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Last summer I threw out a lot of my old cassette tapes as part of a big clear out, but amongst those that I kept was a recording of "Blue Veils and Golden Sands" - a BBC 4 radio play broadcast in 2002 about Delia Derbyshire, considered by many to be "the unsung heroine of British electronic music" due to her work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s. She's probably most famous for producing the original arrangement of the Doctor Who theme music.
I kept the tape aside to listen to, before promptly forgetting all about it. In the meantime references to Delia kept popping up, most memorably in an article by Warren Ellis called "The Pops and Crackles of Vinyl Poltergeists" in Wired UK. In it Ellis talks about "hauntology" - a contemporary musical phenomenon which frequently references the often eerie 70's and 80's electronica produced by the Radiophonic Workshop. (As he suggests, tracks on Belbury Poly's relatively recent album "From An Ancient Star" sound like they could have accompanied "The Tomorrow People" or "Blakes 7", thirty years or so earlier.)
A couple of months ago the tape turned up again as part of another clear up, and this time I finally listened to it one Sunday afternoon. It focuses mainly on Delia's time with the BBC and her interest in "abstract sound" (in part perhaps inspired by the air raid sirens she heard as a child during the war), before she became disillusioned with the direction of electronic music in the mid-70's. This is cross-cut with episodes from her later life in the 1990's when a new generation of musicians (including Peter Kember, AKA Sonic Boom, played by himself here) rekindled her enthusiasm to return to music.
Given its 30 minute running time it's evitable that the play had to leave out a lot of detail about Delia's life and many of the projects that she was involved in, especially those outside of the BBC. However the dramatisation of how she put together the Doctor Who theme is fascinating - in an era before synthesisers, the process of creating these "electronic" sounds was simultaneously highly organic, extremely primitive and labour-intensive. Very ordinary sounds (for example plucking a guitar string or striking a metal lampshade) would be transformed by esoteric analogue equipment to produce other-worldly effects which were then spliced and looped on sections of tape.
To me the original Doctor Who theme still sounds incredible: haunting and slightly disturbing, like the universe that the Doctor himself inhabits. You can listen to it on the BBC website ("Lost tapes of the Dr Who composer"), alongside a number of other audio clips of Delia's work, including a couple from "Blue Veils and Golden Sands", produced for a documentary about the Tuareg people of the Sahara (the demo clip in particular gives some insight into how sounds would be transformed). Many more audio clips (including "Music of Spheres", which features a symphony of sirens) can be found - along with much more information on Delia's life and career (both of which sadly ended when she died in 2001) - at www.delia-derbyshire.org.
It looks like the play has been repeated on BBC 7 quite a few times over the last couple of years, but unfortunately it's not currently available on the iPlayer. It's definitely worth a listen if you have an interest at all in the history of electronic music, or are just a fan of the old Doctor Who theme, and want to learn more about the work of this amazing pioneer.
The most controversial part of Riefenstahl's life however was her involvement with Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s and 40s. She famously made a film of the 1934 Nazi party congress ("Triumph of the Will") and continued to work during the war. She later claimed ignorance of the Nazi atrocities, and was determined to be a "fellow traveller" rather than a Nazi activist by post-war tribunals, but her film career was effectively finished after the war and she was vilified as "Hitler's film-maker" for the rest of her life.
The film is principally based around interviews with Riefenstahl (aged around 90 at the time) by the director Ray Mueller as he talks to her about these various episodes of her life. It's fascinating to see how in spite of her age her mind was still very active - especially when she is arguing with Mueller and his crew about how to shoot a particular sequence, recalling the technical details of shooting her films in the 30s, or reviewing underwater footage that she had shot earlier in the day. She seemed to light up when talking about editing machinery, film stock and camera angles - and in that regard she appears basically to have been what you might now call "a complete geek".
I think that the tight focus on Riefenstahl to some extent obscures the broader picture, though there is some attempt to contextualise the films with her life especially during the Nazi era (the account of her life after the war is disappointingly vague). To his credit Mueller does ask some direct questions about her past, but I felt like the documentary as a whole shied away from really challenging the view that she puts forward. The picture that emerged for me was of someone who wanted desperately and above all else to make her films, and didn't want to engage with the reality of her times. This self-delusion is the most troubling part of her story (and is elaborated on in an excellent review at Bright Lights Film Journal).
What is clear though is that she was a truly gifted and innovative film maker, pioneering techniques (for example the use of cranes and tracking shots) that have since become commonplace. One of the joys of "Wonderful Horrible Life..." is having the opportunity to see the beautiful footage that she shot (some of it previously unseen), and based on this the comparisons with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock don't seem inappropriate (all the more impressive for a woman working in a male industry). Ultimately though her involvement with the Nazis - whatever the truth of it - is likely to always colour the perception of her life and work: wonderful horrible life indeed.
She pretty much disappeared from the public eye after the 1950s, while at the same time the popularity of her pictures has soared. This has had the curious effect of freezing her image in time, so even though she died at the age of 85, she still remains the iconic young and playfully seductive pin-up. I think that part of her appeal is summed up in the quote from a retrospective article from Reuters: "Bettie Page embodied the stereotypical wholesomeness of the Fifties and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface."
The news of her passing can be read in lots of different places (including the BBC, where I took the picture from), however I think that one of the fullest tributes is the obituary at http://www.bettiepage.com/ - well worth reading if you're interested in knowing more about the life and times of "the notorious Bettie Page".
