Have you had the experience of opening a new piece of software only to find that using it seems like visiting an alien planet? The designers have joyfully put a brand new slant on something you were already familiar with. You are tempted to close it down and stick with the old version.
I imagine that this is how Delia felt in 1970, when a system she had helped to build suddenly looked like being drastically changed. All those tape recorders you see in the early Workshop films were mono. The hookups were relatively simple, but stereo seemed more complicated, although the record industry had been making stereo recordings for years. Synthesisers were poking their heads round the door, accompanied by young and enthusiastic new people. Delia was not naturally a ‘management type’, or she could have climbed the BBC ladder with ease. But she was an artist and essentially a soloist. She needed a bit of technical help, but when ‘set up’ was free to roam in an electronic wonderland. In the new age the technology side of things looked as if it was in danger of taking over.
If she had been less vulnerable at that stage in her life, Delia would have coped and re-triumphed. But the combination of a chaotic personal life and change in the workplace was too much at the time.
She was often said to have worked out everything before starting in the studio, but when I worked with her, Delia was great at busking it, experimenting and exploiting those ‘happy accidents’. Adept at playing the machinery, if not hooking it up, and brilliant at moulding the sounds into something with extra magic. In jazz terms, it ‘felt good’.
In his lectures Desmond often said:
‘With electronic music it’s easy to create tension or suspense. Or to be sinister. Or funny with silly noises. But it’s not easy to be beautiful.’
It has been done though, for example Blue Veils and Golden Sands by Delia, Veils and Mirrors by Glynis Jones, and much of Elizabeth Parker’s work on The Living Planet. Peter Howell’s Greenwich Chorus from The Body In Question is also, I think, a beautiful piece. We played it live at gigs in the recent reincarnation of the Workshop. It seemed fragile, and I think that quality connects with the listener. Roger Limb’s more recent Incubus has a similar effect.
And simplicity is another gift. Most of us are guilty of putting in too much in an effort to impress – ‘It’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out’. The director of the TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Alan Bell, called me very late as I was struggling with a deadline and said: ‘I need a bit of music to go with the Vogon scene. Can you do it? About 3 minutes? By tomorrow?’ After an initial panic – no pun intended – I did a very sparse single-line tune with echos, in one take, busked without thought.
He later said that this was his favourite bit of music from the series. Oh…
Not the ‘Heart of Gold’ sequence? Not ‘Share and Enjoy’? Not any of the narrations with graphics, all of which had taken ages? Now I’m not claiming that that piece was beautiful, but it did convey a simple bleakness, which I think was the result of being forced into autopilot and sharing what I was feeling at the time. Even though electronic music is more artificially created than performed music, it can still come from the heart. And when it does, I believe that it gets through to the listener in a way we don’t understand, but is truly magical.
None of us realised the effect our music would have on the young people watching TV in the 70s and 80s. But now, in our 70s doing gigs, we see those children, now grown up, with genuine affection for the work we thought would be forgotten in a week. Of course, our part is just one element of a TV or Radio show. The total effect of story, acting, set, lights, music and so on makes the impact. Our work played a supporting role and I for one am proud to have played my part in that.
©Paddy Kingsland 2021