Delia Derbyshire was an English musician and composer of electronic music. She carried out notable work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s. She approached the careers office at the university and told them she was interested in “sound, music and acoustics, to which they recommended a career in either deaf aids or depth sounding”. Then she applied for a position at Decca Records, only to be told that the company did not employ women in their recording studios. From January to April 1960 taught general subjects in a primary school there. Then she went to London, where from May to October she was an assistant in the promotion department of music publishers Boosey & Hawkes.
In November 1960, she joined the BBC as a trainee assistant studio manager and worked on Record Review, a magazine programme where critics reviewed classical music recordings. She said: “Some people thought I had a kind of second sight. One of the music critics would say, ‘I don’t know where it is, but it’s where the trombones come in’, and I’d hold it up to the light and see the trombones and put the needle down exactly where it was. And they thought it was magic.” She then heard about the Radiophonic Workshop and decided that was where she wanted to work. This news was received with some puzzlement by the heads in Central Programme Operation because people were usually “assigned” to the Radiophonic Workshop. But in April 1962, she was assigned there in Maida Vale, where for eleven years she would create music and sound for almost 200 radio and television programmes.
In August 1962, she assisted composer Luciano Berio at a two-week summer school at Dartington Hall, for which she borrowed several dozen items of BBC equipment. One of her first works, and most widely known, was her 1963 electronic realisation of a score by Ron Grainer for the theme of the Doctor Who series, one of the first television themes to be created and produced entirely with electronics. When Grainer heard it, he was so amazed by her arrangement of his theme that he asked: “Did I really write this?”, to which Derbyshire replied: “Most of it”. Grainer attempted to credit her as co-composer, but was prevented by the BBC bureaucracy because they preferred that members of the workshop remain anonymous. She was not credited on-screen for her work until Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor Derbyshire’s original arrangement served as the Doctor Who main theme for its first seventeen series, from 1963 to 1980. Delia also composed music for other BBC programmes, including Blue Veils and Golden Sands and The Delian Mode. The Doctor Who story Inferno reused some of Derbyshire’s music originally composed for other productions.
In 1966 while working at the BBC, Derbyshire, fellow Radiophonic Workshop member Brian Hodgson and EMS founder Peter Zinovieff set up Unit Delta Plus, an organisation which they intended to use to create and promote electronic music. Based in a studio in Zinovieff’s townhouse in Putney, they exhibited their music at experimental and electronic music festivals, including the 1966 The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, at which The Beatles’ “Carnival of Light” had its only public performance.
In the late 1960s she again partnered with Hodgson to set up the Kaleidophon studio in Camden Town with fellow electronic musician David Vorhaus. The studio produced electronic music for London theatre productions, and in 1968 the three produced their first album there as the band White Noise. Their debut, An Electric Storm, is considered an influential album in the development of electronic music. The trio, under pseudonyms, contributed to the Standard Music Library. Many of these recordings, including compositions by Derbyshire using the name “Li De la Russe” (from an anagram of the letters in “Delia” and a reference to her auburn hair) were used on the 1970s ITV science fiction rivals to Doctor Who: The Tomorrow People and Timeslip.
In 1967, Derbyshire provided sound design alongside Guy Woolfenden’s score for Peter Hall’s production of Macbeth with the RSC. The two composers also contributed the music to Hall’s film Work is a Four-Letter Word (1968). Her other work during this period included taking part in a performance of electronic music at The Roundhouse, which also featured work by Paul McCartney, the score for an ICI-sponsored student fashion show and the sounds for Antony Roland’s award-winning film of Pamela Bone’s photography, entitled Circle of Light. She composed a score for Yoko Ono’s short film Wrapping Event, but no copy of the film with the soundtrack is known to exist. In 1973, Derbyshire left the BBC and worked briefly at Hodgson’s Electrophon studio, where she contributed to the soundtrack to the film The Legend of Hell House. In 1975, she stopped producing music. Her final works included two soundtracks for video artists Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield on their short films Een Van Die Dagen (“One Of These Days”) in 1973 and Overbruggen (“About Bridges”) in 1975.
