Bleep

Delia Derbyshire’s path to electronic music godhead status was a circuitous one at best. Denied entry points into the music industry despite a degree from Cambridge, Derbyshire toiled first as a music teacher at the UN in Geneva and then at BBC as a studio manager before migrating to the Radiophonic Workshop. It was there that she composed the original electronic score for Doctor Who (a massive building block for pop music in general) only to not be credited for another 50 years, her legacy destined to be a mere footnote. The 2021’s experimental film/documentary ‘Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes’ hoped to tell her tale properly and pull her obscurity while taking liberties about the conventions of time and space.

Among Derbyshire’s many modern admirers is Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti. A similarly-minded iconoclast, Tutti was the perfect fit to score a film that meant to inform and rightfully stake claim for women’s advances in the avant-garde and provoke audiences by unconventional means in equal measure. Fanni Tutti recorded hours of sonic experiments and fragments inspired both the film and Derbyshire’s legacy/audio archive in general, with only a fraction of it actually used by director/star Caroline Catz in the film itself. Now collected together for the very first time are all (or at least most) of the sounds Tutti composed via her own Conspiracy International imprint. While a functional piece of incidental music in its own right, the Original Soundtrack Recordings from the film ‘Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes’ is also an homage to its central character. A clever amalgamation of Derbyshire and Tutti’s house styles, these recordings are among Tutti’s finest works.