On Delia Derbyshire

Today would have been Delia Derbyshire's 80th birthday.

The fact that, despite being one of the key figures in the development of electronic music, she didn't didn't live to see the impact she made, is both a tragedy and one of a defining characteristic of Derbyshire as a cultural phenomenon. 

It feels as though Derbyshire's impact is somehow bigger than music, touching on a subterranean fascination lurking beneath our culture, a fascination with the ways in which our technological present-day can help us avert oblivion.

With each passing day, the connection our lives have with the the internet means that the culture which is in some way lost or forgotten is more accessible to us. Everything from music and cinema through to things like gameshows, advertisement and TV continuity graphics, all have a second, ghostly life, their lost reality continuing to play out behind the screens of our devices, fuelling a nostalgia for a lost past.

At times, those lost pasts - dreamed up visions of the future which, we know from our vantage point in the present day - never came to be.

Derbyshire is best known, of course, for her performance and co-composition of the Doctor Who theme, created during her time at the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop where she worked for over a decade.

What I think is most interesting about her compositions is that, despite the icy, robotic appeal of electronic music, Derbyshire's have a tactile, physical quality. They frequently sound handmade because they are, with the music the listener hears, rather than being purely those of the electronic equipment she used, instead being those she worked to create, utilising oscillators, modulators, filters, tape recorders and home-made equipment.  This. I think, is why her music feels bigger, more seismic than it may sound as music. It's the sound of pure invention, with an artist operating in a world which has few antecedents, guided purely by a brief and their own creativity. A woman called Delia pulling sounds which had never existed before into the world as though from some alien portal.