Delia Derbyshire and the Doctor
I saw a documentary at MIFF on the weekend called The Delian Mode.
It was about Delia Derbyshire (great name), who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s. Delia was a mathematician and musician, incredibly talented, innovative and eccentric. She’s best known for creating the Doctor Who theme music. When composer Ron Grainer first heard Delia’s version, he asked “did I really write this?”. Delia replied, “most of it.” She had spunk.
No computers. No synthesisers. Every sound painstakingly recorded to tape, then sped up or slowed down, cut, spliced on to a line of tape hundreds of meters long. Multiple sounds combined, not with a multitrack, but by simultaneously pressing “play” on 8 different tape-players and hoping they stayed in sync.
Delia was a visionary, a scientist and an artist. One of her early pieces of work could easily be played in a nightclub and pass as trance music – but it was created 30 years before trance developed.
She was certainly eccentric – she drank too much and lived a peculiar, isolated life (she was a hoarder, and said that when her house got too messy she just moved) until her first marriage in 1974.
The documentary featured interviews with electronic musicians Peter Kember (Sonic Boom) and Adrian Utley (Portishead), who said that because of the ambient soundscapes created by the BBC in the 60s and 70s, listeners were primed for electronic music. It was something they’d grown up with, as ordinary and commonplace as listening to BBC radio on a Sunday afternoon.
Delia died in 2001, age 64. She was incredibly excited about the new possibilities of electronic music and computers, and was still working on new projects. She hated all subsequent Doctor Who themes, regarding hers as the very best. I’ll let you be the judge of that:
The original gets the nostalgia vote, and it stands up well after 40+ years. I think the Christopher Eccleston one is the best of the updates, and the first Jon Pertwee and the movie one tie for being the worst.
The first one is brilliant, but I find all of them work. It’s just a great tune.
Ah, 2010. I so heart Matt Smith.
That first Jon Pertwee one is a bit misleading, since it was an experimental rearrangement which only appeared on one episode (‘Carnival of Monsters’, episode three, I think).
The blue vortex title sequence (the one that was introduced for Pertwee’s final season and was modified for the Tom Baker era) is so iconic, particularly the logo. I wonder who came up with that logo? It’s very strange.
I have a soft spot for the Peter Howell version of the theme that was used for Tom Baker’s final season and all of the Peter Davison run. A pretty gutsy reimagining, even if it sounds a little 80s now. And I like the starfield title sequence that goes with it. (Also helps that that is my personal favourite era of the show!)
The Dominic Glynn (late Colin Baker) and Keff McCulloch arrangements (McCoy) are pretty horrible, and the McGann one is fairly anodyne.
Love both of Murray Gold’s arrangements for the new series. (I say both, but actually there were slight variations in the arrangements for each of the Tennant seasons.)
But when it comes down to it, Delia Derbyshire’s original arrangement trumps them all, just by being so unusual and inspired. (I just like the fact that the BBC had something called a Radiophonic Workshop. We could all do with a radiophonic workshop, I feel.)
[...] Lili Wilkinson blogged about Delia Derbyshire and the Doctor last year, and that’s a good inroduction to [...]