G
iven its dedication to the advancement of sound, it’s ironic that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop took its cue from a piece of literature dating back centuries. On the wall of Room 13 at BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, its nerve centre of operations, hung a framed segment of Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, an unfinished novel written in 1624.
“We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation,” it began, before offering a vision that promised “instruments of music likewise to you unknown” and “diverse tremblings and warblings of sounds”. Rediscovered by Daphne Oram when she co-founded the Workshop in 1958, the text was adopted as an operative manifesto by everyone who worked there.
Over the next 40 years, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop served as a nexus of experimental sound design, creating a vast and unique library of work that took electronica, musique concrète and tape manipulation into the outer reaches. The TV and radio shows for which they composed included Dr Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Quatermass And The Pit, The Hobbit, Chronicle, Horizon and Tomorrow’s World. There was also a huge range of commissions for schools and educational programmes.
This was cutting-edge daring, a secret group of technicians creating future sounds from banks of oscillators, tone generators, synthesisers and their own raw ingenuity.
“It was like being paid to have fun,” explains Paddy Kingsland, who joined in 1970. “The guy who ran the Workshop, Desmond Briscoe, gave us the freedom to do things with enough time and no awful pressure. Of course, he wanted to make sure that something good came out at the other end, so he wasn’t an easy touch. But we were getting results and he’d back you up. It was a marvellous working environment.”
As a measure of their influence on the populist music world, it’s instructive to note that Paul McCartney was a major fan, once visiting the Workshop’s most celebrated member – Delia Derbyshire, pioneering arranger of the Dr Who theme – to ask for an electronic backing for Yesterday.
Derbyshire was also on hand when Pink Floyd visited the studio in October 1967. Noting their interest in electronic music, she directed Floyd to Peter Zinovieff, her colleague in avant-garde group Unit Delta Plus, who in turn introduced them to the VCS3 synthesiser. The latter would become a key feature of The Dark Side Of The Moon, while Floyd sampled Derbyshire on One Of These Days.
“When I first started at the Workshop, there was Delia, John Baker, Brian Hodgson and David Cain,” Kingsland recalls. “They were working mainly with tapes then.
John Baker, for instance, was doing jazzy tunes for Tomorrow’s World and those sorts of things, where he was a virtuoso at cutting up bits of tape in order to make a tune from something, like a bottle being uncorked. He was a wonderful musician, able to make that sound like real music rather than something mechanical.
“And Delia was using tape for textural and atmospheric pieces, and had a very sensitive handling of it. She was an eccentric. Delia took snuff, for instance, which was quite dramatic. She’d been highly educated at
Cambridge, studying music, but at the same time she was trialand-erroring as well. She seemed “They didn’t want a DJ talking, so they put all the records down onto a multitrack tape and then invited various guests to come in and busk links between the end of one track with the beginning of the next. I’d be there with my VCS3, a guitar or any old bits of gear, and Brian Eno used to come in and do them as a freelancer. Manfred Mann did it too, as did
Bob Downes, who was a great jazz player. These amazing people would arrive and just busk.”
Among those who’ve acknowledged a debt to the Workshop are Mike Oldfield, Portishead, The Orb, Four Tet, Orbital, Hot Chip and Aphex Twin. And it’s a legacy that still endures. Similarly durable is the Workshop itself. When the BBC shut down the department in March 1998, a victim of Director General John Birt’s policy of closing down all services that weren’t cost-efficient, its days seemed over. But, minus the ‘BBC’ prefix, Radiophonic Workshop are once again a going concern.