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LISTEN
'Tomorrow Never Knows' - the Beatles (1966)
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I believe that the recording device is currently the best instrument of the composer who really wants to create by ear and for the ear.
Pierre Henry1
You never forget your first time at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios. The building was sold in 2023, but when it belonged to the Beeb, those security doors swung open to reveal a long corridor that led to an endless tangle of offices and studios. You could pull back one door and find the vast Central Hall, with a BBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsal in full swing. Men with rubber boots and carabiners attached to their belt loops snoozed in stairwells between night shifts. There were empty offices with bureaucrat-grey carpet tiles, chipboard walls and piles of old typewriters, abandoned decades before. Elsewhere in the building, production staff with clipboards shouted to each other across rooms and recording desks. The delicious acoustic in every space bounced sound between wood-panelled screens: oak swallowing up voices, violins, the tapping of stopwatches, the scratching of pens and the sliding of microphone faders. Production here may have been slowly winding down by the time I joined the organisation in 2003, but the walls still hummed with the building's history: the wartime news reports, the legendary live sessions with Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Bing Crosby, David Bowie, Dusty Springfield and Nirvana. Maida Vale, like Doctor Who's Tardis, was unremarkable on the outside and cavernous and complex on the inside. As in Alice's Wonderland, behind every curtain, at the bottom of every stairwell and at the end of every passageway lay a muddle of antiquated processes and a confusion of characters and cultures. This place was the very essence of British eccentricity, encapsulating the quirkiness that characterises our nation - a quirkiness that the BBC has affirmed, amplified and broadcast back to us since its very first transmissions in 1922.
In 1958, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was established at Maida Vale in (the now mythical) Room 13, under the watch of composer and engineer Daphne Oram and her fellow composer Desmond Briscoe. Their remit was to provide theme tunes, incidental music and effects for a new wave of radio dramas and documentaries that were being produced by the organisation. In 2023, the year of researching this book, the only living original member of the workshop is Dick Mills, who was born in 1936. We speak on a video call, and I ask Mills how, in this age of austerity, the Workshop secured funding for explorations into new and esoteric forms of composition and sound production methods. 'It came about', he tells me, 'because producers had been borrowing small tape machines from studios, taking them down the pub at lunch and not putting them back afterwards.' These were producers wishing to experiment with technology, outside of office hours. 'And so', Mills continues, 'the BBC comes up with the technical equivalent of "get a room", and banishes them to this madhouse in Maida Vale, with all the junk equipment they could wish for or get their hands on, and where they can continue their sound manipulation away from everyday studio broadcasting.'
The manipulation that he refers to here is the production of electronic sound and musical effects, a process in its infancy during the late 1950s and early '60s, as radio producers found equipment that had been developed during the First and Second World Wars and put it to new creative uses. This was a phenomenon of the era: recording devices and playback machines that had evolved quickly under pressure from wartime propagandists were repurposed for music and drama production at institutions like the BBC and other broadcasting corporations across Europe.
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At the beginning of the 1940s, while Allied reporters on battlefields around the world were making their news reports on shellac-coated discs, the Germans - with their great history of engineering excellence and an efficacious Nazi propaganda machine - gained technological ground thanks to the invention of a much more portable broadcasting tool: the Magnetophon. This was one of the first recording machines to use magnetic tape, and its sound quality was so pristine that it was difficult to tell recorded and live sound apart. Hitler is known to have used a Magnetophon to fake a live broadcast from one city when, in fact, he was hiding in another.
The Allied Intelligence Bureau was aware of the Germans' superior recording system, but gained access to the technology only when working models of the Magnetophon were discovered in Frankfurt during the 1945 invasion of Germany. After British servicemen brought the machine home with them, the EMI company copied the German design to create the British Tape Recorder 1, or BTR/1. This was later modified to become the BTR/2, many of which remained in service at the BBC until the 1970s. Miniature valves made it possible for EMI's later recorder, the TR/90, to fit into a rack or mobile trolley for even easier use and, in the hallowed Maida Vale Room 13, Radiophonic Workshop engineers got to work with these gadgets to change the face of British sound production.
Dick Mills tells me that the transfer from 78 rpm discs to magnetic tape was the start of the radio industry's radical rewiring, and happened, initially, because vinyl discs were limited in their playback options. Any producer wishing to add a sonic backdrop to a radio drama would have to hop between turntables to keep the soundscape playing continuously while the action unfolded - 'to keep the blasted wind blowing on the blasted heath', as Mills puts it. This meant 'a lot of work for some poor devil, who's got to gallop up and down between turntables, keeping all the sound effects going'. Studio engineers realised they could use the tape to record and loop much longer sequences of sound effects to prevent this 'galloping' around, and the tape machine became a substitute for vinyl discs. While the engineers figured out how these new machines worked, they stumbled across all kinds of novel ways to create new effects, as Mills reveals:
If you leave the machine faded up while you're recording onto it, you get this howlround sort of feedback for instance. The director says, 'Oh, that's good!' And he says to the engineers, 'Remember that scene where they're thinking aloud and we need the listener to know what they're thinking, but it's not part of the action? If we feed their voice through that tape machine and give it a ghostly sort of effect, it sounds like your thought processes.' So the tape machine is now becoming a tool of manipulation.
The tape machine allowed the quality of a recorded sound to be changed much more easily, with engineers now able to play sounds backwards or at many altered tempos. Spooling noises or reverberation could be added, and the human voice could be sped up to indicate a leap between time zones or slowed right down so that every frequency was augmented to terrifying and spectral effect. Contrasting fragments of tape could be spliced and glued together to make new and unusual blends of sound. Technology was making the impossible seem possible, and unleashed the imaginations of drama producers and musical soundtrack composers, inspiring them to make work that both reflected and fed into popular preoccupations of the time: space travel, the supernatural and the subconscious. 'As soon as this tape revolution came in,' Mills remembers, 'if you were a dramatic author, a playwright and a soundtrack composer, you suddenly realised you could write things for radio of an out-of-this-world nature.' He refers to the surreal 1958 BBC radio drama series Under the Loofah Tree, the narrative of which centred around a man taking a bath. 'While he's in the bath, he daydreams,' Mills recalls.
And he has all these wild adventures until, right at the end, there's a banging on the door and his wife says, 'What are you doing in there?' And he says, 'Just washing!' even though he's had this epic internal flight of fancy. The ability to provide spectacular ambience and to reflect various mental states or different locations became much more possible with the increased ability to adapt sound.
It was experimental dramatic productions such as this, lustrous with the sonic escapades of the Workshop, that helped the tape machine become a mainspring of electronic music. Its hiss, bump, wow and flutter were soon essential to the soundtracks and themes composed by Workshop engineers.
Their most famous musical export is the electronic reimagining of Ron Grainer's score for the TV series Doctor Who, produced by Delia Derbyshire, who was assisted by Dick Mills. In 1963, Grainer gave Derbyshire and Mills a single sheet of...
