This is the flyer for the night I played with old friend Ian Bland from Dream Frequency.

This was the first time I’d seen Ian in years.

This was th 24th October 2009. A great night… which was the start of many.

Flyer for Retro Trax event 2009

This is the music video I created for the track Meltdown by NEON:LOVE

On June 6th 2008 Warner Brothers released LEGO Indiana Jones 2.

This was a massive honour to work on due to my life long ambition to work with Lucasarts.

Look out for my musical farting camels, which when played correctly play the Indiana Jones theme… in fart sounds

lego rock band

In 2009 I worked on the LEGO Rock Band which was a successful LEGO twist on the Rock Band franchise.

I worked mainly as sole musician on this video game (excluding the commercial tracks contained in the game of course!) with some sound design duties, mainly focussing on the GUI and front end sounds.

In 2010 Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment released The Lord Of The Rings: Aragorns Quest.

The original version on which I worked as sound designer was for the Nintendo Wii and DS.

The game was later revamped and beefed up for the Sony Playstation’s Move controller.

This is the box art for the video game LEGO Harry Potter which I worked on as sound designer.

The game was released 25th June 2010.

This is the artwork for the mix I did with Matthew Seargent for Pirate Revival

Here is the track list (as promised.)

Chaka Khan – Aint Nobody (Frankie Knuckles Mix)
Rockers Revenge - Walking on Sunshine
Alena – Changes (Ron Basejam Remix)
Cosmic Kids – Reginalds Groove (Classixx Remix)
Dana Bergquist – Hubbabubba
Aleem – Release Yourself (Dub)
Parliament – Motor Booty Affair (Alkalino Edit)
Hamilton Bohannon – Bohannon’s Disco Symphony
Hamilton Bohannon – Lets Start the Dance
Newcleus – Automan (Drop out orchestra remix)
Gwen Guthrie – Aint Nothing Going On But The Rent
Colonel Abrams – Trapped
Mid Air – Ease Out (Revenge Edit)
Bomb The Bass – Dont Make Me Wait
Company B – Fascinated (Extended mix)

I am going to post the mix up soon…

In 2009 House Trained records re-released Hardcore Uproar.

Here is a trailer featuring clips and cuttings from around the time the original version of Hardcore Uproar was released in 1990.

This features a TV clips from BBC’s Top Of The Pops, Channels 4′s E-Motion, ITV’s Celebration “Madchester documentary” and cuttings from The Mirror, MIxmag and Top Of The Pops.

Here is a music video I created for the band Solid State in 2005.

Delia Derbyshire was the writer of the seminal Dr. Who theme in 1963. Decades before electronic music was widely accepted, Derbyshire was creating synthetic textures before most of today’s electronic musicians were even born!

In celebration of her pioneering work I wrote an article for No Dough Music’s webzine.

The music for the TV show Doctor Who has aged remarkably well, despite it’s constant play over the last 5 decades, largely due to its distinctly strong melody and rhythm section. Although her legacy lives on to this today, with the mood of the original version still felt in the latest offering of the piece, she was a hugely under-rated artist who never really saw the recognition she deserved. She was a true pioneer of electronic music who should be regarded with the same stature as the greats of electronic music, such as Henry, Schaeffer, Stockhauen, Kraftwerk and Moroder.

[ click here to see the 1980's version of the Dr. Who theme ]

With links to a hugely diverse list of artists: Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Orbital and Pink Floyd, it is quite astonishing to discover that her career almost took an altogether different path when in 1957 Decca records refused her the opportunity to work in their studios as they regrettably informed her that they did not employ women.

Dissillusioned, she immediately began working for the UN in Geneva but she returned to England very soon after to once again attempt to work around her true passion, music, with the music publishing company Boosey & Hawkes. Knowing of the existence of a department within the BBC called the Radiophonic Workshop, Delia was drawn to the corporation in 1960. At the time the BBC did not employ anyone within the workshop’s department for more than three months, as Derbyshire stated in a rare interview with Surface Magazine in May 2000, “they thought it would send people crazy”.

Three years after starting in her post with the BBC as trainee studio manager, her skills as an alchemist of sound were eventually identified and she was offered the opportunity to turn a melody written by composer Ron Grainer into something which could be used as the title music for a new TV show called Doctor Who.

When Derbyshire was to play the newly completed piece to the original composer of the melody he asked, “Did I really write this?” to which she responded “Most of it”. By today’s recording industry standards this would be referred to as Delia’s remix,  and for it she would rightfully receive critical acclaim, but as this was 1963 and the concept of remixing was some decades away and as the BBC preferred to keep members of their Workshop anonymous and uncredited, the BBC’s acknowledgement of Delia’s ground breaking work was somewhat minimal. Grainer believed Derbyshire should receive half the royalties for the work she had produced but this was not to be the case.

As this was a time before mass produced synthesizers many of her sources were far from typical.

She famously sampled the sound of a green glass lampshade, taking away the attack of the percussive sound by fading in the recording and layering different filtered versions of the pre-recorded lamp shade sound to create a cacophony of sound and used as part of the sound design in a BBC programme about people around the Sahara desert.

“My most beautiful sound at the time was a tatty green BBC lampshade,” she asserts. “It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it. I hit the lampshade, recorded that, faded it up into the ringing part without the percussive start.  I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop’s famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.”
Following Delia’s death in 2001, there was an incredible find in her attic. A cache of 237 tapes including an experimental dance track on which her voice can clearly be heard, “this is for interest only”. Upon hearing the recording Paul Hartnoll of Orbital found it to sound so contemporary he believed it could easily pass as a modern recording. He believed that it “could be coming out next week on Warp Records”. Manchester University are currently digitising the tapes so they can be released to the public as an archive of her work.

Clearly a visionary with an unparalleled original mind, Delia was the catalyst for many sound designers and composers of avant-garde music the world over.

Her work can be heard on the 2002 BBC compilation, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop CD.

Click here to read the full article on the No Dough Music.