Adventure Rocketship!
Edited by
Jonathan Wright
Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco
This edition published May 2013
by Adventure Rocketship!, Trowbridge, England.
ISBN 978-1-908039-21-7
Copyright Adventure Rocketship! and its authors
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written in a newspaper or magazine or broadcast on television, radio or on the internet.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Paper edition first published by Tangent Books,
Unit 5.16 Paintworks, Arnos Vale, Bristol, BS4 3EH
Tel: 0117 972 0645
www.tangentbooks.co.uk
This edition published by Wizard’s Tower Press
Trowbridge, England
http://wizardstowerpress.com/
For Gary Rickard
Contents
Editor’s Introduction
Time to Come Back: Delia Derbyshire, Electronic Music Pioneer
New Worlds Fair: Michael Moorcock, Musician
Mick Farren: Still Raging Against the Machine
Clockwork Angels: Rush and Kevin J Anderson
Bill Nelson: Jets at Dawn
But What Does George Clinton’s Mothership Mean?
Roots And Antennae, Tongues And Flight: Boney M Aboard The Black Star Liner
Music for a Concrete Island: JG Ballard and the Prefabrication of Post-Punk
Ladyhawke: Reclaiming a Soundtrack from its Historical Moment
Martin Millar: Urban Pioneer
The Orb: Behind the Ultraworld
King Rat Revisited: Talking Trash With China Miéville
Digital Distribution in an Analogue World: MP3 Markets in Nouakchott, Mauritania
How Long ’Til Black Future Month? The Toxins of Speculative Fiction, and the Antidote that is Janelle Monáe
Phonogram: Sublimated Emotion
Starmen
Between the Notes
Blues for Ahab
Musicians
Flight Path Estate
One Door Closes and then Another Door Closes
Possible Futures: 20 Mind-Expanding Ways to Start Your SF Album Collection
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Introduction
Welcome aboard the first-ever flight of Adventure Rocketship! Mixing short stories, interviews and essays, it’s a new anthology series that’s steeped in speculative fiction and geek culture. Each edition is themed, with this opening offering – Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco – devoted to the intersection between SF, music and the counterculture.
Why choose this subject? At least in part, it’s down to Jarvis Cocker. Sometime last millennium when I was scraping a living as a music journalist, I received a Pulp press release bemoaning – and what follows is from unreliable memory, but it’s the spirit that counts – life not turning out more like Space: 1999. By which I don’t think Sheffield’s finest were calling for the Moon to be torn from Earth’s orbit, it was more to do with disappointment over the lack of silver suits, domestic robots and flying cars in late 20th-century Britain.
I connected strongly with this sense of longing for a future denied (an idea that recurs in the articles here, incidentally). Having been raised on Doctor Who, I clearly wasn’t alone in taking inspiration from SF even if, ridiculously worried about appearing naff and nerdy, this wasn’t something I would lightly have admitted.
I’d love to say this was a revelatory moment, that I immediately began researching and writing about the ways in which SF and music play off each other. In truth, I might never have had any further thoughts whatsoever about all of this, except that as the years went by I (rather accidentally and fortuitously) moved into writing about science fiction, primarily for SFX magazine.
At first glance, the worlds of music and SF couldn’t be more different, especially when it comes to their audiences. Music fans – and forgive the generalisations here – prefer a studied nonchalance. Within SF, people are far more open about their enthusiasms. Except, get past the surface details, the Tom Baker scarf vs cool band t-shirt subculture markers, and the behaviour of these branches of fandom really isn’t so different. Both communities are full of knowledgeable and funny people passionately engaged with their subjects – geeks.
It was in seeing these parallels within fandom, I think, that Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco started to fall into place. If I was fascinated by the worlds of both SF and music, surely other people were too? And wouldn’t there be strong connections between these worlds? Seen in this light, what follows is just a long-winded way of saying yes to both questions.
So, welcome again to Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco. The essays and interviews are arranged roughly chronologically to give a sense of how music and speculative fiction have played off each other down the years, but dip in where you will. In the final section, you’ll find six new stories including, ever the contrarian, Stanley Donwood’s eerie reflection on a near future of silence, the end of music – forever.
Jonathan Wright, March 2013
Time to Come Back: Delia Derbyshire, Electronic Music Pioneer
- David Butler -
On 23 November 1963, the BBC broadcast the first-ever episode of Doctor Who. That means it’s now nearly 50 years since British television audiences first heard the programme’s astonishing theme music, composed by Ron Grainer but realised by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the assistance of Dick Mills. Variations on Delia’s remarkable arrangement of Grainer’s composition – electronic but with an organic sensuality – would lead in and out of the Doctor’s adventures until 1980, and inspire, excite and terrify generations of viewers, many of whom would grow up to become significant musicians in their own right.
But although the Doctor Who theme tune remains Delia’s most famous creation, her involvement with science fiction extended far beyond the travels of Gallifrey’s finest and had already begun before the TARDIS first opened its doors. Based at the Radiophonic Workshop from 1962 until 1973, Delia’s output during these years, as both a BBC employee and freelance musician, would take her to a space station manned by religious robots and the planet Solaria (for the anthology series Out Of The Unknown) via collaborations with leading figures in Britain’s arts scene, from Peter Hall and Tony Richardson to Ted Hughes and Yoko Ono. The result was a distinctive and evocative body of work that fused the popular with the experimental, and contributed significantly to the development of electronic music.
Born in Coventry in 1937, Delia studied music and mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge. During her time at university she would travel in 1958 with her fellow student (and future composer) Jonathan Harvey to Le Corbusier’s and Iannis Xenakis’ Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, where she heard Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking Poème électronique. This encounter would nurture a growing interest in electronic music and its relationship with the visual arts.
That interest became a working concern when she arrived at the Radiophonic Workshop, having first joined the BBC as a studio manager. The workshop was still in its formative years, having been established in 1958 to provide the ‘special sound’ for BBC productions. Delia’s first major contribution, composing the music for Time On Our Hands, was also her fir
st involvement with science fiction. Broadcast in March 1963, Time On Our Hands was a ‘docufiction’ about the city of the future, Holyhead in 1988. In this alternate world, the Russians got to the Moon first (in 1967), automation has resulted in mass unemployment, and the core problem is “how to spend a golden lifetime, what to do with so much time.”
Delia’s title music conveys the programme’s sense of progress leading to an uncertain emptiness (“the void of leisure”) with its glassy sounds and slow ascending notes giving way to childlike falling phrases and a lack of ultimate resolution – there is no satisfying keynote achieved here, unlike the triumphant musical ascent suggested by Stanley Kubrick’s use of the first movement from Also Sprach Zarathustra at the outset of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), laying the foundation for the evolutionary quest ahead. Delia’s music points to a chilly ennui and restless yet lonely city.
Time On Our Hands was well received within the BBC but by the end of the year, Derbyshire had realised the theme tune for another science fiction project. It was a piece of music that would become an iconic part of the soundscape of British popular culture, instantly recognisable yet with sounds whose origin and nature retain a potent ability to fascinate and mystify today: Doctor Who. Its success would generate huge publicity for the Radiophonic Workshop and Delia in particular – although not immediately, despite the efforts of the tune’s composer, Ron Grainer, for Delia to receive a share of the credit and royalties.
The standard practice at this time was for individual Radiophonic Workshop staff not to receive on-screen or printed credits for the special sound and music created for BBC shows. The Mirror was among the first to try to solve the mysteries of the Doctor Who theme and, in December 1963, claimed that: “Nothing quite like this… has been heard before on TV. It’s a noise with rhythm and melody which continually pulsates in a weird, fluid and uncanny way.” No mention was made of Delia’s involvement. Instead, the article highlighted Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert’s desire for a “new sound – way out and catchy.”
Derbyshire’s marvellous arrangement was realised in the pre-synthesizer days of the Workshop: achieved through a combination of sounds augmented using musique concrète techniques, sine and square wave oscillators, and a white noise generator. These sounds were then recorded to tape and manipulated, raised and lowered in pitch, looped and filtered to eliminate particular frequencies, a painstaking process informed by Derbyshire’s mathematical precision but retaining a human warmth and unpredictability.
As Derbyshire’s reputation grew, artists outside the BBC sought her out. In 1966 she founded the short-lived studio Unit Delta Plus with her close friend and Radiophonic Workshop colleague Brian Hodgson and the composer Peter Zinovieff. Unit Delta Plus enabled Derbyshire to take on freelance work across theatre and film, as well as live ‘happenings’ and multimedia art projects. At Kaleidophon, set up by Brian Hodgson, Delia and David Vorhaus, the trio worked on the album An Electric Storm (1968) for Island, released under the moniker White Noise. She would collaborate with figures as diverse as Anthony Newley and the pioneering Dutch video artist Madelon Hooykaas, as well as working with Hodgson again on the 1973 horror film The Legend Of Hell House.
By now Delia had left the Radiophonic Workshop and would soon leave music altogether until the final years of her life when, championed by a new generation of electronic musicians such as Aphex Twin and Orbital, she began to collaborate with Sonic Boom just prior to her death, in 2001 at the age of 64.
What prompted Delia to leave the BBC in 1973? In a 1997 interview with John Cavanagh, she discussed how accountants had increasingly come to dominate the BBC, and how both Auntie and the world at large had “gone out of tune with itself”. At the same time, the Radiophonic Workshop was placing greater emphasis on the use of synthesizers, moving away from Delia’s preferred tape and musique concrète techniques.
If sensationalist accounts have emphasised her difficulties with alcohol, Delia deserves to be remembered for far more than any personal demons – or indeed the Doctor Who theme that did so much to turn the show into a national institution. Although she was active as a professional musician for just over a decade, her work has a remarkable depth and range. And even now a power to surprise. To take just one years-ahead-of-its-time example, listen to the dance beats buried, of all places, deep within a 1971 schools radio dramatisation of the story of Noah. As more is learnt about the contents of her archive, held at the University of Manchester, expect more surprises – and expect the influence of her music to continue to grow.
New Worlds Fair: Michael Moorcock, Musician
- Jonathan Wright -
In Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, where everything that could happen does happen, reality consists of an unimaginably large number of universes, a multiverse of possibilities. If Everett was right, it follows that another man associated with the multiverse, Michael John Moorcock, doesn’t always get to be not just one of the leading lights in British science fiction’s New Wave – hell, one of our greatest men of letters. Other possibilities spin out.
Presumably, these aren’t all alternate fates the Michael Moorcock who occupies this universe would welcome, but you’d guess the timelines that involve him becoming a fully fledged rock star have a strong appeal. And even in this universe, if things had turned out just a little differently, it might have happened.
“I did a single demo, Dodgem Dude c/w Starcruiser, which United Artists liked,” Moorcock tells Adventure Rocketship!, casting his mind back to 1974. “I thought I was having a meeting about the single but the UA A&R man of the time [Andrew Lauder] took me to lunch and just assumed I was going to do an album. ‘When can you do us an album?’ were his words. As easy as that. I felt almost guilty.”
The result was New Worlds Fair, credited to Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix, a concept album (well it was the 1970s) centred on a dystopian fun fair. As its comparative obscurity attests, the album didn’t set the world on fire, but that doesn’t mean Moorcock was somehow a dilettante when it came to music. In addition to famous collaborations with Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult, his connections in the music world take in American bluesmen, The Shadows, The Action, Brian Eno and Joy Division.
It’s a story that begins in the 1950s. As a teenager, Moorcock bought his first guitar. He performed on the skiffle scene, even recording a (probably mercifully unreleased) novelty song for EMI. This was also the era when American blues musicians started visiting the UK. It was, says Moorcock, “crazy” for “a bunch of white, mostly middle-class teenagers [to be] identifying with old black men who had worked a good part of their lives as field-hands.” Nevertheless, he was among those who hung out with these bluesmen, meeting the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Terry, men who were “pleasant but generally a bit distant.”
Moorcock toured himself too, playing blues to pay his way on trips around Europe. In Paris, he met American beat writers. Somewhere along the line, he sat in with The Vipers, the band who would morph into Cliff’s backing band, The Shadows. “In Soho and later Ladbroke Grove in those days it was almost impossible not to know guys doing music,” he says.
It helps, of course, if you actively seek out musicians and the counterculture, which is what Moorcock was clearly already beginning to do. As he himself notes, “Really, I seem to have been the first to be both a rock-and-roll musician and a writer.” Well, it’s not like such figures have ever become commonplace.
In the early 1960s, he moved to Ladbroke Grove, an area of West London where, in a pre-gentrification era, disparate cultural influences started to coalesce in new, and indeed revolutionary, ways. “It was a bohemian area because the rents were cheap,” says Moorcock. “Taxis and respectable middle-class people wouldn’t go into the area in, say, 1965. It was thought to be too rough. Lot of poets and literary writers lived there, too – and more came, of course. Quite a few seminal moments in UK rock happened around there. We were all engaged with similar enthusiasms.”
When he met Syd Barrett, says Moorcock, the Pink Floyd singer told him he was a big fan of The Fireclown, a book that’s reputed to have inspired Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun from Floyd’s A Saucer Full Of Secrets. “I didn’t know Syd very well, or indeed the rest of Pink Floyd for that matter,” says Moorcock. “He certainly didn’t act or sound loopy and I’ve known some extremely loopy musicians. I suspect the business itself got to him. He wouldn’t be the first to be uncomfortable with commercial success. Certainly, he was coherent and clear-headed when I talked to him. I sometimes wonder if the ‘cure’ didn’t get him. Doctors in those days were inclined to put you on [antipsychotic] Largactil and stuff – in many ways worse than the non-prescription drugs you were taking. Even Valium could turn you nuts.”
The energy flowed the other way too. Moorcock’s anti-hero, Jerry Cornelius, was born out of this era. “He’s an urban adventurer looking for identities in the contemporary world. One of those identities is that of a rock musician,” says Moorcock. “Jerry in many ways was me and his experience was my experience.”
Cornelius is thus essentially a 1960s figure who has morphed and evolved as Moorcock has employed him in different ways. (Recently that’s meant a space pirate Cornelius in Moorcock’s 2010 Doctor Who novel, The Coming Of The Terraphiles.) As for the author’s own post-1960s trajectory, it was set in part by meeting the band with whom he’s become most associated, Hawkwind. It’s a collaboration that began in earnest in 1971. Over the years, Moorcock has performed with the band and contributed lyrics – and even overarching ideas so that Warrior On The Edge Of Time (1975) riffs (an apposite word) off Moorcock’s recurring hero figure, the Eternal Champion. Was it difficult to move between rock and literature?
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