Sunday, 16th May 2021 at 11:09 am
When she died in 2001, “Delia Who?” seemed a reasonable question. The obituaries described her as a forgotten pioneer, a “lost genius of British electronic music”. She was the woman who had used valve oscillators and magnetic tape to conjure the eerie howls of the Doctor Who theme, and made avant-garde electronica part of everyday life. But Delia Derbyshire’s name had never once appeared on the programme’s credits.
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There was a note of agony in her story, too. A Catholic girl from Coventry, she’d become an audio radical by detecting an experimental soundscape in the roar of the Blitz. She’d studied maths at Cambridge, been rejected by Decca Records on the grounds that women were not employed in recording studios, then found a home in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a dark suite of rooms at the end of a corridor in London’s Maida Vale. She’d flourished there, crafting hymns for robot revolutionaries and raising a shimmering desert by giving alchemical treatment to the clang of a metal lampshade.