Delia Derbyshire

The forgotten genius. Born in Coventry, England, in 1937, this is the lady responsible for the awesomely magical theme song of famous 60's-80's TV show, Dr. Who. She has had exploratory sessions with Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Yoko Ono, her songs have been covered tons of times and she's been credited and mentioned by many big artists, including Aphex Twin and The Chemical Brothers. It is safe to say that this misses is one of the true pioneers of electronic music.

Before joining the BBC in 1960, Derbyshire was rejected by Decca Records due to their policy of not hiring women. The guy who turned her down also rejected The Beatles. She became part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the early 60's. After more than 10 years of successfully producing and recording countless songs, tv themes and sound effects, she stopped recording music and left the BBC in '73 - apparently because she was worried about the future of electronic music, due to what was being released at the time. She returned for some collaborations with Sonic Boom (who btw is coming to Boston) in the late 90's, before passing away while working on an album in 2001.

After she died, people discovered hundreds of unreleased recordings in her attic that she had made over the last 35 years. Considering alot of them were created in the 60's, some really were quite a while ahead of their time. One of them kind of sounds like Bjork to me.
Check out this article with some of those tracks.


Here's a clip of her in action.


I'll leave you with a cool little documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. You'll be able to hear what inspired Aphex Twin with much of his music.