Fleapit revisited:Delia Derbyshire:The Myths and the Legendary Tapes.

"I'd like to create sounds that have never existed in the world before" - Delia Derbyshire

"Essential truth and beauty through music. Let the pattern of mathematics be my roadmap to fulfillment" - Delia Derbyshire

Delia Derbyshire:The Myths and The Legendary Tapes (BBC4/iPlayer, part of the Arena strand but classed as a 'film' so earning its place under my Fleapit revisited remit) brought together so many of my key interests and threads of my writing that it could not fail to impress me. Music, Brutalist architecture, mathematics, abstract art, deviation from accepted ideas, conspiracy theory mindsets, inequality in society, and a deeply felt connection to the natural world.

It was an utter delight from start to finish. Directed by Caroline Catz, who also starred as Derbyshire, it worked as a documentary, a feature film, and a piece of conceptual art and, quite remarkably, didn't suffer for trying to be many different things at one time. Beautifully shot, with great period details, there were scenes that were reminiscent of horror movies like Suspiria, Berberian Sound Studio, and Repulsion but there were other moments in which talking heads from Derbyshire's life (Peter Zinovieff, Brian Hodgson, David Vorhaus, and Madelon Hooykaas) simply sat on chairs in their gardens, or in studios, and spoke fondly of the Delia Derbyshire they knew.

Adjectives such as sparkly, wonderful, curious, talented, and fascinating were in abundance as her friends recalled the young woman who was born in Coventry in 1937 and, retrospectively, was first turned on by music when hearing the abstracted sounds of air raid sirens during the bombing of her home city during World War II.

But we start at the end. Delia Derbyshire died on 3rd July 2001 (aged 64) in Northampton. On clearing out her house, a 'treasure trove' of electric music was found in the attic. Her lost works. Over two hundred and fifty tapes packed away in cereal boxes. These have been sampled and manipulated by former Throbbing Gristle member Cosey Fanni Tutti to create a beautiful, yet eerie, soundtrack to the film.

Cosey's involvement doesn't stop there. We see her dragging her keys along the gates of Coventry's bombed cathedral and talking of how she hopes that her and Derbyshire can use their music to create "a point of contact across the dimensions".

You can't help thinking that Derbyshire would have approved. We see the young Derbyshire (played by Honor-Ray Caplan-Figgs, Catz's daughter) listening, sometimes with a gas mask on, to Erik Satie and the BBC's early attempts at experimental sound radio in her bedroom. We see archive footage of the real Derbyshire playing with sine waves in a studio full of audio generators, reel to reel tapes, dials, and monitors.

Her desire had been to combine music and mathematics (two disciplines she saw as inextricably intertwined) to bring joy and clarity to the world and, possibly, to make sense of her life. But that wasn't an easy sell in the fifties and sixties for anyone. For a woman, it was nigh on impossible. Even a woman who had studied at Cambridge, said things like "tickled pink", and cited Pythagorean theorems in job interviews.

Only to be told, by a proper old school chauvinistic cigar chomping executive at Decca, that there was a policy in place in which women could not be employed in the recording studio. Though there was a job going, should she be interested, as a secretary.

Eventually, she finds herself at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A place, like her home town of Coventry, that had gained a reputation as somewhere you were sent as some kind of punishment. But Derbyshire wanted to be there and it was there that she fostered working relationships with the thespy beatnik Brian Hodgson (Julian Rhind-Tutt), the musician and producer Maddalena Fagandini (Saskia Reeves), and a slightly cooler one with the starchier, and more senior, Desmond Bruce (Richard Glover).

Preferring to work nights so she can concentrate free from distraction, Derbyshire is tasked with creating a score for a drama about a "time travelling doctor". Composer Ron Grainer had put together an idea for a tune but the makers of Doctor Who wanted somebody to make that tune sound "familiar but different".

The results, of course, are legendary and though I knew that Derbyshire was not credited as co-writer of the Doctor Who theme tune until after she died (and thus never received a penny in royalties for it) I was unaware that Grainer himself had requested she be given a 50% cut. This was denied because, back then, sound technicians and tape manipulators were not seen as musicians. In fact, "the m word" was unofficially verboten in the studios of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Perhaps that's why, as the hippy movement of the sixties gathered steam and even infiltrated the fusty old BBC, Derbyshire started to take her music, in collaborations with Zinovieff and David Vorhaus (Tom Meeten, the shepherd from Motherland), to live environments. In 1966 her first show took place in, of all places, Newbury's Watermill Theatre and imagined footage suggests a set up, and sound, not too different to the one Kraftwerk would eventually adopt.

The shows are advertised as 'raves' and though they're hardly Tribal Gathering or Gatecrasher, footage towards the end of the film shows just how dancefloor ready some of Derbyshire's music was. Little touches like this, along with scenes of bees and spiders and talk of fractals, ferns, and coastlines and the mathematical music that underpins nature, only further add charm to an already delightful story.

But not one without some darkness. We hear of Derbyshire's addiction to snuff and her penchant for wine as well as her tendency towards depression (though, at one point, Derbyshire returns to rather amusingly edit what she sees as a woefully inaccurate obituary). The warm and articulate Derbyshire who spoke knowledgeably about the 16c/17c English philosopher Francis Bacon, the nomadic Tuareg people of the Sahara desert, and her forebear Daphne Oram is served well by a film that is not shy of approaching lofty concepts of gateways between lives, residual music in concrete, and the sort of people who demand that a score sounds like a 'gothic altarpiece'.

As Derbyshire, Catz gives respect to feminist icons like Ada Lovelace and Virginia Woolf and she laughs about once seeing Jimi Hendrix and the day Brian Jones, in his frilly cuffs, visited the studio in a state of chemical imbalance. But, most of all, Catz gives respect to Derbyshire herself.

In a film that is not a docudrama but does combine elements of documentary and drama and at times is far more theatrical than it is cinematic, Derbyshire comes across like a chess grandmaster. A grandmaster of sound. She wasn't one move ahead of the game. She was so many moves ahead of the game that to some it appeared she was playing a different game entirely.

She wasn't. She was just playing it at a different level. Delia Derbyshire:The Myths and the Legendary Tapes was, like the woman herself according to those who knew her, wonderful, curious, and fascinating. Let the pattern of her mathematics be the roadmap to your fulfillment.