Delia Derbyshire invented dance music
Sunday, July 20th, 2008The woman who brought you classics like her realisation of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme also seemed to have hit on the IDM thing about 40 years before everyone else.
I always blamed the relative absence of women in electronic music on nerds (and internet pornography) but there may be an alternative theory. It seems that the music-concrete experimenting, pocket-book of logarithms toting, Vidal Sassoon hairstyle rocking and eventually just plain hard-drinking awesomeness that was Ms. Derbyshire left the electronic music scene at the advent of synthesisers because she thought they were kind of like cheating.
How many others have we lost from the cause by not being nerdy enough? We may never know.
Anyway, this is the track that has been floating around on Matrixsynth and Create Digital Music. It’s is pretty special when you realise it was done in the 60s and that Delia didn’t even think it was that impressive.