Selected Radiophonic Works on Radio 4 Extra

There was a treat for fans of the Radiophonic Workshop on Radio 4 extra last Saturday evening, with 3 hours of programming based around their output. It was presented by Richard Coles, a former keyboard player and singer with The Communards who made an interesting post-pop career move of taking up the cloth (he is a C of E vicar, the Rev.Richard Coles), and, as far as his ecclesiastical duties allow, is an irregular but always welcome commentator on and presenter of arts programmes. As a sort of prelude, Stuart Maconie played John Baker’s Codename as the opening track on his Radio 6 Friday night programme The Freakier Zone. It’s Baker’s theme for a 1969 BBC spy adventure serial, and can be found on the first of the two excellent volumes of The John Baker Tapes released on Trunk Records a couple of years ago. It’s typical of his style, its springy melody riding effortlessly on infectiously sprightly rhythms, the source sounds (usually of humble, everyday origin) edited together with immaculate precision.

Baroque portal - the entrance to the Maida Vale studio, home of the Radiophonic Workshop

The Radio 4 extra celebration presented several archive programmes featuring the Workshop’s music and sound design, beginning with a 1971 documentary, Electric Tunesmiths. This was made at a pivotal moment in the Workshop’s history, with fundamental changes in production methods occurring. Principally, this was due to the arrival of synthesisers, and in particular to the installation of the mammoth EMS Synthi 100 in April 1971, nicknamed the Delaware after the road in which the Maida Vale studios, where the Radiophonic Workshop was based, were situated. Incidentally, the studios are still there, as I discovered when, with an hour or two to spare before my train was due to leave Paddington Station, I took a walk to Delaware Road via Little Venice and the Regents Canal. There is still the same jarring disparity between the baroque, white-icing façade and the utilitarian, hangar-like roof which slopes up behind it. It displays an architectural split-personality similar to that evident (on a larger scale) in St Pancras Station, with its dark Victorian neo-gothic spires and towers masking the busy, modern railway interchange beyond and below. The Maida Vale studio really does look like a building which houses a busy workshop behind a fancy façade, although before the BBC moved in during the 1930s it had in fact been London’s finest Edwardian roller skating rink. You can see a picture of it on the back of Volume 1 of the John Baker Tapes, or in its 60s state (little different from the present, actually) in the Masters of Sound documentary on the Radiophonic Workshop included in the extras of the Doctor Who dvd Edge of Destruction (the follow up to the very first serial An Unearthly Child).

It’s marvellous to be able to hear extracts from Delia Derbyshire’s piece IEE, written on the Delaware to mark the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. It demonstrates her analytical approach to music, drawing on her mathematical background (she studied maths at Cambridge), her own interest in engineering matters, and her philosophical belief in a Pythagorean order to the universe, and to the structure of sound. She translated the letters IEE into morse code, with syncopating dots in between, and produced melodic material by treating IEE100 as musical notation and code. The I became a B, and the 100 a C in Roman numerical form. It’s a very modernist way to go about things, somewhere between the chance compositions of John Cage, such as Atlas Eclipticalis, created by the superimposition of musical staves over a star chart, and the fixed serialist systems of Pierre Boulez and early Stockhausen – compositional calculus. The result of Derbyshire’s codified musical transpostitions, intended to convey the ‘simplicity and loneliness’ of a man walking on the moon, is hauntingly, melancholically atmospheric. It’s not a million miles away from her earlier, tape-created piece Blue Veils and Golden Sands, showing that a strongly defined musical personality could bridge the new technological divide. The piece was one of those presented at the IEE100 Radiophonic concert in the Royal Festival Hall on 19th May 1971, with the Queen present to hear it. Desmond Briscoe sent out a memo to Workshop members before the concert, suggesting they tone down the challenging and adventurous qualities of electronic music in their contributions. Ironically, given both Derbyshire’s technological facility, Daphne Oram’s tireless efforts to initially establish the Workshop in the late 50s, and the significant number of women composers who worked within it, Briscoe’s reasoning for such timidity is couched in the most cringingly patronising and obsequious terms. He wrote that ‘the calibre of the audience is such that while there is a natural interest in music, electronics and the arts, the social nature of the event and the presence of the ladies requires that the programme is non-technical, entertaining, aesthetically pleasing and as visually interesting as possible’. This kind of attitude was increasingly prevalent beyond the immediate demands of the concert performance, and was immensely frustrating to both Derbyshire and John Baker. Indeed, Briscoe can be heard in the programme taking in his authoritative managerial voice about the need for the Workshop composers (or ‘producers’) to subsume their personal artistic aims in order to provide for the requirements of the programme at hand. Something of independent artistic value might be produced, but only incidentally. Art can in some cases disguise art, as he puts it.

John Baker joining and splicing

The abandonment of time-consuming tape-based composition which had been the predominant means of production in the 60s resulted in a demand for increased output. Derbyshire and Baker, both perfectionists with a proprietory pride in their work, were used to being allowed to work to a great extent at their own pace and in their own time. This necessary in the context of the labour-intensive work of splicing, editing and re-recording countless, often tiny lengths of tape. Synthesisers theoretically allowed for a more instantaneous creation of the desired sound, and with a keyboard attached, the means to mould it directly into musical forms. But actually getting the machine to produce the sound you wanted was often a long and exasperating process, and subsequently reproducing it an imprecise art. Both Derbyshire and Baker, whilst they were fully capable of using the Delaware and the other Workshop synths to original musical ends, found this nascent technology more limited in scope than the concrete and more home-made electronic sounds they had become used to. It was simply incapable of realising the sounds in their heads.

In Louis Niebur’s book on the Radiophonic Workshop Special Sound, he relates Brian Hodgson’s tale of Derbyshire’s inability or reluctance to finish her IEE piece on time. As she was still working on it the night before the performance, he got Workshop engineer and later composer Richard Yeoman-Clarke to run off an extra copy of her ‘final version’, knowing that she was unlikely to let her work go out in what she considered an incomplete or imperfect form. The following morning, he discovered that she had destroyed her tape, and Hodgson used his copy, together with sound clips garnered from the BBC archives, to present an impressionistic history of electronic communications spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Thomas Edison, through opening and closing broadcasts from the BBC studio at Savoy Hill (leased out to them by IEE between 1923 and 1932), and culminating in the launch of the Apollo 11 rocket and the messages from the moon delivered by Neil Armstrong. With a hint at lingering exasperation at having to resort to such subterfuge on behalf of his friend and close musical collaborator (they would continue to work together outside the Workshop in Unit Delta Plus and the Electrophon studio), Hodgson told Niebur ‘somebody had to produce something, the fucking queen was going to be there, for Christ’s sake, in the Festival Hall! It wasn’t brilliant, but it was there, it sounded loud, and if it’s loud it sounds impressive’. Indeed, its loudness is commented on in Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell’s book The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years, in which they write that ‘the powerful punch of Delia’s take-off threatened the very fabric of the Festival Hall’, no doubt rattling Her Majesty’s jewellery at the same time. The EMS Synthi 100 which took centre stage, and which was played by Desmond Briscoe, wasn’t the fabled Delaware but a model lent by its creator Peter Zinovieff. Getting the gargantuan beast into the Radiophonic Workshop studio had involved enough Laurel and Hardyesque rigmarole, and they weren’t in any hurry to shift it again.

John Baker searches for the right sound

Delia Derbyshire and John Baker, such central figures in the ‘golden age’, or glowpot days as they are described in Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell’s history, of the Radiophonic Workshop, didn’t stay on much beyond 1971, the year in which Electric Tunesmiths was broadcast. Derbyshire left in 1973, and more or less stopped producing music shortly thereafter. The programme also features the gently-spoken voice of John Baker, who guides us through his methods of creating a short piece from an initial sound recorded on tape, a means of production which was already largely redundant by this time. His piece New Worlds is played without, for once, reference to Newsround as the rise and fall of its final punctuating, percussive cadence had yet to become indelibly associated with the John Craven-helmed children’s news programme. Delia Derbyshire’s realisation of the Doctor Who theme is often cited as the piece which brought experimental electronic music to the masses. A similar claim could be made for John Baker’s many and varied short but vital and joyfully inventive themes and local radio call-signs. They were little bursts of playful musique concrete which introduced electronic music to many households on a daily basis, without listeners even really noticing that they were enjoying such new and experimental sounds. The PM theme, Radio Nottingham station call-sign or the intro to Woman’s Hour would probably still be instantly recognisable to many on an instinctual level. The Woman’s Hour theme is here picked apart into its simple component sounds: a cork being pulled out and liquid poured from a bottle. Baker was descending into a slough of depression and heavy drinking as he entered the 70s, and was unable to cope with the pressures of studio demand. He would deliberately try to avoid the attentions of Desmond Briscoe, who had effectively abandoned his own music-making career to manage the Workshop, a source of frustration for him too. As Brian Hodgson, who was also to leave the Workshop in 1972 to open his own Electrophon studios, puts it in Niebur’s book, ‘the strain of the Workshop and Desmond became a great bogeyman at some point in the 1960s. He (Briscoe) was seen as an obstacle rather than anything else’. Richard Anthony Baker paints an affectionate but unflinchingly honest and deeply moving portrait of John, his brother, in the sleevenotes to The John Baker Tapes Volume 1, describing him as ‘my hero’. He notes that he was already in a bad way when their mother, Vi, died in 1971. They had been very close, and it was a devastating blow. Baker left the Radiophonic Workshop in 1974, sacked according to his brother, and subsequently never made music in public again. If Baker and Derbyshire are anything to go by, the Workshop could be an emotionally and creatively exhausting environment, which was unforgiving towards more sensitive or unconventional souls. The 1971 documentary acts restrospectively as something of an elegy to the ‘golden age’ of the Radiophonic Workshop, and it’s difficult to listen to it without a sense of sadness at times and people passed and gone.

Delia at the controls

More from this golden era comes in the form of the Inventions for Radio programme Dreams, produced in 1964. This was a collaboration between Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange, a marriage of words and sound of the sort that had been a specialty of the Workshop since its inception in 1958. Indeed, a major impetus behind its creation had been Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play All That Fall, which was written with a particular sound world in mind. That world was recreated by Desmond Briscoe from concrete sources, and anticipated the Workshop’s key role in coming up with sounds for dramatic productions. For Dreams, Bermange recorded a number of people relating their dream experiences, and then edited them into a structured collage of voices, with repetitions and thematic passages giving it a musical form. Five general areas and recurrent themes provide ‘movements’: running, falling, land, sea and colour. The tone is dark, with repeated references to pursuit, drowning, disorientation, unspecified or half-defined dread, and death. Derbyshire provides a suitably ominous backdrop of low-pitched, humming atmosphere, summoning up the emotional inner landscapes recollected through the obscuring mist of waking consciousness by the participants. Her subtly modulated, undulating electronic drones are reminiscent of those which would be produced by the French composer Eliane Radigue some years later, initially on tape and then on her trusty ARP 2500 synthesiser.

Fourth Dimension - Radiophonic pop from Paddy Kingsland

The 1971 documentary also looks forward to the future, with Richard Yeoman-Clarke demonstrating the sound range of the Workshop’s EMS synthesisers, from the pure sine wave tone to the undifferentiated hiss of white noise, and then showing how they could be added to or subtracted from to produce all manner of different tones and effects. Paddy Kingsland showed the more conventional rock or pop context into which synthesisers could be incorporated with a piece he was composing for the Schools Department’s USA 72 programme, which ended up on his Fourth Dimension Radiophonic Workshop LP. The synths are here used mainly to provide the melody, over a guitar, bass and drums backing which Kingsland had recorded in another of the Maida Vale studios. Dick Mills, who had been at the Workshop since 1958, initially as an engineer, was introduced as the resident ‘comic composer’, a somewhat belittling categorisation based on his enduring miniature of apocalyptic gastric eruption Major Bloodnok’s Stomach. His sound design for Don Juan’s descent into hell, also featured, made it clear that he was capable of more than mere tomfoolery (impressive though his efforts in that direction undoubtedly were). The potential for comic sound effects were thoroughly explored by Spike Milligan, a regular visitor to the Workshop studios. The Goon Show episode The Scarlet Capsule is included here, a take-off of Quatermass and the Pit, whose music was originally created by Desmond Briscoe. The Workshop is thus left effectively parodying itself.

In the loop - Dick Mills keeps an eye on the spooling sounds

Relativity, from 1975, is another blend of sounds and words, a piece of ‘lingual’ sound poetry written by Lily Greenham in collaboration with Workshop composer Peter Howell. Language is the musical material here, with words looped and layered to bring out their inherent sound qualities. The basis of Greenham’s linguistic sound blocks is Einstein’s theory of relativity, and specifically his E=MC2 equation. Words are repeated, overlaid and stretched in a manner which recalls Steve Reich’s early tape pieces such as Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, without the element of phasing over time. It all ends with Richard Baker announcing that ‘the silence you have just heard was the velocity of light’. Peter Howell was also responsible for a later dramatic piece from 1983, Inferno Revisited, which was written in the form of a package tour around the circles of Dante’s Hell. Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell’s Workshop history, published in the same year, looks forward to this as being one of the ‘major radio events of 1983’. The sounds and music were all composed and edited together on the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, a top of the range example of the new digital synthesisers which the Workshop had bought (at not inconsiderable expense) in 1981. The hellish soundworld which Howells conjures up is impressive in its own brittle, glassy way. It sounds at some points like one of John Carpenter’s horror film soundtracks (particular when the keyboard is used to produce relatively conventional synth chords); at other times it is reminiscent of parts of Stockhausen’s Licht cycle of ‘operas’, which have a similar glinting digital sheen. It was produced by Brian Hodgson, who had by this time returned to the Workshop as its head, replacing Desmond Briscoe, who for all his sometimes fractious relationships with his staff had done so much to nurture and develop it since its initial creation. The Radio 4 extra overview was peppered through with samples of the Workshop’s work through the years, with snatches of Paddy Kingsland’s fantastic theme from The Changes to Delia Derbyshire’s eternal Blue Veils and Golden Sands, Desmond Briscoe’s terrifying sounds for Quatermass and the Pit and Dick Mills’ airy Dandelion Countdown to Malcolm Clarke’s charming electronic nursery song Bath Time. Finally, Richard Coles informed us that since the Workshop’s closure in 1998, Brian Hodgson had gone on to run a restaurant and Dick Mills had written a bestselling book on the care of tropical fish. An appropriate indication of the diversity and range of interests which made the Workshop such an inventive place, creating marvels with unconventional means and materials. Perhaps they sometimes wonder what marvellous sounds might be produced from the food or the fishes, and contemplate the Music for Restaurants or Fishtanks LPs they might one day produce.

The Freakier Zone Children's Music Special

What a wonderful edition of the Freakier Zone it was last Saturday. This is a Radio 6 show presented by Stuart Maconie which acts as a sort of supplement to the lengthier Freak Zone on Sunday’s (now from 8 til 10 in the evening), and often devotes much of its hour long span to a particular theme in the company of an enthusiastic guest. This week Stuart himself presented his selection of children’s music, however, and much of it evidently meant a great deal to him. He started off with a couple of pieces by the Radiophonic Workshop composer John Baker, Time and Tune and Boys and Girls, both of which appear on the ‘pink’ Radiophonic Workshop LP of 1968. Created from meticulous and painstaking tape splices, with found sounds used in a percussive manner, a string of sprightly blips and boings. These pieces both demonstrate Baker’s assured sense of light, springy rhythm, which partly derived from his love of jazz; Volume Two of the John Baker Tapes on Trunk Records features a couple of recordings of him playing airily swinging versions of All the Things You Are and Get Happy on the piano.

Next up were a couple of pieces from Vernon Elliott’s music for the Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin animated series Ivor the Engine and Pogle’s Wood, also released on Trunk Records. Elliott himself played the Bassoon and its low voice, alternately darkly mysterious, comically cheerful and melancholically reflective is at the heart of his compositions. Forming a trio together with the clarinet and piano, this is chamber music which, in its easy transition between different moods and bright melodicism, bears some resemblance to the kind of sound characteristic of the early twentieth century French composers grouped together by Jean Cocteau and known as Les Six: Georges Auric (who wrote the scores for Cocteau’s film La Belle et La Bete), Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey and Arthur Honegger. The North Sea Radio Orchestra played their own arrangement of a piece from Ivor the Engine in a Freak Zone session a while back, and have become champions of Elliott’s music, playing it in concerts too. Maconie expresses his love for Elliott’s music, describing it with unabashed emotion as gorgeous and delicious, and he’s absolutely right; It’s wonderful. Hopefully Mr Trunk will release Elliott’s music for Postgate and Firmin’s Noggin the Nog sometime in the future, which is a shade darker than the Ivor, Clangers and Pogles Wood soundtracks.



Philip Glass is a composer who I grew impatient with some time ago as he settled into a comfortable and utterly predictable style. But here was a piece from 1979 which was commissioned by the makers of Sesame Street to accompany a series of animations called The Geometry of Circles. It’s very much in the mould of Koyaanisqatski, with wordless, undulating vocals and swirling, spinning carousel organ. It’s the kind of thing which I imagine children would love, as it is itself full of childlike delight, and offers plentiful opportunities for twirling around until you feel dizzy and sick. Following on from this was Sidney Sager’s incredible music for Children of the Stones, long a favourite of mine. Stuart commented that it reminded him of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, and it certainly does have the air of the formless but approachable avant garde music of the 60s and 70s. George Crumb’s ritualistic music also springs to mind, as does Stockhausen’s vocal piece Stimmung. The programme’s producer apparently heard a piece by Penderecki whilst driving towards Avebury, the setting for the story, and asked Sager for something similar. He duly obliged. The combination of the music with the strange resonance of the ancient megalithic landscape made for an unforgettable viewing experience for any child growing up in the 70s. the unworldly vocals were produced by the Ambrosian Singers, a very diverse vocal group who were capable of acting as a chorus on operatic recordings, acting as backing singers on pop records, and doing work on soundtracks by the likes of Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone (they appear on his Chariots of Fire score). Sager was involved in a number of HTV children’s serials of the 70s, which often included an element of the fantastic. I’ve just finished watching The Clifton House Mystery, for which he was musical supervisor. His job there was mainly selecting the classical piano pieces which were used (the father in the story is a professional musician), but he does provide a naggingly insistent music box theme whose repetitions lodge in the mind, and which serve to summon one of the house’s restless spirits. His discordant theme for King of the Castle, in which the nursery rhyme in sung in a subtly unsettling off-key choral arrangement with gothic organ accompaniment, concluding with a tearing concrete crash, is also memorable. This children’s series was disturbing enough to rate a 12 certificate when it was released by Network on dvd.

More 70s music came in the form of the haunted music box swirl of the Picture Box theme, originally a piece by the French musicians of Structure Sonores (or is that Lasry-Bachet, I’m never quite sure) called Manege. They play the musical sculptures which they created to produce the resonant, metallic sounds – something of a cross between a steel band and a calliope. Like the Philip Glass piece, it’s music to circle around to in a swirling waltz, although its bewitching quality suggests it might be difficult to stop, particularly when the tune takes that downward turn into a tumbling, fragmented minor key ostinato. This was followed with immaculate thematic programming by Donovan’s Picture Book from his HMS Donovan LP, a gentle children’s song sung in his mellowest style. The Stark Reality were a 70s American group who fused jazz, rock, soul, funk and anything else which caught their attention. They recorded an LP of Hoagy Carmichael’s children’s songs, which he’d written late in his life, which was released in 1970 as The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop. According to the album cover, the music was taken from a WGBG classroom TV series. If so, those must have been some interesting lessons. Junkman’s Song is a wild piece of driving soul, with raw r&b tenor sax, which has a touch of Albert Ayler about its rough-burred edges, percussive electric piano and fuzzed up lead guitar. It all ends in an extended collision of free jazz or rock noise worthy of Sonic Youth or Peter Brotzmann. As Stuart comments, what child wouldn’t like that – noisy chaos in the classroom. More American TV fare comes in the form of the late 60s/early 70s show featuring large puppets HR Pufnstuf. Jack Wild, who had played the Artful Dodger in both the stage and film versions of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver, sings the title song, a bright and cheerful piece of sunshine pop which conjures up the rainbow poster and album cover art of the period. This was followed up by Thomas Moore’s strange therapeutic singalong ditty I Get Mad from his album The Family, which seems to be about how to endure getting hit by everyone you come across in life without responding with a whirlwind of violent, fist-flying rage.



Carl Orff’s Schulwerk, or Musica Poetica as it became known in its recorded version, was a great favourite of the group Broadcast. It’s a five volume collection of short pieces written to be played by groups of children, and designed to include an inbuilt but not overly didactive instructional element. This was akin to Paul Hindemith’s concept of Gebrauchmusik (utility music), which was intended for adaptable use by non-professional performing groups, thus connecting the role of the composer with wider world beyond the concert hall. Orff’s Schulwerk was designed to introduce children to music making at an early age, and to develop their musical sense and instincts in an intuitive way, guiding them towards finding their own voice. The loose spacious structure and rhythmic nature of the pieces allowed for a significant degree of improvisatory exploration. There was definitely no place for the classical composer’s ego, the imposition of authorial control in this music. Such an approach would have entirely undermined the whole philosophy of what is above all a flexible learning programme. The simplicity resulting from Orff’s writing for children gives the music a spare and spacious quality of clarity and purity, and makes it instinctively affecting. The title Musica Poetica refers to a form of musical instruction book prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries. Orff’s educational music, much of it written in collaboration with Gunild Keetman, has an air of antiquity about it, similar to that which underpinned his ubiquitous and much (over) recorded Carmina Burana suite. As Stuart pointed out, that work has been tainted through its co-option by the Nazis, not to mention by advertisers and bombastic film-makers (although it was quite effective in John Boorman’s Excalibur, accompanying the elderly knights riding out for the final battle beneath newly blossoming orchards). The Schulwerk maintains its aura of innocence, however. Its blend of tuned percussion (xylophones and glockenspiels), children’s chanting voices and groups of recorders evokes both the school and the medieval hall. The exploration of various modes beyond the usual tempered scales also draws the music back to a pre-classical age. The piece Stuart played, Gassenhauer (or Street Song), was played on a number of xylophones and other percussive instruments, with recorders coming in later. It is a set of variations on a lute piece written in 1536 by a composer called Hans Newidler. According to the notes in the booklet of my RCA Victor Red Seal version of the Schulwerk, ‘this piece shows the individual character of the subdominant, and in combination with the dominant demonstrates the relationships of the elementary form’. So there you go. I think that means the first, fourth and fifth chords. It was used to great effect, along with an arrangement of Eric Satie’s piece Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire (parts of the Schulwerk share a great affinity with some of Satie’s more tonally ambiguous music), in Terence Malick’s debut film of 1973, Badlands. It evokes the Eden of tainted innocence to which the young protagonists, played by Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, temporarily retreat.



In a neat xylophone segue, we then move onto a remarkable 1957 medley of lullabies sung by Julie Andrew (and Martin Harris) with accompaniments written by Moondog. It’s a collaboration about as unlikely as Captain Beefheart duetting with Cilla Black, or…well, come up with your own. Moondog gained a reputation as an ‘outsider’ artist, partly because of the period that he spent performing on the streets of New York. These arrangements show that he was far from being a ‘naïve’ composer, however, as he provides a professional yet charming and bright backdrop for the pure vocals of a pre-My Fair Lady, Sound of Music and Mary Poppins Julie Andrews, twinkling percussion evoking the starlight, starbright night of which she sings. Next were two pieces of library music which ended up being used in and indelibly associated with the eccentric children’s series Vision On, which ostensibly aimed at those with hearing difficulties, but was enjoyed by all. This featured the oddball likes of Wilf Lunn and Sylvester McCoy goofing around in a sometimes baffling manner whilst the wonderful Pat Keysell and Tony Hart got on with the sensible and arty stuff. Accroche-toi Caroline by Claude Vasori was one of several tracks taken from the de Wolfe library label and used on the show. It’s a crisp bit of vocal jazz in a post-Swingle Singers style, with a tinkling, swinging harpsichord solo in the middle which could have been lifted from an episode of the Avengers, and points to the mid-sixties fixation with the idea of elegant antiquity. Stuart eschewed Wayne Hill’s Left Bank Two, known to all as The Gallery music, as it would have been a little too obvious, marvellous though it undoubtedly is. Instead he played Merry Occarina by Pierre Arvay (also from de Wolfe), which combines the oval clay flute with a glockenspiel to create an amiably plodding tune which, as he observed, would be more familiar to people of a certain age as the Humphrey the Tortoise theme.



The Moomins was a Polish animated series created in the late 70s and early 80s which adapted Tove Jansson’s perennially popular tales of strange Nordic creatures, who seem to exist in a world untroubled by human interference. The theme tune, played here, was composed by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill and combines the synth sounds of the period with light, piping folk flutes to charming effect. It all ends with The Residents, with a track from their 1978 Nursery Rhyme EP, a disturbing enough concept in itself. This can now be found on the Duck Stab/Buster and Glen release. This song was a kind of farmer’s mix, mangling Old McDonald Had a Farm, Baa Baa Blacksheep and Mary Had a Little Lamb in a ground and processed blend of treated voices. It was music from an experimental factory farm secretly breeding nightmarish mutant hybrids. Goodnight children, everywhere. Sweet dreams.