Delia Derbyshire and the Spacegoats

I was vaguely aware of her (via Matt from the Spacegoats), but when I watched this (on my way to the second Spacegoats reunion gig, in Brighton, curiously) I was instantly obsessed with her legacy. The thing everyone knows about her is the Dr. Who theme tune, which (like many people who grew up in Britain in the 60s/70s/80s) is burned into my childhood memory, but that's just the tip of the Delia Derbyshire iceberg. This is a nice little introduction:
 

The Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember connection was a nice surprise. I interviewed him on UKC Radio back in '89 or '90 when I was a Spacemen 3 fan, then saw him solo many years later in Exeter doing his "Experimental Audio Research" thing, around the time he would have been in contact with Delia.

...and the Spacegoats were pretty amazing too!

As at the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms gig we got two long sets, but this time there were no feedback issues with Chris's hammered dulcimer and you could hear everything clearly. No Stella, sadly, but everyone was on top form and Pok seems to be working on the next stage of the Goat-world mythology (a profoundly pissed-off "great-grandmother Kraken" seeming to feature heavily in the eco-bardic narrative).

I think Pok Spacegoat would have related deeply to something I saw earlier that afternoon. As part of the Brighton Festival, the Lighthouse gallery was screening a short VR film called Collisions, the true account Nyarri Morgan, of an Australian aboriginal elder who, as a young man in the 1950s, witnessed a British atomic bomb test with no context whatsoever for what he was experiencing (he didn't find out for twenty years). Really quite moving. And it was good to see on the credits that the appropriately dark, eerie soundtrack was composed by Nick Cave (a Brighton resident I think) and Warren Ellis of The Bad Seeds. The Brighton Festival was guest curated by the wonderful Kate Tempest this year, I was pleased to see.