Joe Theobald, aka DJ Captain Wormhole, Looks at all things vinyl 

EVER wondered what a Venusian space lab sounds like? Probably not.

You’ve probably never even given over a fleeting moment in quiet contemplation to consider the effect of a Gravity generator’s whirring oscillations on the inner cochlea.

Fortunately not everyone is so wrapped up in their humdrum work-a-day lives to overlook these important questions.

Desmond Briscoe was appointed Senior Studio Manager for the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. Composed of musically literate mathematicians and eccentrics, the workshop was the Beeb’s crack sound-effects department.

Pioneers of noise manipulation, including Daphne Oram, John Baker and the Queen of weird reverberation, Delia Derbyshire, were let loose on miles of magnetic tape and electronic boxes with technical names and loads of knobs (Synthesisers were but a twinkle in the eye of Dr Robert Moog in the late 50s).

The team’s principle role was to render strange alien sound effects for radio and television, and they used found sounds to create different musical textures.

Derbyshire, the genius responsible for the Doctor Who intro music, had a treasured metal lampshade she liked to hit with a wooden stick and record. Dick Mills, who was with the workshop from day one, described the working attitude as thus; “We didn’t know what we couldn’t do”.

These days producers for radio, television and film have access to huge libraries of stock sound effects and recordings but back in the 1960s and 70s the Radiophonic Workshop was leading the field in the creation of abstract soundscapes.

Were it not for those brave innovators working out of Room 13 Maida Vale Studios we wouldn’t have the music of Kraftwerk, and by extension modern electronic dance music.

British taxpayers in the 1950s subsidised the musical genesis of Acid-House and Rave culture... and all because traditional orchestras didn’t have the stones to pull off a Sonic screwdriver’s transdimensional whirr. If I’ve wet your whistle then look online for the 2004 BBC documentary, The Alchemists of Sound.

Next week: Brewskis & Beats