as easily as a hyperlink, but it leaves the strange feeling that culture (as a realm with places left to explore) has ended and any attempts to make art are only attempts at reviving some piece of history, a sort of creative archival work. Recent Doctor Who reminds me of recent Sparks albums, curating snippets of past styles into an eclectic compilation, refined and updated but unable to commit to a whole new format. We can still go off and do things with tapes, but we will only be doing so looking backwards rather than forwards.
But possibly this impression is the whole problem – it’s not as if Season 1 (1963-1964) wasn’t just as much a grab-bag of contemporary genres even if it was also literally inventing the concept of adding Doctor Who to them. We also live in a time where Originality and Creativity are pervasively promoted as the key defining traits of people who are allowed to make money. Apparently it wasn’t Rosa Parks’ (or whoever’s) involvement in political organising that made her important, it was her bravery, free spirit, and of course her commitment to serving as a plot device! So maybe we just have to be realistic, and fight for better arts funding… I don’t know. But it’s something I know I’m struggling with a lot: is there anything new left to say, or should the role of an artist now be to emphasise the best bits until everything actually changes?
Dave
October 10, 2024 @ 11:00 am
I’ll be honest, I don’t even think the theme tune aquits itself well in the Chibnall era. While I like it more than many of Murray Gold’s versions, Gold does at least DO something with it. This means while I subjectively think Gold’s current theme and the Capaldi and Smith ones are worse than Akinola’s, they are much less interesting. Akinola’s is a straightforward cover, but with percussion.
What’s worse is that, being a straightforward cover, it is the theme tune of a mysterious, edgy, dark series that tonally the series goes nowhere near. A cheery bombastic Gold theme would suit the thirteenth Doctor’s era much better, whereas as it stands it just sounds weird and off-kilter. Like that leaked version of Rose where Derbyshire’s version plays.
Camaveron
October 13, 2024 @ 9:47 am
Don’t have much to comment but this is one of my favourite TE essays ever
Przemek
October 15, 2024 @ 4:55 pm
Nothing to add but a “thank you” for this great essay on Derbyshire and creativity.
Nicole
October 22, 2024 @ 9:44 am
I guess for this reason I will tip my needle for “i’m gonna do visual arts” and “i’ll go do architecture” over to the latter a little more. At least I won’t starve or be homeless, and those are really tough positions to be in. I don’t have the support to recover from that.