Sounds of future past

>> Kara Blake celebrates the work of the woman who made the music for Doctor Who

DRAWN TO DERBYSHIRE: Blake

by MATTHEW HAYS

For Kara Blake, the beginnings of her documentary project came about when she first watched an old episode of Doctor Who. As a child, she recalls catching the landmark British ’60s series on TV. “I was so freaked out by that musical score,” Blake recalls. “I had to stop watching it, I was so scared.”

As an adult, Blake, who has directed music videos for the Besnard Lakes, the World Provider and Lederhosen Lucil, would look further into what made that score, composed by Ron Grainer, so utterly and unforgettably creepy. She would learn that the eerie, edgy pitch was part of the groundbreaking style of a BBC technician, Delia Derbyshire, who was a pre-techno-music pioneer.

As Blake found through her research, the Doctor Who effect came through meticulous attention to technical detail. “In an era before synthesizers, the composers at the BBC Workshop relied on recording actual live sounds and pure electronic tones generated by equalizers and oscillators to create their compositions. For the Doctor Who track, Derbyshire created each sound by hand—manually adjusting the pitch of an oscillator to obtain a ‘swoosh’ or filtering white noise to get a hiss.” Blake doesn’t hold back in her admiration of Derbyshire: “The result was one of the most recognizable pieces of television music ever created.”

Blake’s investigation into the life of Derbyshire has resulted in a half-hour doc, The Delian Mode, which will premiere on the festival circuit this year. (The title comes from one of Derbyshire’s own works.) “I was very drawn to her process,” Blake explains. “She was incredibly cutting edge. She was always pushing the limits of the available technology. There was a dark undertone to much of her work.” Blake says Derbyshire often found unusual instruments to create sound. One was lifted from a lamp at the studio. “My most beautiful sound at the time was a tatty green BBC lampshade,” Derbyshire recalls in the doc. “It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it.”

Sadly, as is often the story with trailblazing geniuses, Derbyshire found her bosses at the bureaucracy-heavy BBC not very supportive. She would leave the Beeb in the ’70s, became a recluse for a couple of decades, dying of an alcohol-related illness in 2001. In her final years, she did experience something of a resurrection, working with musician Pete Kember of Sonic Boom on new music.

But with her contributions largely forgotten, Blake says it’s paramount to record Derbyshire’s considerable legacy. “She never really got the accolades that she deserved.”