The BBC Years
The Geek Room
“This book really doesn’t disappoint. Highly recommended!”
40 Years with the Radiophonic Workshop
In the Studio and On the Road
Radiophonic Times
Radiophonic Concerts
Early Years
Latest Music
Everything is in one place at last. You’ll find music composed at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as well as music composed recently for the Radiophonic Band. There is a section on the early years, featuring comments and links to the H&F Recordings five album series that has been so successful on the collectors’ market, as well as the first opportunity to hear music from the five shows produced by Whizz Theatre Company during the same period.
In the Latest Music section, you’ll find details and links to all my recent compositions, including the studio versions of numbers that we play on tour with the band. Lastly, The Geek Room is a place to wallow in the technology, with articles on anything too geeky to include elsewhere!
The Blog
There is also a Blog section. Extracts from two of the posts are below.
Whine into Water
La Gomera is one of the smaller Canary Islands, and less easy to access. You get a plane to Tenerife and then the Fred Olsen car ferry to the island itself. It was on the return trip that I made the recording.
To allow the cars access to the belly of the ship, a large metal ramp was lowered from the boat and was resting on the metal runners of the jetty. The sea wasn’t rough but there was a swell and the wave motion caused the ramp to move to and fro. It was probably no more than a foot or two, but it was enough to let out a metal squeal. Metal on metal is often an unpleasant sound, but this was different. By some coincidence of angle, grease, sea water and whatever else, we were all treated to a series of harmonic arpeggios, as if someone was bowing the metal strings of a gigantic violin. I managed to capture a minute or so on my phone; and that was the start of what would become the four and half minute piece, ‘Aqua’.
Something in the Wire
Ideas can have strange beginnings.
I taught on the music and sound courses at the National Film and Television School after leaving the BBC. For one project, students were asked to form groups and come up with original ideas for new audio productions. One sound design student, had just moved into a new flat, and was intrigued and somewhat unnerved by a mysterious noise that kept attracting her attention. She wondered whether it was a guy revving a motorbike in the basement, but every time she went to investigate, the sound had stopped. There was no motorbike. In fact, there was no one there at all. She teamed up with a couple of other students, and decided to make an audio piece featuring their relentless efforts to track down this elusive noise.
We are all pre-programmed to identify anything that might threaten us, and there was something about that piece that addressed a much darker level of the subconscious. Perhaps there was something here that would act as inspiration for a new composition?