Here I am, pleased that I have a much better database than I had previously. I’ve removed a load of silly guesswork on where records should be. I’ve fixed a plain wrong pair from Mike’s Collection. I still need to add all the new ones I’ve found, assuming they are real, to really get all the juice out of the 1985 catalogue scan, but I have another issue. There are still quite a lot of entries which have no name. I got most of them from Mike’s Collection – thanks Mike! – and yet there are still gaps, especially where I added them by just throwing in the catalogue numbers quickly, leaving that job to future me. Thanks past me!
The sfx discs usually have a name or title on each side. To begin with though I just want a something close to the actual title for the front side. It’s a minimum level of completeness I can achieve until I can add the real text from the actual records. So, let’s fill these known records with the unknown names!
EC 193F, title:- Motor Car: Ford Cortina 1600 (Interior)
Taking my scan of the 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue I can find all the records I have in the database with no title. The scan is a mess remember, so I have to manually search the actual catalogue pages near where the numbers are found. And that’s what I did. It’s a bit tedious but I only had, erm 150+ to do. Hmm. Well, I started with the mono EC catalogue numbers and that’s more like 40.
Alright, it’s not that exciting to do, but I found some interesting examples. The twelve inch records design as stage props (EC 81E and 81D) are not in my collection. One of those is for playing at 78RPM. EC 81A is just ‘shellac disc noise‘. Yes, a record with a record of a record’s surface noise. I found EC 45P which is a Post Office Computer playing noughts and crosses, in 1971 (stitch that WOPR!), and EC 46E, which is the bell of Cologne cathedral, as used on Death & Horror Sound Effects (REC 269, 1977).
Then I had a couple of missing ones. Well, one. I originally thought there were a few, but in the previous part I realised 195M and N were not actually in reality in my actual collection. Grrr. So, a single record, not in the 1985 catalogue. Which is interesting for its absence. But where to find its title without a faff about in a cold garage?
I started by Googling the catalogue number EC 60A and whaddya know? There it was on the Pro-Sounds Effects Library website. Now, that was a reminder of something I found a year ago. You can get all* the BBC Sound Effects from Pro-Sound, much like the BBC Rewind’s own SFX website https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk. The nice thing for me about the Pro Sounds website though was that you can download a list of all the sounds. Very handy! Even nicer is that a large number of the effects have a catalogue number in the description! So, using the Pro Sounds catalogue is another possible source of finding the names catalogue number, or indeed, of hitherto unknown records!
I opened the spreadsheet of their database which I’d made for easier handling and quickly located the untitled record. EC 60C German Crowd Exterior.
In all, 9659 effects in the Pro Sounds catalogue have EC catalogue references, although many are really stereo ECS numbers. From the mono EC numbers there are 7344 effects. Anyway, what’s in there is a for another time, but I will say this is a kind of Rosetta stone for mapping effects to records.
Now, EC 60C is not in the 1985 catalogue at all. Once I knew what it was I could go and check for German crowds. It definitely isn’t there though. But I did go and find it in my collection.
EC 60C – German Crowds
And, what about that matrix number? Ah, yes, it must be after 1985. Surely. It is not! The matrix number of 118638 (on the front side) means it’s circa 1966. You’ll never guess what though! That is the year which the Pro Sounds database claims it is from. Cor!
The other EC 60 records are in the catalogue. A, B and D are other German scenes. A gasthof, more crowds and traffic. I guess it just didn’t work out for EC 60C.
That nailed all the unnamed mono discs. Next for the over one hundred stereo discs. Now though, I don’t necessarily need to go through the 1985 catalogue manually as I have remembered the Pro Sounds database. I just need to match my list up with entries in that list. If they were in there. Using the Conditional formatting option in Excel I found that following catalogue numbers were not in the Pro Sounds database.
2T10, 2T17, 2T18, 2T20, 2T21, 2T22
So, maybe, just maybe, these are not in the digital sound effects libraries. Or perhaps they simply don’t exist and I’ve added them to my list in error. Ugh.
Yes, only 2T10 is really in my collection. Trains: Diesel Multiple Unit
ECS 2T10 – Diesel Multiple Unit
The other untitled ECS discs were effectively duplicates of other records due to typos. They should have been S not T. Looking through box I had S17, S21 and then the Ts, but then they went back to S’s. So S17,18,20,21,22 are all now back in order and I had an additional 2S17 and 2S21.
In the end I did get the names of 60 untitled ECS records. All the named discs are now waiting to be added to my database and appear on bbcrecords.co.uk/sfx/sfx.php. I’ve added EC 60C and ECS 2T10 already though. Next: Those supposedly new catalogue numbers.
In the last post I’d extracted 1720 unique catalogue numbers from the 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue and pasted them into Excel. As well as deduplicating the list I ran quick sort to begin the process of matching up what was in the catalogue with what I had in my list.
I found a mistake quite quickly from just looking at the NH results. In fact I got abit lucky because a typo meant I spotted something early on. I’d put a ‘+’ after the letter match pattern. This meant I found a NH1DA. You can’t have two letters, so I knew I’d messed up the regex and it was easy to fix that. Now it matched NH1D.
Perfect? No! There was clearly an OCR error here. Just above the match for ‘NH1DA f02’ was ‘NH10A f01’. The f numbers are the band (track) numbers and it’s very easy to see – even dislocated from the text saying what’s on those bands – that the OCR has failed here and turned a 0 into a D. I’d have banned the use of the D letter as well as I and O, but that’s hindsight and also counter factual.
True Cat?
So, I need to accept some errors like this. But, err, hold on, isn’t NH1D a valid catalogue number? Couldn’t that be wrong here and still be a real catalogue number elsewhere? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I’m going to end up with a list of catalogue numbers which aren’t in my list already, so how do I know if they are truly valid?
Actually, that’s not as bad as it seems. When I search for NH1D in the text file I see quickly that it’s a bad match and can remove it with alacrity. Equally, I can search around the new cat. numbers in the text and see if there is corroborating evidence. In fact, I can usually see what page number they are on and look at the physical catalogue to see what that says.
So, I’m one down and the total is now 1719 entries in the catalogue. The total number of catalogue entries will be lower than the 1720 it seemed a moment ago. Or will it?? There’s an another possibility.
The scanning may have missed out some valid cat numbers completely. In that case I will have to check the ones I have in my list against the catalogue to see if those are indeed in the 1985 catalogue, but didn’t get scanned.
Or, more interestingly, if they are not in the 1985 catalogue. That could mean they were deleted or were added after that point in time, overlapping with the CD era.
I haven’t mentioned the fact that the first CD – ECD1 is in the 1985 catalogue too, but that’s something I’ll come back to.
So, if you’ll excuse me I will now go at it with Excel to sort and then sift through all of those comparing with my existing list.
Intermission
Catalogue Story Short
Thanks for waiting. Well, I was surprised how many I had in my list that were not in the output of the 1985 Catalogue scan. Dismayed might be a better word. In the EC catalogue numbers alone I found 148 cat numbers on my list which were apparently not in the catalogue.
I began by assuming that most of those were in the catalogue, but had failed to scan. There was a more obvious error too. When I’d created my list I’d stupidly started guessing about missing entries and I’d ended up with a load of speculation. That accounted for 68 false mismatches with the 1985 catalogue. These have now been removed from my database.
Then I found a different 68 which were actually in the catalogue after all and had been missed by the OCR. Not too bad. To find those I’d had to manually search each one in the catalogue though, which was a bit of a chore. I also found two which were wrongly numbered in my list. These were probably wrong in Mike’s Collection list. Which left ten entries in my list which, as far as I can see, are not in the 1985 catalogue!
EC 501D – Aircraft: Barracouda, Airspeed Oxford, Avro York
EC 195N – Would be the tenth but, there was a problem there. Although it was in my list it was not in my collection. A mistake in my listing. Not so much a problem as an annoyance. And EC 195M was also missing in reality. All useful in the end.
From 195L to P and no M or N
A couple of more interesting things I spotted.
EC 45G was hand-written into the catalogue on page 304 with ‘1986’ after it. Proving that it was after this 1985 catalogue beyond doubt.
Whilst EC 133G is not in the catalogue, ‘Coach and Four’ is there as EC 1010H. All the 1000 series are annotated “(From 78 Disc)”. Could this 1000 series be a reissue? For what it’s worth, EC133G was not in the 1971 catalogue, although a similar coach and horses EC133F was. That’s something to look into another time. As are the details of these discs and more thoughts about how many more might have come out after the 1985 catalogue.
Those missing scans (68) plus the post-1985 additions (9) plus the remaining catalogue entries which I had in my list already (1087), minus the stupid guesses I made, total 1164 mono EC catalogues discs in my list.
Fool’s Gold?
Now for the real gold! How many previously unknown mono EC records did I net after this trawl through the catalogue? A very ‘worthwhile the effort’ 158 new entries! And that’s before I get to the Stereo EC and Natural History NH catalogues too!
It’s surprising how many of those come from single digit catalogue prefix numbers (1-9). 46 including many from EC 1 and EC 2. Less surprising are the 1000 series cat numbers which represent 82 of the new entries. As I said above, these are all listed as copies from 78s and there’s a hint of a resissues in there too.
I don’t like surprises though. Those EC 1 and 2 are suspicious to me. Can I and Mike really have not had any of them? Stay tuned for that.
Stereo
The stereo list is much smaller and I only found 6 new (to me) entries, but I was less surprised to get a list of 81 cat numbers missing from the catalogue scan. I had suspected that as the stereo discs were the newer thing there’d be more coming out after 1985 than the mono discs, many of which were copies from 78s anyway.
I removed thirteen immediately as more silly guesses, and although 4M2 had been matched, it was actually false positive and there was no 4M2 after-all.
Meaning 13 to subtract. And then another 9 were really in the catalogue yet didn’t scan, so 60 possibles to go. This was a bit harder than with the mono EC’s as a lot of the records I was checking are in my list without a title. I can go and pull them out of my collection to check, but it’s warmer in here.
The results of that hunting through the physical catalogue was a bunch that I don’t think are in the catalogue, but which I still need to double check.
I totalled up 41 almost certainly not in the catalogue and 19 probably not, but need to check to be sure.
In this stereo lot I’ve indeed found way more records that post-date the catalogue than ones I was missing in my list. This suggests I will have to think there are more ECS stereo catalogue records still to find and add.
Some things of note with the stereo.s.
ECS 2D3 – ‘Dogs: Beagles’ was hand-written in on page 136. As was ECS 3T7 – ‘Steam Train Various’ on page 320, whilst 3T8 and 3T9 are not in at all, but I know exist – ~Steam Trains. Then ECS 1A18 and 19 – Lancaster Bomber also got added by hand (in green biro!). All these were counted as not in the catalogue. It begs the question are there other hand written entries I missed in the scan and are not in my list? Something else to get round to checking!
ECS 2W5 – ‘Rain with thunder’ is not in the catalogue and is an example of where you get a whole run, in this case 2W1, 2, 3 etc., but then there’s a gap in the middle. This shows that records were not always released in the same order as the cat. number sequence. Something to remember when I finally get round to the matrix numbers and perhaps need to guess if the dates are reliable.
Natural Story
Finally the Natural History catalogue.
I initially found 23 in my list but not in the catalogue and 10 new ones from the catalogue to add to my list. After checking those 23 it was clear that 20 of them, running from NH 114Z to 133Z are not in the 1985 catalogue. The first few I checked were not there and they all seem to be similar collections of birds. The other three I had already listed with no details, so they will need pulling out and examining.
Some Totals
Let’s total up then! My list – any silly guesses + Additions from the 1985 catalogue
EC – 1235 – 68 + 158 = 1325
ECS – 435 – 13 + 6 = 428
NH – 128 + 10 = 138
Total = 1,798 – 91 + 174= 1,891
That’s the new number, 1891. And I’ve added a net total of (174-91) 83, but I’ve really found 174 in the catalogue which were not in my list at all. It’s pretty clear that there’s potential for more to be found and added, still. Also, there might be a few I missed completely in the scan of the catalogue. Small chance there, but a definite possibility. For now though. it’s 1891, and at last count I have 1530 that are keepers in my collection. At least 361 shy of a full set. Something to aim for!
I now need to go back through the catalogue and match all these new cat numbers with what’s on them so that I can add them to my database. As long as they do exist… As well as pull out the ones that I couldn’t put a name to and need a double check if they are hiding in the catalogue. These winter nights will fly by…
Welcome to the third part of the third, well, part of Discographic Workshop. We’re still knee-deep in Doctor Who and this post is about the non-musical releases on the BBC Enterprises record labels. We’re starting with Doctor Who Sound Effects, of course, and there’s a story disc too – Genesis of The Daleks.
Doctor Who Sound Effects is very much a Dick Mills album and Genesis of the Daleks is another Dick and Dudley affair, with the exception of the theme, which was a Dick and Delia realisation! I will get more into the Dick Mills story in part 4 of Discographic Workshop, which is all about sound effects. Meanwhile, here’s a short introduction to the effects specialist.
Dick Mills took over from Brian Hodgson and created the sound effects for Doctor Who right up until its cancellation, in 1989. Mills was at the Workshop longer than anyone else, as well as his record-breaking run working on Doctor Who. He started there shortly after joining the BBC and didn’t leave until his retirement in 1993. An honorary doctor, he spent 35 years at Maida Vale making the noises that no one else could and during around half of those he was responsible for all of the DW sound effects.
Dick Mills on Pebble Mill At One – 11th April 1979 (BBCTV)
Honorary Doctor, Who Did Doctor Who Honours
Dick was at the very first Doctor Who meeting with Verity Lambert. He and Workshop Organiser Desmond Briscoe went to Ealing studios to meet her and get the ball rolling. After helping Delia Derbyshire with the theme Dick was then assisting Brian Hodgson with the special sound. They worked as a pair on the first few stories and then the Workshop decided to double their productivity by using one member of staff per project. Brian continued to work on the programme whilst Dick went about work on many other BBC productions.
“Dick? Would you care to stop what you’re doing and attack the piano for me, please”
Brian Hodgson ‘Tom Tom’ BBC TV
Hodgson left the Workshop in 1972. His last DW story was ‘Carnival of Monsters’, broadcast in early 1973, but made in the previous June (an unusually large gap between production and broadcast), but Dick had started to pick up work on the next story in series 10, ‘Frontier in Space’ (1973).
Due to the pairing of staff noted above, Dick was involved in the DW Special Sound from the start, but only as an engineering assistant. When Hodgson “to no-one’s surprise”(DM) announced his departure Briscoe asked Dick how he felt about taking over. Frankly, he gave him no option.
Desmond Briscoe, then Head of the Workshop, asked me ‘How do you feel about doing Doctor Who?’ So I said ‘Have I got any choice?’ He replied ‘No!’ So I said ‘I’ll do it!’
Dick Mills – Doctor Who Magazine 198
As it happened Dudley was coming in at 4 PM that very day (or perhaps the following morning, depending on the version of events you listen to…) to do some of his soundtrack overdubs for ‘Frontier in Space’ on the Delaware synth. Dick and Dudley would form a successful bond in time. Still, with apparently no hand-over from Hodgson, Dick had to quickly pick up where his erstwhile colleague left off. Requests for ‘low-trajectory sounds’ from Simpson mystified Dick, to begin with, and it took a while for him to pick up the lingua franca, which the Australian had developed with Hodgson. Dudley could be fussy and any sound effect that could be mistaken for a duff musical note would reflect badly on the composer. Rather cheekily the Workshop provided Simpson with a special control knob, known as ‘option 4’ which he could twiddle to improve the sound. It didn’t actually do anything to the sound, but it seemed to keep him happy!
Dick Mills – Electronics & Music Maker March ’81
Dick’s basic method for sound effects was to use electronic means to create sounds for machines and natural sounds for, well natural elements. As more sound processing products came onto the market, Dick took full advantage. Flanging, phase shifting, harmonizers, delay and reverb came boxed and ready to use. However, the highly experienced Mills would still resort to tape, room ambience, repurposed BBC gear and whatever else was lying around to get things ‘just so’.
Mills feels that he only really hit his stride when Tom Baker took the lead role in 1974. By then he’d worked on nine series, which shows just how serious he was about his craft!
Doctor Who Sound Effects
Sound Effects No. 19 Doctor Who (REC 316, 1978)
Inside Number Nineteen
I am going to return to the RWS contributions to BBC Records long-running ‘BBC Sound Effects’ series in a later part of Discographic Workshop. The DW chapter in that story is being told now because it fits in more neatly with the rest of the Who stuff. Suffice it to say, since 1969, BBC Records had been releasing albums of sound effects. By the time this one came out, eighteen previous volumes were available, so this edition was number 19. The naming and numbering of the sound effects is haphazard, but on the reverse of the sleeve there is a little “no. 19” next to the title and the on the spine is “DR.WHO SOUND EFFECTS NO.19”.
Shelf Load Of Tapes
When Verity Lambert told Mills and Briscoe that they would be making large demands on the Workshop, she wasn’t kidding. Every encounter with new technology or aliens called for a new and unique sound. Having the same noise for a Dalek gun and a Cyberman gun would undermine the reality of the show and simply wouldn’t do.
“Every programme’s a challenge, with its own unique set of problems no two spaceships or monsters will sound the same. Each is different.”
Dick Mills – ‘Sounds Peculiasr’ – Doctor Who Weekly 29, 1980
By the same token if the Doctor met the same aliens, gadgets, or whatever, it made no sense to re-make that sound. Indeed, it was expected to be the same sound. Hence, over the years, a large library of sound effects was built up. In the ‘Doctor Who: Masters of Sound’ documentary, Dick Mills and Brian Hodgson proudly show off their collection. Some 16 feet of shelving full of tape reels.
Brian and Dick with the DW tape library – Doctor Who Masters Of Sound
So, they had a ready supply of DW sound effects and as we’ll see later, the RWS had already been involved with the BBC Records’ Sound Effects Series. Also, there has always been an interest in how DW is made that runs parallel to the show itself. The RWS were involved in that fan engagement and were generally happy to share the secrets of their work. This LP is the most tangible example of that. The next logical step then was a DW sound effects record, but it still warrants a bit more explanation and context than that.
Classic Albums
To most people, including dedicated and otherwise open-minded DW fans the very existence of this album is a bit of a laugh. In fact, unconsciously for the most part, any album which doesn’t at least seem to be trying to compete with (ooh, let’s say) Sgt Pepper, is somehow ridiculous merely by existing in the same format. It invites ridicule. Its incongruity with the majority of LPs practically demands a wisecrack about: how well it placed in the charts; how danceable its grooves are; something about singing or humming along, and what, in short, the hell it thinks it’s doing, daring to be in anyone’s record collection? It actually un-nerves people, I think. If you could stand listening to the whole thing, when you could be appreciating something more conventionally entertaining, there must be something wrong with you. And they would be right, if you ignored all other entertainment and only listened to abstract noises you would be highly unusual, I suppose. Needless to say, if you were a DW fanatic, particularly in the days before the geeks inherited the earth, you were already an outsider. If you went as far as buying an album exclusively made up of sound effects from the show you were an extremist. Or maybe just, a kid who loved everything DW. Or an adult fan with an appreciation for the whole shebang (and brrrrrrzzz and shhhhhhheeeeeeewwww).
Fan Made
In the BBC programme ‘You, Me and Doctor Who, made for the 50th anniversary of DW (and which should have been a 12-part Ken Burns-esque encyclopedic series in my opinion) the presenter Dr Mathew Sweet spoke to the current generation of writers. The whole genre area of fan fiction gets a bad rap, for some good reasons, but I was struck by an audio adventure they played. “Amateur city” was New Who script editor Gary Russell’s assessment of an old cassette tape production (‘The Mutant Phase’), but there were sound effects on that tape. The thesis was that it was this era that trained a generation of creatives who would bring DW back to life in the new century. The DW sound effects played a small but important part in that. YOU had the tools. You had some of the same library of sounds that Dick Mills had. It was, for now, over to you.
Doctor Who Weekly 30th April 1978
Credits Account
This album is produced by both sound designers (as they would be called now) as by 1978 Hodgson had returned to the Workshop (in 1977, in fact) and was running the daily activities as well as overseeing the overhaul and renovation of its studios.
The blurb isn’t credited to anyone in particular, but it was hand-written by Mills and included at the end of the track list he sent to BBC Records. We can also safely assume that he composed it because he was paid the standard fee of £25 for sleeve notes.
Everyone knows that Dr. Who’s Tardis is bigger on the inside than outside; and the selection of aural locations from the Doctor’s travels will equally broaden your horizons. No less than seven alien worlds are visited, together with some extra ordinary, extra-dimensional occurrences encountered on Earth (Sol. 3 in the Mutters Spiral). Add to these an audiogram of the Doctor’s own mind processes, Tardis operations, some weapons for self-defence and your galactic safety is ensured. Time-Lord. Note: A source of jelly-babies is recommended to complete the illusion of Time Travel.
Doctor Who Sound Effects sleeve notes – Dick Mills
Each effect is uncredited, but you can work out who did what. The earliest effect is track 2, atmosphere from ‘Death to the Daleks’ stated as being from Season 11, in early 1974. It’s actually much older having been with the Daleks from the beginning – 1963 to be precise. The latest effect is taken from the Season 15 finale ‘The Invasion of Time’, in March 1978. That means that all these story-specific effects are by Dick Mills. Thus tracks 8-13, Tardis interiors and the sonic screwdriver, with no specific story mentioned in the sleeve notes, are Brian Hodgson’s.
Brian’s Bible
This is how the album ended up, but that wasn’t always the plan. In the BBC Enterprises file on Doctor Who Sound Effects the first documents you find are lists of effects on tape reels at the RWS. Each page lists effects from a DW series in the 1960s. In the Masters of Sound Documentary Dick shows us a bound volume of these sheets and calls it “Brian’s Bible”. Only two of these effects are used on the final track list though. There are no accompanying memos or other correspondence on these sheets and no equivalent set for the later effects. Somehow this sheaf was passed to the people at the record label and they were kept on file.
Double Contrived Fantasy
I can only imagine what happened here. A double album seems wildly optimistic. A Brian side and a Dick side might have been fairer. A more comprehensive selection from the whole history of DW would have made sense too. In the end, the track list reflected the more recent history of the show and it’s debatable how many fans would recall or even have been alive for stories from ten to fifteen years earlier. Did Brian tell Dick that as he was doing the work he should take the lion’s share of the content?
Some of the selected effects have subsequently been made available on CD releases. You can’t completely recreate this selection yet though. Maybe something for a future compilation? I’ve added the list of proposed effects below.
Multi Track Review
When Dick Mills prepared his tracklist he used the name of the effect and the story it came from as written on his tape sheet. The problem there was that many of the DW stories had working titles which were changed before broadcast. No one spotted this before the record was released though, so that’s how they stayed.
Side 1
Side one begins with the sound of control rooms. Low-pitched throbs and humming are the order of the day here. Spaceships are alive with power and you have to be able to hear it.
Central Control Room In Exillon City
Oh dear, we are off to a bad start with the track titles and associated programmes
‘Doctor Who and the Exillons’
The broadcast serial was, ‘Death to the Daleks’
The Dalek Control Room might be “the scariest noise ever created”(@mumoss), but context is everything with these sounds.
From ‘Death to the Daleks’
Hodgson’s concept for this sound was that all Daleks have the same universal heartbeat.
So, this is a Hodgson sound as although Death To The Daleks is from 1974 it is the same sound that is still used today for Dalek control rooms.
Then we’re off outside, to sample the Metebelis III Atmosphere, which is swirling, whistling and also thrumming. Metebelis III is a beautiful place, but also hazardous.
From ‘Planet of the Spiders’
The Sontaran Field Major Styre’s Scouting Machine has a not unpleasant burbling, alternating with a not particularly pleasant buzzing undertone, but it seems to have developed a nasty whinnying which he should get checked out.
From ‘The Destructors’
Actually, it’s from The Sontaran Experiment
These Dalek Hatching Tanks on Skaros(sic) seem to be in good working order – if they are supposed to sound like a bear with laryngitis snoring away at the back of its cave.
This is from Genesis Of The Daleks
See below for more on that…
Skaros is meant to be Skaro though
The Zygon Spaceship Control Centre takes us back to the womb-like humming, yet it seems to have been infested by some electronic birds.
From ‘Doctor Who and the Zygons’ it says here.
It was in reality called ‘Terror of the Zygons’
A Sutekh Time Tunnel will be familiar to all fans of the rave classic ‘Spice’ by Eon (anyone?). It’s actually like a more calming version of the effects used to try and brainwash Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965), created by none other than ‘Workshop Organiser Desmond Briscoe.
From Pyramids of Mars
The Interior of Xoanon is more meditative still and you will not be inclined to bother discovering what the exterior is like (if you did, you would be rewarded by finding Leela, so that might be worth your while…).
From The Face of Evil
Doctor Who Weekly 30th April 1978
Side 2
At this point, the record flips over and we briefly get some more of the work of Brian Hodgson. Conspicuous by its absence is the Tardis take off and landing effect. That had already appeared on ‘Out of this World Sound Effects’ in 1976, and you’ll have to wait for Part 4 of Discographic Workshop for it to materialise. Dick notes this fact at the bottom of his notes to Mike Harding at BBC Records.
The Shrine of The Sisterhood of Karn’s air-con needs a thorough service, but the bells and general ambience are relatively agreeable.
From (Doctor Who and the) Brain of Morbius
Next, we stumble into the Krall Disorientation Chamber, which could be anywhere (Derbyshire, maybe), before getting wrapped up in the ‘Madragora Helix’ and wishing that whoever designed this technology would find a way to make it stop making that noise.
TheAndroid Invasion
The Curse of Madragora should be The Mask of Madragora
We’re briefly surprisingly glad to be in the ‘Atomic Reactor…’ before becoming increasingly alarmed that it might be ‘…Running Wild’.
The Hand of Death
Another busted-up air conditioner is next, but this is being used as a Wind-mine Machine. If you need it for a wind mime, you are in the wrong place.
From TheRobots of Death
The machine was probably just the sand mining machine and the working title had been ‘The Storm Mine Murders’ at one point.
Time for a tipple to calm our nerves, so it’s off to the ‘Distillation Chamber’ but all we find is a hot drinks vending machine attempting to take our youthful (ahem) energy as well as our loose change, and then giving up.
From The Talons of Weng Chiang
What’s that noise now? And why is everything getting larger? Oh, it’s the Cloning and Miniaturisation Process as we head (literally!?) to the Inside of Dr. Who’s Mind. All I can say is that he’s got an EMS VCS3 synthesizer in there and he’s making full use of the spring-reverb.
Both from The Enemy Within, allegedly
It was later named The Invisible Enemy
And suddenly we’re back to the Tardis Interior (In Flight) which apparently uses an extractor fan to achieve propulsion through the 5th dimension.
Tardis Interior (Stationary) shuts that racket off, but there’s another one somewhere else that you can never quite locate.
Suddenly the TARDIS Observation Screen Operates) via a noisy electric motor and the ‘TARDIS door opens‘ by means of something bubbling(?).
The Sonic Screwdriver heralds another round of the Radio1 Roadshow’s ‘Bits and Pieces’ quiz, AKA Fission Gun (2 Blasts) followed by the weedier, but no less deadly Tesh Gun.
From The Ark In Space and The Face of Evil
The battle hots up as a Gallifreyan Staser Gun (3 Blasts) joins the fray,
From The Deadly Assasin
…which in turn draws more fire from a rather camp and glittery Vardan Gun.
No such sparks from the more punchy Sontaran Gun, which is chased off by another report from a different Gallifreyan Gun.
You would think the matter is now settled by a prolonged blast from the Dematerialiser Gun.
All from The Invasion of Time
Except no battle is complete without a Dalek Gun (3 Blasts)
From Genesis Of The Daleks
And we’re finally finished off by a Dragon Ray Gun – good shooting, Mr Sin!
From The Talons of Weng Chiang
Sleeve Design
The front of the sleeve is essentially the same as the 1976 re-issue of the Doctor Who theme (RESL 11) in full colour. Albeit the colour has been changed from the titles to create a more attractive contrast of blue and green.
The back cover is another screenshot from the opening titles introduced in 1974. This has been rendered in monochrome.
Time Vortex circa 1974
Reissues
On 1st May 1978, BBC Sound Effects no.19 Doctor Who Sound Effects (DWSFX) was issued in the UK on vinyl and cassette too (ZCM 316). In the first week it soled over 1500 copies on LP and nearly 400 on cassette.
Canadians also got an LP release in the same year (TRC 918) and the US got a cassette (C22316). American and Spanish fans had to wait till 1982 (BBC 22316) and ’83 (51.0123) respectively for LPs. Spain’s Diapson label called this release ‘Cienia Ficcion’ (translation Science Fiction). They then reissued the LP as a CD in 1990 (950031), but were beaten to the digital punch by Edelton who put out a CD in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1989.
Back in Britain, 2012 saw the issue of both a CD on AudioGo’s ‘Vintage Beeb’ (ISBN 978-1-4084-7055-8) label and an LP reissue (LPBBC24819). This AudioGo LP was available for Record Store Day
No one’s sure what disc Dick is brandishing here, but I like to think that it is for sales of Doctor Who Sound Effects, so I’m putting it here.
Genesis of the Daleks
Doctor Who – Genesis of the Daleks – 1979 – REH 364
Genesis of the Daleks was the fourth serial in the twelfth series of Doctor Who, broadcast in April 1975. Starring the fourth Doctor played by Tom Baker, it is roundly agreed to be one of the all-time best DW stories. It was given a fan pleasing nod on the 2023 Children In Need special, where we meet Dalek prototype presented by a still standing Davros.
The musical score was provided by regular composer Dudley Simpson and the Radiophonic element was added by sound effects stalwart Dick Mills.
Genesis of the Daleks was swiftly repeated in 1975 and then again in 1982 as part of a season of monster themed re-runs ‘Doctor Who and the Monsters. It wasn’t available to buy on VHS tape till 1991. In the meantime, this abridged audio version LP was the only tangible way that fans had to enjoy the adventure, save for the writer Terry Nation’s Target Books novelisation. But, of course…
The abridgement of six 22-25 minute episodes is achieved through the use of a voice-over from Tom Baker, linking the action and filling in missing details where necessary. Some prefer the faster pace of this approach and it certainly has an edge of urgency thanks in no small part to Baker’s earnest delivery. It wasn’t his first such assignment. In 1976 the Argo label released a similarly formatted LP of the story ‘Doctor Who and the Pescatons’. Keeping things in the family, that record was partly put together by Brian Hodgson (amongst others) at his Electrophon Studios. ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ was an in-house BBC production though. “Narrative and Record Realisation” is credited to Derek Goom. If that name sounds familiar in the context of BBC records it’s because Derek Goom not only arranged (from works by J.S. Bach) the theme to ‘Juliet Bravo’, which was released in 1980 (RESL 84), but he also produced many records on the label around the late seventies.
Notably, for our purposes, he was responsible for ‘BBC Sound Effects no. 16 “Disasters”‘, a record which we’ll perhaps see a bit of in a later part of this series. Derek seems to disappear from the scene after the Juliet Bravo signature tune though – maybe it was enough to retire on!
Multi-Track Review
The track-listing of this album is non-existent with the sides being simply labelled Part 1 and Part 2. Nevertheless, I’m going to break the Radiophonic features down below.
Whose Who’s
The theme music is still credited to ‘Ron Grainer and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, which suggests either Brian Hodgson’s comments (citation needed) about Delia Derbyshire being careless with her copyright registration were correct, despite being given due credit for “realisation” on the 1973 single, or perhaps she had a problem with this version. It does have the controversial spangles on. Or maybe they just forgot? Dudley Simpson is credited with Incidental Music and Special Sound is, of course, by Dick Mills. On the TV recording there was also an uncredited grams operator, Gordon Phillipson. This would have been for the less special sounds perhaps. In any case he’s not credited here either.
Off Script
There are scripts available for the Genesis Of The Daleks (Doctor Who The Scripts – Tom Baker 1974/5) but music and sound effects (SFX) cues are (as far as I can see from the sample pages I’ve seen online) not detailed. Hence there is no exact list or record of any kind available that details all the RWS and Dudley Simpson material. This was all added in post-production and by that point, the rehearsal and shooting scripts were only of use as a rough guide to what had actually been recorded and cut together.
To get some sense of the RWS contribution to this record I took notes of all the SFX cues in relation to the points they were used in the story. Whilst I was there, I also listed the music cues – DS for Dudley Simpson. As I covered in the previous part of Discographic Workshop (3B), Simpson’s collaborations with the RWS had ended by 1979, but as this series was created in 1975 the synthesizer overdubs were most likely done at Maida Vale on the EMS Synthi 100 with help from Dick Mills (DM). I have indicated where this is likely to have taken place too.
Side 1
Opening titles signature tune (with spangles!) [Delia Derbyshire realisation assisted by Dick Mills]
Wind atmosphere FX
Music cue [DS]
Timelords disappear FX
Bombardment FX
More wind FX
Narration with music cue (acoustic) [DS]
Gas FX + very dramatic music with synth-overdubs [DS & DM]
Etheric beam locator (sonic screwdriver?)FX
Mutos dialogue + Music Cue (synth) [DS & DM]
Door FX
Shaggy creature muto FX + Music cue [DS]
Struggle music cue [DS]
Control room and doors FX
Scanning sound and power source detect (time ring) FX
Davros is coming alarm FX
Davros music cue (timpani and brass then synth stabs) [DS & DM]
Davros voice FX
Dalek voice FX
Thal dome music cue [DS]
Thal dome atmos FX
Music cue [DS]
Cell door FX
Thal city escape music cue [DS]
Thal city alarm FX
Gun-fire and explosions FX
Davros in Thal city music cue [DS]
Warn Kaled leaders cues (marimba?) [DS]
Rocket music cue [DS]
Soldiers guns FX
Regained consciousness in the control room
Rocket launch/explosion FX
Sting into the closing signature tune. [Delia Derbyshire realisation assisted by Dick Mills]
Side 2
Destruction of city FX
“Let the vengeance begin” Destruction music cue [DS]
Dalek exterminate FX
Dalek speech music cue [DS]
Thal crowd cheering FX
Thal doors FX
Corridor of Thals music cue [DS]
Dalek appears cue [DS]
“Never escape” music cue [DS]
Bunker atmos FX
“Thank you. That’s what I wanted to know” music cue [DS]
Someone in the ventilator music cue [DS]
Davros interrogation equipment FX
“I will have that power” music cue [DS]
Davros captured music cue [DS]
Davros life support alarm FX
“Make the Dalek invincible” sting!
Finding explosives music cue [DS]
Dalek incubators FX – as heard on Doctor Who Sound Effects (REC 316).
Opening viewing port FX
“Preparing genocide” + Music cue [DS]
“Here is a destruct button” + Music cue [DS]
“Wrestled him to the floor” + Music cue [DS]
“Down here” + Music cue [DS]
Time ring FX + Music cue [DS]
“You are insane Davros” Music cue [DS]
Incubation chamber FX + Music cue [DS]
Huge explosion FX
Flashing indicator panel FX
Bunker escape music cue [DS]
Explosion FX
“We are the superior beings” music cue [DS]
Closing sting into sig tune [Delia Derbyshire realisation assisted by Dick Mills]
In 2001 GOTD was again paired with another story. Exploration Earth was another fourth-Doctor and Sarah-Jane Smith adventure, although it had been uniquely created for BBC Schools Radio in 1976. This CD “is presented in a slightly revised and expanded version of its previous LP and cassette releases in 1979 and 1988”. In fact, it was “researched, compiled and digitally remastered” by Mark Ayres. Your guarantee of quality! A further issue of this remastered CD, now under the BBC Audio label and with GOTD only, was given away with purchases of the Daily Telegraph newspaper on 29th April 2010. Both discs featured artwork by Max Ellis.
When you consider that this was a concentrated edit with all the key dramatic moments, the number of effects and cues probably represents more than average for a Doctor Who adventure. That said, it is a lot of effects! It really brings home the amount of work which went in to a typical Doctor Who series.
Kaled Liberation Front
In common with many of the BBC’s sound effects records’ Genesis of the Daleks’ was a popular source of samples with UK hip-hop artists in the 80’s. Coldcut, Junior Gee and Normans Cook’s first foray into sample based cut-and-paste were all graced with snippets of dialogue from this disc.
Let’s take a closer look at those copyright-bothering lifts.
Norman Cook – The Finest Ingredients – “This is only the beginning” & “Exterminate” randomly scattered into a very of its time bit of early extracurricular from the Housemartins’ bassist.
Coldcut – Beats + Pieces – “Alright, just one more time”, in response to James Brown enquiring “Can we do it again?” (from More Peas). Probably the only time the Soul Brother Number One duetted with Tom Baker.
Junior Gee and The A-Team – The Terminator (Killer Rap) – “Exterminate” in a cringe-making reference to the Schwarzenegger classic.
Sleeve Design
Mario Moscardini is busy at his drawing desk this time. Notice anything, err, off about that upwards firing Dalek, second from the left? Is anything not quite true? Jaunty, perhaps? It’s said that the wonky Dalek is from ‘Planet of the Daleks’ but after the ‘World of Doctor Who’ confusion I’m not going there again.
The style here is a pretty clear nod to silent-era horror movies with colourised black and white stills used to invoke the classic posters of the early 20th century. Converting the colour TV serial to a monochrome movie and a stylised form of colour was not pure whimsy. Given the clear parallels between the idea of maniacal scientists creating monsters in an underground lab, Moscardini was obviously inspired by the likes of Frankenstein (1931). Indeed that whole era of DW was in some way a homage to those classic horror flicks.
Frankenstein (1931)
The Doctor Who logo is prominent on the front sleeve and particularly on the reverse. Its art deco styling is particularly appropriate to the era, being evoked by the rest of the design, too.
Reissues
‘Genesis of the Daleks’ (GOTD) was also issued in 1979 as a cassette – ZCR 364. In 1988 another cassette version was produced as part of the BBC Radio Collection series in a double-cassette pack with the sixth Doctor story ‘Slipback’ (ZBBC 1020).
The enduring classic was then re-released on the Vintage Beeb reissues label as another CD. This time the original Mario Moscardini artwork was reused and it seems that this was not the slightly expanded and remastered version from 2001, but a straight transfer from the original disc.
Back in 1979, fans in Australia could get their own vinyl copy (2963 086) and the Americans didn’t miss out either (BBC-22364). The US cassette version (C 22364) came out in 1983, except it apparently has a track listing for BBC Sound Effects no.28 – Comedy (REC 478, 1983) misprinted on the inlay card!
Then, in 2016, the LP was reissued by a subsidiary of BBC Studios, Demon Records. Initially available for Record Store Day, on 180g “70s Tardis Blue” vinyl, it was a limited run of 2500) and the inner sleeve was a pleasingly authentic recreation of the white-on-blue striped logo design of the singles’ company sleeves.
2017 saw the BBC Worldwide CD release of an audio version of the GOTD story from Terrance Dicks novelisation, read by John Culshaw and running 4 hours 10 minutes over 4 discs. This has nothing to do with the previous abridged television audio though.
Appendix
Doctor Who Master FX Reels for LP
18 tape sheets included in the file BBC/CORP/R125/271/1
Not all have marked effects but most have ticks against some effects
Added notes in square parenthesis [like so].
All tapes from #19 onwards are credited explicitly to Brian Hodgson, prior to that assume those are also Brian’s.
The Radiophonic Workshop tape library number (TRW) is not included on all sheets.
**** Tracks on DW SFX LP
Side/Track for effects used
Effects available elsewhere
CD – track – name
6 available on CD
Reel No. 2 – Beyond The Sun (The Daleks)
2. Dalek Control Room **** SIDE 1 – TRACK 2 / #2
3. Whirlpool Start & Constant
14. Dalek Speech Background – Not Used
Reel No. 3 – Beyond The Sun (The Daleks)
11. Brain Washing Machine
13. Bottled Brain
Reel No. 6 – The Dalek Invasion of Earth
2. Slyther Slobers
5. Dalek Electrocuted (A)
Reel No. 8 – The Chase
Mechanoid Constant Run
13. Mechanoid Original Speech [Doctor Who: 30 Years At The Radiophonic Workshop – #7 – Mechanoid (Speech at end)]
Master 12 – The Tenth Plant – TRW 6534
22. Cyberman gets dose of radiation
28. Machinery in Tardis goes wild (for transition) [Doctor Who At The BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Volume 1: The Early Years 1963-1969 – #24 – Machinery In TARDIS Goes Wild (Regeneration)]
Master 19, Reel B – The Evil of the Daleks – TRW 6653
5. Cobweb pulsates [Doctor Who At The BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Volume 1: The Early Years 1963-1969 – #34 – Sting & Web (Cocooning Interior) / Cobweb Pulsates]
Master 24 – The Web of Fear – TRW 6762
3. Tardis interior in flight **** SIDE 2 – TRACK 9 / #17
Master 27, Reel 3 – The Colony Of Devils – TRW 6787
7. Sea weed mix
Master 36, Reel 4 – The Dominators – TRW 6824
4. Hurt Quark goes berserk – explodes [Doctor Who: 30 Years At The Radiophonic Workshop – #27 – Quark Goes Beserk And Explodes]
5. Quark whimpers and gurgles
Master 40, Reel 1 – The Invasion – TRW 6908
Tardis take off slows and painful
Master 41, Reel 2 – The Invasion – TRW 6908
[nothing]
Master 42 – The Krotons – TRW 6942
15. Birth of a Kroton [Doctor Who – The Krotons – #1 – Birth of a Kroton]
Master 45 – The Space Pirates – TRW 6986
[nothing]
Master 48 – The War Games – TRW 7037
Sonic Screwdriver NOT[Side 2 – Track 13] [Doctor Who: 30 Years At The Radiophonic Workshop – #29 – Original Sonic Screwdriver]
Two years ago I wrote a long post about BBC Records’ sound effects albums, and no.13 in particular. I wanted to put Death & Horror Sound Effects in context as well as telling as much of its story as I could. Now, here’s another long post about Death and Horror. A predictable sequel where the original bad guy comes back from the grave? Or a highly entertaining return for an anti-hero fan favourite? Actually, it’s that other franchise staple: the origin story.
Bringing Death And Horror to life
Whereas before I was referring to mostly pubic domain information, now I can prise open the tomb and exhume the story of a landmark BBC LP. Given access to the BBC Written Archive I have seen the extensive original file on this record, including hand-written notes, memos, letters and documents that reveal just how it came to life. Or should that be…
Supernatural & Horror Sound Effects
The paper-trail begins on 10th August 1976 when Death and Horror’s (D&H) producer at BBC Records, Mike Harding (not that one) wrote two letters from his office at 80 The Langham. Both are headed PROPOSED LP OF SOUND EFFECTS, and both begin
“We are putting together an LP of supernatural and horror sound effects.”
R125 / 263 / 1
Dead Letter Drops
Drama…
One letter is sent to Roy Maynard, Programme Operations, Radio, at Broadcasting House; just across the road from The Langham. Roy Maynard was responsible for ‘Off Beat Sound Effects'(REC 198, 1975) but Mike was not asking him to help directly. Mike might have been aware that Maynard had not found his work on that record sufficiently well appreciated by the in-house label. In a memo dated 25th September 1975 he had replied to Jack Aistrop, Head A&R at BBC Records, about the latter’s request for another sound effects record. Maynard points out that he was not remunerated for that despite the work he and his staff did on their own time. Signing off with a jokey threat about the pistol he kept in his desk drawer you get the sense that any future approach would need careful handling.
The polite request this time is for the help of one of Maynard’s “SM’s”. BBC Studio Mangers will be familiar to students of the Radiophonic Workshop because so many of their staff came from these ranks. Distinct from engineers and technicians, who installed and maintained studio facilities the operation of a studio to achieve a broadcast or recording fell to the SMs. They managed the studio, not the talent. It fell to producers to bring in the actors and presenters.
Mike wasn’t making a blind request though.
“I have spoken to Ian Richardson who is keen to help”
R125 / 263 / 1
Whilst he does not insist on Richardson you get the impression that the two had cooked up this idea already. The alternative, he gives Roy would be have to be “someone who is ‘into’ this side of things”.
The specifics of this request are that the SM would both research existing effects and create new ones. The existing effects would come from the extensive BBC Sound Effects archive, which SMs would know better than most. The creation of new effects would also be the stock in trade of the SMs who provided ‘spot effects’. Spot here refers to ‘on the spot’ and means an effect created at the same time as the actors’ performance. Playing the effect live, as it were.
Whilst Richardson was said to be “keen” Jack Aistrop had probably arranged for a budget so that whoever was assigned would not have to give up their own time, and Maynard would have no complaint (or need to reach into his drawer!). Mike states that it is expected to take two or three days and any charges would be covered by BBC Records.
…Workshop
The second letter Mike sent that same day was to Desmond Briscoe, the Organiser of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. For this missive Mike mentions that the album will be a follow-up to ‘Out Of This World Sound Effects no.12 (REC 225) which he adds “has sold very strongly indeed”. OOTW was produced by Workshop staff member Glynis Jones and released in March of 1976.
The request this time is simply for “someone to produce some of these effects”, but as with Ian Richardson Mike had a ‘someone’ in mind. Who else, but Dick Mills? There’s no hint that he has already discussed this with Dick and he simply asks if he is free. Speaking to Dutch radio in 1981 though, Dick explained that they at the Workshop had got wind of this project.
“when we found out that they were doing Death & Horror sound effects records we said ‘would you be interested in any of our sounds…?”
Rauhfaser – Brom en Ruis – afl 162/1v2 – ‘Radiophonic Workshop BBC’ – 7 jan 1981
So, despite the formality of writing to Desmond, maybe there’d already been some informal chat between Workshop and label.
Glynis left the Workshop’s Maida Vale studios and went to work for BBC Records sometime in 1976. Paddy Kingsland’s suite of music from The Changes (RESL 33) came out the same year too, although it seems more likely that Mike’s new colleague would have briefed him on what and who to ask for. And as we’ll see, she was in the loop.
Happy Horrors
A week after his requests went out a reply from Roy Maynard was received on 17th August – glorying under his full title of Production Services Manager, Group 4, Programme Operations, Radio. Evidently they had spoken in the intervening days and he confirms (“as discussed”) that Ian Richardson will be available for the research and recording on 21st – 23rd September.
Roy signs off with advice to book the studio for the recording soon and a cheery “Happy Horrors”! All seems well between Roy and BBC Enterprises, so has a special deal has been done?
All horrors eve?
Thinking of the studio schedule: Wouldn’t D&H have been perfect for a Halloween release date? If Mike had held any hope of releasing D&H by Halloween then this recording date meant that was now out of the question.
Was that ever on the cards though? According to the BBC Records Operations Calendar (handily included in the OOTW file) the October release date fell on the 1st. The next possible release date would then be bonfire night. In fact though, for October to be possible the calendar says you’d need to have your booking forms to Miss Moor by 14th June!
Unnatural Sound Effects
“Some of these will be purely spot/disk or radiophonic in origin – some can be done by both methods.”
R125 / 263 / 1
Just under a week after securing the services of Ian Richardson, Mike writes to his colleague under the heading Horror Sound Effects (suggesting that the supernatural element had been exorcised). Glynis Jones is copied in too, showing that she was in the mix. We learn that the Paris Studio (not in Paris) had been booked for 22nd September from 10-6, and this will cover “spot/disk FX dubbing”. This means they will record the ‘spot’ effects and copy the effects which will be taken from the BBC effects library discs too.
Murders Mostly Horrid
The letter mainly provided a complete list of effects proposed for the album. This is very close to the eventual record, although a couple are notable for their later absence. Particularly eye-catching is “man hit by car”. This is certainly more in the Death category and it’s not surprising it was omitted. Erm. This time. Other suspicious deaths are ‘Man falling out of window’ a “burning at stake sequence’, ‘person drowning’ and the no less pleasant, but probably more controversial, ‘crucifixion’. That one was renamed and most of the other murders were committed to vinyl… in later D&H editions.
It’s easy to see all this as extremely distasteful, when taken for entertainment, but a lot of that stuff is an everyday occurrence in drama. It’s not recorded in this file but it’s quite probable that this list was compiled from requests that BBC Records had received. Indeed this fact was used in defence of the album later.
Radiophonic in origin
Moving forward a couple of weeks and Mike has been on the ‘phone (that’s how he wrote it!) to Dick Mills. The day after this call, 10th September, he writes to Dick, copy Ian and Glynis. As well as enclosing the same list of effects he sent to Ian, the letter sets out those which will be “radiophonic in origin”.
These ‘Radiophonic in origin’ effects are the Special Sounds which the Workshop was set up to create. Special Sounds are things which are impossible to capture either in the outside world or in front of a studio microphone. Or at least, not easily.
Hence Dick is asked for ghostly winds, supernatural creatures, laboratory and electric noises (think Dr Frankenstein), unnatural screams (“through a synthesizer”), the swinging pendulum (“as in Pit & Pendulum, Edgar Allen Poe), King Kong, swamps, squelching and some musical effects. One such is ghostly piano, but not actual music – “the usual fingers over the strings – no tunes please”. The other is ghostly organ “to suit a phantom of the opera”. The arrow arriving effect is specified “as in TV ad. for Strongbow cider!”.
Finally there’s a comment on mono and stereo recordings. Mike says he can “stereoize” anything in mono although he wants anything Dick is newly creating to come in stereo.
Die(l) A Disk
Next in the chronology is a set of five pages headed ‘Mike’. Given that we know Ian was booked to hunt through the effects library and you don’t usually write your own name at the top of whatever you’re writing, I think these are the notes he made. It’s also headed ‘FX’ and each section has an underlined sub-heading, such as “Various Winds” and “Inn Sign”. These follow the list Mike sent, with some additions.
Each of these ideas is expanded on in the sections with a list of possible effects from the sound effects library, including descriptions and the Sound Effects Centre catalogue numbers. Some of Ian’s notes refer to ‘spot’ effects as he identifies those sounds which are not on the effects library shelves and will be recorded by themselves. Others he notes as Radiophonic, as they are on the list Dick Mills will produce – And then they are crossed out,
To these jottings, Mike has added his own notes at several different times, using different pens. Many of these refer to effects from the BBC Records’ own Sound Effects series. For example, ‘Man Hit By Car’ is suggested as 84D and E, to which Mike notes “good skid”. Then he suggests “skids (on disc) + Thump (spot)”. Then “Car Crash on RED 76 no.2”. Finally “[illegible] up-to crash + then body thump”.
New work, London, Paris, Murder
Now we come to the recording session, which remember was booked for 22nd September. The booking form shows the date was set on 19th August, just after Roy Maynard’s advisory note on getting it done soon. It also shows that the form wasn’t despatched until 24th, which explains the gap before informing Ian of the date.
The Paris Studio was also better known as the Paris Theatre. This former cinema located on Lower Regent Street in London was used by the BBC for recordings with live audiences. Comedy, drama and many pop music performances were done there and Mike was doubtless familiar with it from his stint as presenter on Sounds Of The Seventies and their live shows; Ian wound likewise be at home there.
So, rather than a clean, sound treated studio they ended up in a live space. No mention is made of this choice in the paperwork present in the BBC archive, but I suspect that the mess with cabbages they were going to make might have been a factor. In the theatre I assume Mike was present with Ian. According the sleeve notes Lisa Braun was also involved although I can find no trace of her in the documents, except for a bit of different hand-writing which maybe is hers. It’s also clear that they’d need another pair of skilled hands to get the recordings done and perhaps the recording channel (room) would need an operator off-stage.
The file contains a page of hand-written notes headed “Paris 22/9/76”. This is all there is to document the day’s activities. A numbered list of twenty one effects and another of five more. It appears that each list refers to a tape. Speaking of tape, the booking form had specified that the producer would bring their own. These were the heydays of tape recording and there will be more tapes to come as the record is assembled.
The effects begin with guillotine slides (1), followed by the head dropping into straw (2), the blade through neck being crossed out and appearing out of sequence next (3). More neck violence (4) sawing head off (5) chopping with axe (6) and so on. Most of this matches the first band on the record, titled Execution and Torture.
What’s not always clear from these notes is what are spot effects and which are auditions of effects from “disk”. There are a couple of annotations which are obviously Sound Effects Centre (EC) catalogue numbers.
“84C good (b3)”
That refers to band 3 of the back side of 84C which contains wooden crashes. The note for that was probably added later as it’s in a different pen and is Mike comparing what they got in the studio with existing effects. Also, the list changes from Mike’s writing to another hand for effects 14-16 and then goes back to his. Those might be Lisa’s.
The second tape includes a load of throat work with screams and strangulations. Was Lisa there to provide the female takes? No, it seems they were taken from SFX records too.
As Ian’s sleeve notes make clear most effects on the record are from the effects library but they did use a real red hot poker on cabbages. This fire hazard must have required a certain amount of forethought, I’m sure they didn’t want to risk burning down the Paris Theatre or simply being thrown out for showing insufficient care. Let’s assume a brazier of hot coals wasn’t used, however it was actually done in practice.
Alongside the list of recordings committed to tape are notes in Mikes’s hand and a different pen. Obviously these are his thoughts on playback. Various comments such as “good”, “no use” and “last one” referring to specific takes. I imagine the tape consists of spoken cues – e.g. ‘Four: neck broken’ – followed by several takes. He also redefined some notes. “8 Hot poker through eye”, ditto 9, are confirmed as “into cabbage” and “into water” respectively. Here he starts to refine his ideas and adds “call it Branding” to the water one. There are several other notes about adding echo, which will come up again and again as he summons stereo from base mono sounds.
Off The Shelf
The next dated documents come a month after the Paris Studio session, on 20th October. Two letters, both requesting effects from the BBC Sound Archive.
He writes to an A.E. Trebble at ‘Archives’ asking for dubbing to tape copies of various creatures. Four in total from three discs, specified by their LP prefixed catalogue numbers. These numbers are an indication that these were not 78 discs but 33 RPM micro groove long players. Also this indicates that they are not simply the older generation of sound effects records, but archived sounds, a different purpose, but still useable as effects. None of these were on Ian’s original effects library notes, so maybe Mike went there in search of more stuff.
The BBC Sound Archives are distinct from the Sound Effects Library, whom he also wrote to at their Western House basement on the same day. This was a much longer list based on those notes from September and some new ideas.
The digging grave effect is requested from 83G – Digging in stony ground – not 186C (which was struck out) or 83K B1, which had been commented as “best”. However, digging in both wet and stoney ground is on the final album. In fact, all this digging came from the army and was recorded in 1970.
Of interest only to me is that Mike added the matrix number of every Sound Effects library record after the catalogue number. These are long numbers, tedious to type in by hand, so he evidently had good reason to do so.
Tapes from the cryptic
In both letters Mike asks for the dubbing at a specific tape speed – 15 ips for best quality – and Dolby coding in Channel H59. This mysterious entity seems to be a particular facility at The Langham where high quality Dolby noise reduction equipment is available. He mentions that it is shared by his department with Archives, but that’s all I know at present. Pleasse comment if you can throw any light on this corner of the mid-seventies BBC facilities.
Copyright
The other concern he raises with the Sound Archive is copyright. The original recordist of ‘Siamese Cat’ is the celebrated Ludwig Koch, who was well know to BBC Records from many wildlife sounds albums.
Mike’s legal diligence continues into the next letter, dated 6th December, which is to the Copyright Department. This is to apparently follow up on an ongoing check on Koch’s cat and add use of bat recordings by Eric Simms, another wildlife recording legend and BBC label stalwart.
Simms’ recordings are to be taken from a BBC Records album. Wildlife series no. 2 – British Mammals and Amphibians (RED42, 1969). The deal on that LP was that Simms retained the copyright for the original recordings and took a royalty on the sales of the record. Mike had already agreed with Eric to pay a flat fee for the use of the ‘Greater Horseshoe Bat – calls of hungry young and adults flying’ for the sum of £8. That’s around £45 in today’s money.
Sleeve Artwork
As he seems to have a day when he writes letters, another he sends on the 8th December is to his label colleague Andrew Prewett. He starts by saying it’s too early for a full design as he doesn’t have a running order yet. Instead he lists out again some of the grisly noises to be expected – including frogs, which didn’t make it to the final album.
He asks Andrew to think about a sleeve design concept:
“Either a montage (as in ‘Out of this World’) or one of the subjects taken individually would be good.”
R125 / 263 / 1
By this time though he has settled on a new working title: Sound Effects no.13 ……. Death and Horror. Which is strange because although this remains consistent throughout the file and is aligned with the rest of the sound effects series the actual sleeve design says not no.13, but Vol. 13. This appears to be a mistake and I have no other explanation for the anomaly.
The rest is history, as I covered in my previous post, and the montage Andrew painted elevated the album to iconic status as well as giving fair warning of the contents.
In Living Mono
At long last, on 14th December 1976, Dick Mills writes back to Mike:
“Herewith your esteemed order! The bands (all in living ‘mono’ for your delectation and subsequent transmogrification by the adept use of reverberation) are as follows:”
R125 / 263 / 1
Worth waiting for, for that rhetorical flourish alone, I think!
TARDI(S)-NESS
Before looking at what he sent over for D&H, it’s worth a cross-reference with the Radiophonic Workshop tape archive to see what Dick had been up to in the past couple of months. Luckily for Mike, Doctor Who wasn’t in production so Dick was not fully engaged. Not that he could avoid it entirely. ‘Dalek Announcements’ for Woman’s Hour, ‘Doctor Emu & The Dustbins’ for BBC1 and ‘Doctor Who Signature Tune for [schools TV] Christmas Show’ demonstrate the interest in the show at this time.
But I digress. Clearly Dick was given the time to get the tape together for Mike as his other jobs dry up in November, logging just one tape for the whole month; another Emu Broadcasting Company spoof, this time The Bionic Man (TRW 8504).
The aforementioned DW sig tune for BBC Schools (TRW 8511) is logged just ahead of “Enterprises Record (Effects – Death and Horror/Suspense)” (TRW 8512) in December. After that his work rate picks up again. I’m not sure that Dick really took a whole month to make the effects for D&H though. It might have been a case of one effect per day, but I doubt it. Dick was well used to turning out lots of effects against the clock on Doctor Who.
Dick Mills at The Radiophonic Workshop early 1977 – The Lively Arts – Whose Doctor Who? (BBC2, 3rd April 1977)
Nineteen to a dozen
Dick’s tape has a list of nineteen “bands” with some repeated examples. In full it comprised:
Pendulum & Pit x2
Heartbeats regular and fast
arrow (2)
lab backgrounds x2
swamp
organ
static, short circuits etc.
hounds “(perhaps werewolf too)”
whizz-bangs
explosions manifestation (2)
feet x2.
To this list have been added Mike’s comments on timings, lengths and further details on what’s on each band. Dick signs off: “Have fun – and a Merry Christmas”.
The nineteen Radiophonic effects are then listed on another sheet, reduced to just twelve sounds. This page of notes has some technical gubbins tabulated on the left. A column of what look like frequencies where equalisation has been applied and two more columns headed A and B with plus and minus numbers. Possibly speeds of tape playback.
The ‘Radiophonics’ are listed down the page right, but not matched to the technicalities on the keft – although they are headed “now dubbed Dolby”. Mike also notes which are stereo. Dick only provided mono effects so there’s been some of that “adept use of reverberation” applied here.
The Squelching Footsteps effect which Dick supplied was used usurping an existing ‘Squelshing Footsteps’ effect which Ian had noted down from the library. A note with arrow pointing to the record EC 100Q says “check it”. 100Q is in the library catalogue as “Sound of footsteps squelching (From 78 disc) – 1964” and has one walk on each side. You can hear both here, on the BBC Rewind site and compare with Dick’s rendition on the LP. By pure fluke I also came across the original 78 RPM disc of the library effects at a record fair during the process of writing this post. This is catalogue (disc) number 6 B 42 on the Recorded Programmes Permanent Library label. I’ll write more about that another time.
FX13
Several pages of scribbled notes follow which capture the final assembly of D&H.
Mike arranges his effects’ running order across four sheets and decides on sections A-F, with A, D, E , F on side 1 and B & C on side 2. No precise dates are on these sheets, but they must have been first worked out ahead of getting the Radiophonic tape as the notes are seemingly reworked with red pen after receiving Dick’s effects, adding an ‘R’ (often numbered) to denote each of the twelve dubbed effects. Mike also reworks some of the running order, inserting and swapping things around. There is a third and final pass in a thicker black pen too.
The sections are
A – Execution & Torture
B – Vocal Effects & Heartbeats
C – Weather, Atmosphere & Bells
D – Monsters & Animals
E – Doors Digging & Creaking
Originally ‘Doors & Creaks & Bangs’
Footsteps moved to F
later rejigged as Creaking Doors And Grave Digging for the final sleeve
F – Musical Effects & Footsteps.
The mono effects are labelled with an asterisk, as on the final sleeve notes.
Release The Release With Hounds!
With the running order worked out and presumably a master tape created, plus the sleeve notes and other details finalised the release is ready to go. A BBC Records & Tapes Information Sheet is prepared on 7th January. This form is filled in as follows:
Title: Sound Effects No.13 – Death and Horror
Release Date: March 1977
Retail Price: £1.95
The six bands are listed out but some details are missing, such as the pressing quantity. We learn something about that when Mary Whitehouse takes the BBC to task after release.
The following Monday the 10th January sees a flurry of correspondence. The cutting details are sent to Jo King (real name!) a secretary in the A&R department, and arrangements for Mike’s presence at the cutting is requested. Jo writes to Andrew Prewett with the sleeve notes, label and repertoire sheets.
The third internal communication on the 10th January is from the Copyright Department. This confirms that The Hound Of The Baskervilles is still in copyright. A note from Mike dated the 11th states that he phoned them back and told them not to proceed with clearing this as it had already been changed. Just as well! It looks like the query went unanswered for some time and Mike took the safe option of renaming it to the Hell-Hound. That must have happened quite late as it was still Hound of… on the final set of notes.
Music Week, November 1975
One day later the Copyright Department write to Mike to confirm that the BBC acquired the copyright for Dr Koch’s Siamese Cat recording in 1948. Phew! It would have been a bit late, after the sending of the release the day before.
Fangs Very Much
On 19th January Mike writes a brief note back to Dick with his thanks.
“I’ve used everything except the whizz-bangs, explosions and manifestation – they were too similar to Glynis’s LP”
R125 / 263 / 1
He also says that the album should be out in “March or April”. This throws a bit of doubt over the actual release date, which was supposedly March on the Information Sheet. In any case he promises to send a copy over.
Finally, another letter on the 19th January. In this case it’s a payment to Ian Richardson. This is £25 for writing the sleeve notes. It wasn’t much then either, about £140 in today’s money, but this small consideration for writing those notes was a typical fee paid at the time and does mean he got something. This may have been part of a deal struck by Roy Maynard, or just something they worked out later. It’s nice to see though and resolves the issue of payment missing from Off Beat’s production.
Conclusion
I hope you found some of that interesting! There’s plenty more to dig up about this record. The Mary Whitehouse archive at the Bodleian library in Oxford holds a wealth of correspondence about her fight against Death and Horror Sound Effects (confirmed to me by Samira Ahmed!). There are some press cuttings in the file which I’ve held back too. There’s a reference there to a BBC press release, which isn’t in the file. In the file are a couple of documents about using the sleeve design for a book cover. That doesn’t seem to have come to anything though. And, of course, there are two more editions in the Death and Horror series to come…
There is very much more to say about which library effects were used too. One day I will probably work through all the notes to trace them back the Sound Effects discs. The mad gorilla is quite intruiging as it’s called King Kong throughout the notes and doesn’t seem to come from a BBC sound effects origin at all. Also, did an angel turn into a vampire?
After a brief introduction to Regular Expressions last time it’s time to actually scan the 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue and turn it into a text file.
I’ve cleaned it up a bit since I got it, but this is how it came to me
Happily, I had already photographed this whole thing in early 2022. That taught me that the OCR task was not at all easy and I put it to one side. Eventually I realised that pulling the catalogue numbers alone was possible and very useful.
As you saw in the previous post, the OCR scan vandalised the text. I forget which tool I used for that example, but there are various ways and means to do this and the results are only part of the problems you’ll have doing a big job. In general you get better outputs when you zoom in on a smaller area though. Whatever, I needed to quickly scan 358 pages and create a monster text file and of the inevitable scrambled mess be damned.
Power Down
My first thought was to use the Microsoft Power Automate application. It’s very easy to cycle through a folder of images, OCR them for text and then append it all to one big document ready for searching. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working properly at the moment – throwing an error about memory. I won’t go into here, but I’ve tried a lot of things and it it’s a bust. For now.
Lens Not Good, Man
I then went round a few options but ended up on my phone. Not doom scrolling or whatever I’m supposed to be doing on it, but using apps. Microsoft moved their Lens app to become mobile only in the past couple of year and basically that’s their free solution. It’s alright and works fine but I needed to batch OCR all the page images and I couldn’t make that work.
Adobe (S)can
Adobe have their own app with similar functionality called Scan. It’s free! Unless you want to get large batches done. Even then it’s limited to 50 at a time. Well, there’s a 7-day trial so after loading all the images onto my phone I selected batches of 50 at a time and opened then in Adobe Scan. 7 or 8 batches later (the eighth was a small one) I had created 8 Word document files full of this kind of thing:
Not As Good As Your Word
That’s a Word document exported from Adobe Scan and opened in Word on my desktop. And, you’re probably thinking that it looks pretty good! And it does. Why can’t that be turned into a digital version of the catalogue??
Briefly, how it looks up there is built on underlying formatting which has none of the apparent order and line-by-line coherence that you see. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle of elements which come together to make the picture look right. If you take an individual piece though, it’s not a line or even a column. There are all kinds of fragmetary chunks of text that include lines and columns in a random patterns.
So, there’s no real value in that as it stands. Tantalising as it looks, and searchable as it is, it does not convert to anything else I can use.
Mark My Words
Never mind though. All I had to do was copy all the text from all the documents and paste them into a simple .txt file. The next step required a slightly more nerdy application. Instead of MS Notepad, I used Notepad++, a free code editor and notepad.
Notepad++ has a couple of key features which made the job of extracting the catalogue numbers a cinch. Firstly it has regex searches. As covered in the previous post, the regex search pattern below will find all the catalogue numbers.
((EC)|(NH))\d+[ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ]\d*
That’s useful, but alone is not enough. I need to find ’em all and the select and copy the matches. Notepad++ has a cool feature called Mark. As well as Find and Replace, Mark can search for the text you want. It then selects – or, marks – that text so that you can copy it. Or, delete, cut etc.
Notepad++ finds and marks all the catalogue numbers.
So, with that done it’s only the catalogue numbers in my clipboard and a total of 11,434 sift through. I’m ready to paste to Excel and really start sorting out these numbers!
Excellent
Pasting into Excel, the next job is to remove duplicates using the tool on the Data tab. That removed 9,714 duplicates leaving a total of 1,720 unique values. Is that corect? Is that the number of EC, ECS and NHS 7″ records in the catalogue? You’ll have to wait to next time to see how that went.
The EC and NH are prefixes for Sound Effects Centre catalogue numbers, so that’s a clue. The capital letters are a complete alphabet minus the letters I and O, which is another.
Expressed Purpose
This is a regular expression. You don’t come across them in everyday programmes like MS Office applications but they make searching for text with regular a pattern, like catalogue numbers, much easier. Try it for your self here: https://regexr.com/.
The pattern above will match any text which follows the pattern of a BBC Sound Effects Centre catalogue number. Although the BBC may have called them disc numbers, I’m calling them catalogue or cat. numbers. I’m going to work through this pattern match in detail below, for those that are interested. For now just remember that I can find all the catalogue numbers in a text file if they follow that regular pattern.
I was on about searching. Search what? Why, the November 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue, of course! The cherry on the top of the mega donation and a gift for anyone who wants to attempt a discography. Here’s page 1 of 358.
One day, I hope, I will be able to scan this whole thing line by line and have the entire thing searchable. Let’s just say that is a non-trivial problem for now. What I can do is get a quick OCR scan of the text. Here’s an extract from another page.
Chatter: Exterior. General chatter. - Nov 66 - 3'0" EC40A b01 Cheerful chatter. - Nov 66 - 3'O" EC40A b02 Chatter and footsteps on gravel. - Nov 66 - 3'2" EC40A f01 Chatter and footsteps on gravel, animated. - Nov 66 - 2'27" EC40A f02 Crowd leaving mosque, busy atmosphere with some children. (Kano, Northern Nigeria) - 1967 - 3'30" EC51C b02 Native village chatter, medium-sized crowd. - 1970 - 1'170 EC51K b02 Excited chatter from large crowd. (Wide perspective) ¿„Jun 70 - 6'35" EC40F f Mixed cheerful chatter. (Thirty people) - Aug 70 - 40" EC40G b04 General atmosphere of crowd at protest meeting, 6000 people. (Recorded outdoors, England) - Sep 71 6'30" ЕСДОН f Chatter at close of protest meeting. (6000 people, recorded outdoors in England) - Sep 71 - 1'35" ECAOJ f04 Large cosmopolitan crowd with footsteps and speech. - Nov 71 6/2" ЕС4OK f
It’s not too bad as these things go, but I had to do some manual fiddling to get it that good! The problem really is that instead of the neat lines of entries in the catalogue it all gets messed up and jumbled about. The OCR needs to be told the format of the page to reassmble it in the same format, otherwise it assumes it’s paragraph text like you’re reading now, and it gets very confused.
Anyway, at least there are a catalogue numbers in there. EC40K, for instance. But also garbled numbers like ECA0K, which looks like it should be EC40J.
My theory was that even without reassmbling the original pages’ format I could do a quick and dirty scan of all the pages and search for cat. numbers. It’s worthwhile searching for them because knowing all the catalogue numbers in the catalogue in 1985 should provide a very good, maybe even complete, list of all the 7″ discs the BBC ended up with before switching entirely to CD. I’ll save ytou the anticipation by stating now that there were more released after this catalogue. Still, I’ve only had a vague idea till now, based on my collection and Mike’s Collection at https://www.6868.me.uk/ how many records were released. This snapshot from November 1985 will be useful.
Luckily I had spent time in early 2022 photographing every page in the catalogue. That had shown me how difficult this scanning was going to be and I set them aside for another day. Sometime later I realised that the catalogue numbers alone would be quite useful and as they are quite easy to pluck from the mess of text.
Once I’ve got all the cat. numbers searched out I will find new cat. numbers, not currently in my list. I’m sure of that. Then there’ll be ones that aren’t in there but I know for a fact exist and can pull out of my collection to prove it.
Next time the scanning…
Or read on for more regex…
Regular Expression
((EC)|(NH))\d+[ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ]\d*
The EC and NH are inside brackets, which is to say they are a group of characters we want to find together. We want to find EC or NH at the start of the thing we’re looking for so we have both seperated by the pipe symbol | which is typically useing to make a logical OR in programming.
All catalogues start with an EC or and NH so that whole group is saying, ‘find text with EC or NH’
((EC)|(NH))
And that might be enough to find most of the catalogue numbers. It depends on the text though. The word EFFECTS is on every page and that matches (EC), so let’s keep going.
In all the SEC catalogue numbers the catalogue prefix is followed by a number. In Regular Expressions (regex, for short) we find digits with the ‘\d’ character class. That ‘\d’ will find a single digit 0-9, but not if there are more one digit, say 57. Then it would only return 5 in the search result. That why in my pattern I have to have ‘\d+’. That ‘+’ is saying find one or more of something, in this case digits.
\d+
Strictly speaking I only need to find 1-4 digits because there are no 5-digit or higher numbers. For that kind of search there’s a range quantifier in curly brackets. I could have used \d{1,4}. I gambled that no scan would incorrectly match 5 or more digits and if I was wrong about the 4-digit maximum I’d find out. Also I only thought of that when I was writing this. Moving on!
The next bit is in square brackets ‘[ ]’ The idea here is to find any one of these characters. In the case of SEC catalogue numbers the next element is a single capital letter, so I want ‘any one of these capital letter characters’. The BBC had a rule though, never to use ‘I’ or ‘O’. Presumably because they can too easily be mistaken for a 1 or 0 (one or zero). EC 11I1 would be terrible. EC10O5 would be similarly troublesome. Hence it’s the whole alphabet minus those two letters.
[ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ]
Now, for the original mono SEC records that’s all you need.
EC + digit(s)* + a captial letter.
*See what I did there? There’s a convention built into common written English which allows for one or more, a bit like regex.
When the stereo ECS records came in a final digit, or digits, was added on the end, so instead that pattern is:
EC + digit(s)* + a captial letter. + digit(s)
We’ll need another \d to find all catalogue numbers of both types and a zero or more quantifier so we can find either pattern, with and without the final digit(s). That quantifier is ‘*’
\d*
Hold on! I hear someone muttering at the back, you missed out the ‘S’ on the end of ECS. Yes, that’s right. I did that on purpose because in the search I’m doing the ‘S’ for stereo isn’t used. Nor is there a space between the prefix and number. Instead of, say ‘ECS 1T3’ I only have to search for EC1T3. Thats’s the convention in the printed catalogue. When I come to doing this on the record labels it will be a different regular expression I need.
“Notes on paper sleeve from pressing plant which state “PU58, JOB 27422, 150 pressings, 4-3-75” Field recordings made in 1969 from label.”
How about that?!
Welllll, let’s start with the record. It’s the sounds of a Ford Cortina motor car recorded from the interior. We get the doors opening and closing, wipers, the starter motor and running the engine. If you can’t remember what a late sixties car sounded like, or never knew, you can hear it all here on the BBC Rewind SFX website. If you keep scrolling you’ll get to the exterior recorded sounds and these are on EC 19G and EC 19H. Oh, and there’s stereo recordings of the Ford Cortina 1500 on there too. Those come from ECS EM4,5,6,7 and 8! And! The Cortina 1.6 too! on ECS EM25-29.
I don’t have the space or any inclination to go into the details of the various models of the Cortina, but they sold a lot of them and it’s no surprise that they are well represented in the BBC SFX library.
In typical Discogs style though, whilst the labels are there to see, there is no photo of this paper sleeve. The BBC FX 7”s famously come in plastic sleeves, so this paper one from the pressing plant might have been test pressing! Ooh!
In any case, I’m going to take the information at face value and see what I make of it.
The Discogs entry has the EC 193F ‘Released’ date set to 4th March 1975. Can that be right? It is the date on the note from the pressing plant, so maybe. On the other hand the photographs of EC 19F tell a different tale.
The first image of the front side has two stamps: ‘BRISTOL SOUND TRANSFER SUITE’ and ‘BRISTOL EFFECTS’. I can only imagine these are from BBC Bristol. The Back side has another stamp ’15 MAR 1973′. Well that puts the mockers on this being released in 1975, doesn’t it? Unless some joker working in the Bristol Effects Suite had their stamp set-up for 1973 in 1975 it would appear that this copy is not the one with the note on the paper sleeve. It would be nicer if the Discogs note matched the images, but we must be grateful for what we have.
Alright, so the pressing in 1975 may have been a repress. Let’s have a closer look. The note ends with the comment that the recordings are from 1969, which they are indeed, according to the label. Four years before the 1973 stamp and six before the 1975 pressing note. Alright, no messing about now, were the Cortina 1600 effects released before 1973?
Yes. They are in the 1971 catalogue so the stamp from 1973 and the note from 1975 are from long after the actual release date. Of course I can do better than that though. Were they released in 1969?
To be sure when this was first released let’s have a look at the matrix number. The discogs photo has 7FRD 125243 on the front side. The nearest matrix number I have for another BBC Record is 125672 and I have dated that to… 1969. So, that copy pictured on Discogs is possibly from an original pressing from 1969. Or maybe a later one in 1973? No idea, really, but lets say probably one of the original 150 copies pressed in 1969.
Now I thought I should check some other copies. And because I’m not in my garage as I type this bit I reached my fingers across the keyboard and checked Mike’s Collection website instead. Yes, he has that one and oh! Look! It’s the exact same copy from Discogs. Not the same photos, but the copy, no question. And, well the sleeve is only visible in one image, but could just be a paper sleeve. There’s a crease in one corner which is all but impossible to get in the plastic sleeves. Well, Mike says the sleeve is plastic, so maybe not. And the reverse looks like, errm, not sure what to be honest.
Apart from it seems Mike bought his off Discogs. I haven’t learned anything new there.
As the two I found on the web are actually the same one I’ll have to go out to the garage and see if my two copies have anything new to add.
EC 193F Set A copy
EC 193F Set B copy
Absolutely identical the Discogs/Mike copy, apart from they are clear of any stamps.
But wasn’t I supposed to be finding something interesting? Let’s go back to that pressing plant note. And try really hard.
First up it’s “PU58”. I have no idea. P for pressing is somewhat possible, but is that Press Up? Again. No idea. Oh dear.
Let’s try “JOB 27422”. That’s quite a big number. It could be the number of jobs done to that date. What jobs exactly? I suppose jobs for the BBC. I can get an approximate idea of the number of jobs the BBC had ordered by 1975 by looking at my matrix numbers from that year. They come out around 136,000. Divide that by two, because each one has two sides, at least, and you get nowhere near 27,422. It’s more than twice that at 68,000. But the job number would be only for that pressing plant. In this case it’s Decca, as in the 7FRD matrix code prefix. If you take into account that other plants were producing a similar number of BBC pressings as Decca and factor in the (err) fact that a large number of jobs would have had four or more sides, and squint a bit… I’m saying that this could just be the number of jobs Decca had done for the BBC at that time.
The next one is easy. “150 pressings” is not just self explanatory though. As I mentioned in the post on matrix number dating and represses with different matrix numbers, the number of pressings was worked out in 1965. There’s a memo in the BBC Written Archive which lays out the numbers of new records to be released per week and per year to get to a target of 1000 (2000 sides) in five years. What’s pertinent here is that the memo says they will press 150 of each. This is said to be a “high number” which will means “the need to reorder will be reduced to the minimum”. Since 1969 had they needed to repress EC 193F before 1975? I really don’t know. Sorry! But, they may have only got away with only needing 150 from 1969 to 1975 in this case.
Or till “4-3-75” to be precise.
That’s all I can say for now, but I’m slowly seeing more of the bigger picture.
Late on in the collating (see previous post) I noticed these two copies of EC 91C – English Church Bells – had different matrix numbers. And I had to sit down to absorb this information.
EC 91B with two different matrix numbers – not just front and back differences!
I was rocked back on my heels by this because it means an assumption I had about dating these records was wrong. I was assuming any represses would have used the same stamper and I can always rely on the matrix number to stay the same. But I was wrong. Not always.
As the years passed the BBC Sound Effects Centre moved around pressing plants. The metal stampers aren’t held by the BBC and the plants would only use their own, I assume. And so all the matrix number really tells us is roughly when that record was first pressed by that plant. A repress at the same plant might have reused old stampers and it might be of some interest to compare the label printing and sleeves of those. That’s another story though.
Anyway, back to these EC 91B records. I can date these different matrix numbers to 1966 and 1974. In this case I can be fairly sure that the record was originally issued in 1966 and then repressed in 1974. I figured this our by looking at lots and lots of other non-retail BBC records and building up a range of numbers for each year. It’s a work in progress but really locates the year pretty accurately.
EC 91B 1966
EC 91B 1974
I have four copies of EC 91B. The earlier one pictured above has a BBC TELEVISION stamp and comes from a small batch I got from eBay several years ago. The ’74 one I think came from Moz. That means I should have Set A an d Set B copies that came from the mega donation. And here is the Set A copy.
My ‘Set A’ keeper copy of EC 91D
Note the marker pen red cat no. on the sleeve, which identifies it as part of that donation. The matrix number dates it to 1966 and it’s identical to the one shown above.
Now here’s the Set B one.
This one was stuck in its sleeve and once out was hard to get back in! But I did do so “IMMEDIATELY”, as instructed.
It’s a later 1974 copy. And it has a blue marker pen number on the corner of the sleeve, meaning it’s from the mega donation, but it is a later pressing. Jethro said he thought two sets had been combined to make the huuuuge donation, which is how I ended up with a large Set A and B.
The two I spotted as being non-indentical are in my duplicates boxes. The left-hand disc with BBC TELEVISION stamp, I think, came from my eBay set and may have been pressed at Orlake, (FRO) which opened in Dagenham in 1963. The right-hand one is from 1974 and came from the Moz donation, pressed at Decca. The printing is remarkably similar.
So what? Well, as I said. I can’t completely rely on the matrix numbers to date a catalogue number. If I only photograph one and that’s one with a later repress matrix number I’m going to get the wrong date. Even if I photo everthing I have – which is of course something I’d rather avoid – I might only own copies from a repress with a later matrix number! Arrrgh! That’s a shame as in a discograhy where the catalogue numbers are no help in dating the records the matrix numbers really do help to tell the story.
The good news is that upon checking a few more multiple copies I can see all kinds of represses that do have the same 1960s matrix numbers despite coming from clearly different eras of pressings. Different labels, sleeves and formatting. There are other interesting things in the other pressing differences too (honest!); that’s not for now though.
All my copies of EC 99A – All with the same matrix numebrs.
For those represses with completely different matrix numbers I have a trick or two up my sleeve to help with spotting the differences.
Firtsly though, one trick that I mustn’t play is thinking I can rely on the catalogue numbers being sequential. If the matrix numbers indicate that the catalogue runs A 1966, B 1974, C 1966, I can’t just assume I have a different plant repress of catalogue no. B and correct it to 1966. Nothing is that easy. I have seen gaps in the catalogue sequence filled some years later, so the algorithm for making such an assumption needs a bit of work.
However, I do think that if those A, B, and C catalogue numbers have the same matrix number prefix I can be more cetain. If they were all 7FRD, then they should all be Decca pressings and then, even though it seems unlikely that B appeared 8 years after A and C, that would seem to be the case. Now, I’d also be surpirsed to see a new matrix number from the same pressing plant, but I can’t rule that out completely either. Good stuff, eh!?
A very useful cross reference available to me is a catalogue from 1971, with a supplement from 1972, which I saw at the BBC Written Archive. If I find a disc with a matrix number for 1974, but it is in that earlier dated catalogue, I’m warned to set a lower limit on the release year. And, yes, EC 91B is in that catalogue so even if I only had the matrix number from 1974 I’d have know it was older than that. Oh, and you can see what was in the catatlogue via my super-simple first cut webpage here.
If I’m lucky a lot of the matrix numbers from represses will come from after 1971-72. This might seem to be overly optimistic, but thanks to that catalogue I can tell that the bulk of the mono EC catalogue was done by 1971. Then, as the market grew they repressed the old ones and maybe ordered larger quantities of the new ones to avoid repressing. That should make life a bit easier for your dedicated discographer!
I’ll see how this goes though. I have a good idea that they pressed up 150 copies of each record in the sixties, based on a memo from 2nd June 1965.
“it is hoped that in placing a high initial order of 150 pressings the need to re-order will be reduced to a minimum”.
This was the plan for the first five years anyway. The evidence of all the various repressing I’ve seen is that they went back to the pressing plant a few times.
That memo also says they are going for “4 x 7 inch couplings per week”. Interesting way of putting it! This should mean that I will find some groups of four records with consecutive matrix numbers. Eight numbers in fact, as every side has a number. It should also be quite clear what order records were pressed in and therefore probably what they thought most important to get done first.
In the extreme I might be able to place certain matrix numbers in halves or quarters of a year or even a certain month! But that really would be exceptional.
If all else fails I can do manual checks and guesswork. Some effects have a year for the recording, setting a lower limit on when it was released.
Having said all the above – and it was all kind of useful in terms of development in my understanding – I have to conclude that after checking more records I’m feeling happier that most records will stick to a single matrix number. I just need to remain alert for these represses!
The SFX 7” adventure has been on hiatus. I was making steady progress on the automatic cropping of the labels, but hit a bit of a wall with the many things I needed to do basically daunting me a bit, whereupon I lost momentum. Then I got busy on other things and I’ve been needing fresh impetus to return to the whole thing.
So, when Brighter Day Records got in touch with a lead on a batch of discs for sale, it felt like a sign to get moving.
I was put in touch with Neil who had around 200 sound effects singles to sell. Although I was initially reluctant to add to the thousands in my garage, he sent me a photo of every record so I could see exactly what was on offer. I reckoned there were only about 13 I didn’t have, there were a a few that I hadn’t logged as existing before though. Somehow I convinced myself to buy the lot. There were significantly more which I only (only!) had one copy of and I’m still hoping for some kind of grand swap with a doppelgänger collector one day, so the more swaps I have the better, right? (Right?) But maybe I was just itching to get back into this project and used this purchase to redirect my attention back to it again.
Neil is in London but a stroke of luck was that his friend from Leeds was coming to visit soon. This friend took the records back home with him and all I had to do was pop over and collect them. I put the address into Google maps and drove over. It wasn’t a house though. In fact it was a mosque! Neil’s friend came out and introduced himself as the Imam! Well, I’ve never bought records like that before!
Purchase from Neil.
After logging the records into my spreadsheet it was time to have a big sort out. As well as a couple of hundred new ones on my hands, I’d pulled out a bunch of comedy and electronic sounds out for research purposes; plus Moz had very kindly donated 15 or so discs to the cause (gratis) and they had to be folded in too. Meanwhile, I still had a box of nearly 70 from an older eBay auction which I’d not collated with the main donation yet either.
SFX Spreadsheet in action.
Till now I was holding back from a full mixing of the various batches. Each has its own history and I was thinking of trying to preserve that. With another big addition coming in though I decided to give up on the idea as it was starting to get a bit confusing and unwieldy out in the garage. I mean, as much as you can wield a few thousand records!
With that decision made, a week or two back I sorted out all these additional batches of SFX 7”s to collate everything I have and make three sets. Set A (keeps), Set B (another big set, swappers) and duplicates (smaller set, 1 or more additional copies).
Collating In Progress
All this required was the steady filing of the records into each set whilst keeping my spreadsheet updated and the shifting of chunks from box to box as each one became fuller and overflowed.
With that done it was time for the next stage in the creation of a discography; except for one little surprise which I found during the sort out.
Discursive Workshop is a spin-off series of blog posts from the main Discographic Workshop series. Discographic refers to discs released with Radiophonic Workshop material and the Discursive series refers to non-disc material that wasn’t released as such. It’s really a place where I can let fly with any other ephemera or just plain interesting research which I’ve come across. In a word discursive. Digressing from the main subject or context.
Mellotronic Sound Effects
Somewhere in my deep and long memories of watching and listing to the BBC’s output the notion of a ‘sound effects machine’ has been buried. What was that referring to, actually? Was it really a single machine or did presenters and writers just imagine a single machine when in fact there was a load of different equipment used for cueing in effects? In the Radiophonic Workshop tape archive there is a reference to sounds for a Mellotron. Could this be something to do with a sound effects machine?
In February 1966 Tape Recorder magazine carried an article titled “Systematic Sound: an examination of the Mellotron Sound-Effects Console BY DAVID KIRK” The piece describes a new version of the Mellotron instrument designed to play sound effects.
“The BBC Sound-Effects Library is the source of all material used on the effects console. The machine can, however, be programmed with the user’s own recordings, these being submitted to Mellotronics Ltd. on 1/4in. tape at 7 1/2 i/s, where they are dubbed on to 3/8in. tape for insertion into the console. The sound-effects console is available on hire or can be purchased for £2,625. The BBC was one of the first customers and has shown great interest in its development and use. However, when one remembers that the device is not so much a piece of audio equipment as a very versatile information store, it is reasonable to expect a spate of widely differing applications to appear in the course of time. Medical authorities, for example, have expressed interest in a version of the sound-effects console, programmed with cardiac murmurs, faulty heart-beats, stomach rumbles and all ancillary noises worth memorising by the trainee surgeon.
Tape Recorder February 1966
Well, I’m not sure if the medical community ever embraced that possibility (although Ferris Bueller took up the idea, albeit digitally with his Emulator keyboard some twenty years later)! However, BBC Records did get in on that act with the Symphony Of The Body album. And here I am, already digressing on this discursion.
Mellifluous Electronics MKI
Let’s go back a step to what a Mellotron is. And I do mean ‘is’ because although they work differently inside you can still buy a Mellotron. The history of the keyboard instrument known as the Mellotron is long and complex. The original idea was born in the Chamberlain instrument but was rebranded and relaunched in the UK as the Mellotron thanks to some skulduggery which was not the fault of the inventor or the Mellotron company. All you need to know is that it looks like an organ but creates sound from tapes. Every key on the piano-style keyboard is a start button for a length of tape to be played. So, a C key will perhaps play a tape of a choir singing in the note of C. The recording could be of anything though. A guitar, a piano and a brass section or orchestra. Furthermore, you might have a rhythm on some of the tapes and an instrument on others. Just like the auto-accompaniment on an electronic organ, you could be the whole band!
MKI Mellotron – Photos: David Cilia – John Bradley’s MKI- https://www.outofphase.fr/en/mellotron-mark-i-ii-en/
The intention was to sell the Mellotron to keyboard players who could be a one-man band and that wasn’t a bad idea, given subsequent the explosion in home organs in the 1970s. In the 1960s this was not a huge success and is not the thing that people remember it for today. Yes, Princess Margaret and Peter Sellers had one (I mean each, they didn’t share one between them) and there was a market for the bossa-nova rhythms with string section played with the right hand. The real breakthrough though was with rock and pop bands. In particular, progressive rock bands of the seventies just had to have a Mellotron and The Beatles were quick off the mark too with Strawberry Fields’ famous flutes introduction. The original MKI was released in Britain in 1963 and the BBC were immediately on the sales team’s hit list, arranging a demonstration in June of that year.
Two MKI Mellotrons were purchased by the BBC in 1963. One was used at the Sound Effects Library for auditioning effects and the other – mind-bogglingly – for playing effects onto news reports. Presumably, this would be to add simple background sounds, such as traffic, crowd noise and other atmospheres to otherwise silent film footage. In 1964 the Sound Effects Centre broke away from the main Sound Archive library and set up at the former Gramophone Library site in the basement of Western House. Another MKI Mellotron was purchased with sound effects from library added. Although auditioning effects at the Sound Effects Centre was a nice service to have, the real prize was to have a facility to hand when doing the actual effects dubbing.
Meanwhile, engineering and finance heads were eyeing up a way to make the Radiophonic Workshop more efficient and thought the Mellotron would be just the ticket. This was to misunderstand completely the Workshop’s function skills and indeed needs. There would never be a Mellotron at their Maida Vale studios, but the story of the RWS and the Mellotron doesn’t end there.
British Pathe film about the Mellotron – 1965 (MKII Mellotron)
The Sound Effects Console.
Although it was a significant time-saver for sound editors needing to find a quick ‘spot effect’ the BBC wanted a way to play-in sound effects and the MK1 ‘melly’ was too wobbly and grainy sounding (which was maybe wonderful for psychedelic artists but not suitable for the beeb). In 1965 Mellotronics came back with the improved MKII model. Later that year a special version, as stated in that Tape Recorder article (see above), was designed with the BBC in mind. The Mellotron Sound Effects Console was a kind of MKII but souped up to meet BBC’s technical standards and optimised for effects by removing some of the accoutrements. It was housed in a cheaper plywood cabinet painted black or regulation grey instead of the mahogany of the original and they also removed the reverb unit and fitted a smaller loudspeaker. Crucially it sounded far more hi-fi with a transistor amplifier amongst the improvements.
A Sound Effects Console in its grey cabinet
The MKII Mellotron was able to serve up 1260 different sounds with a maximum of two hours of sounds available and with the improved BBC engineering requirements solved some of the issues that dubbing sounds presented. In comparison to juggling records or piecing together their own tapes, this machine was a doddle to use.
By the mid to late sixties video editing was progressing from the early days of cutting to the non-destructive process of copying from one tape to another. The Mellotron Sound Effects Console was (according to G-Force Software – see below) destined for use on new video edit suites at the Beeb. The photo below shows such a suite, but, sadly the tellly Melly is not in frame, but you get an idea of the grey chic they were going for.
A BBC videotape suite in 1968 – https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/genome/entries/7e88ba4e-fa0b-43a5-91cd-b0b765b82aa1
These next pictures show the catalogue of effects included in the factory Effect Console. Note how there are instructions for changing the effects by sending standard 1/4 inch tapes off for transfer to the Mellotron type of 3/8 inch tape. Perhaps if you were lucky enough to get one that was auctioned off by the BBC when they went out of use it might contain different effects to those it was sold with.
Handwritten on the cover is something hard to read but I think says:
Film Unit(?)
Room E-173
East Tower
Tel-Centre
Theatre ‘X’
The Mellotron was still limited though. Sounds could only last for 8 seconds before the tape had to return to the start (which to be fair it did with some alacrity) and although a large number of effects were available at the press of a key, you could not have all of them available at the same moment nor in any combination you liked. You were stuck with groups and could not randomly access any effect quickly. Some switch around was required to access different groups of sounds.
It’s this Effects Console Mellotron where the Radiophonic Workshop really come into the story, but I have one or two more things Mellotronic to cover first.
The Beatles & the Mellotrons’ Rock Heritage
If you’re a keen Beatles superfan you’ll know that a MKII Sound Effects Console was reconfigured back into a musical instrument and purchased by EMI for use at Abbey Road Studios in early 1968. It’s this version of the Mellotron that was used by the band on The White Album. The instrument used on the intro to Strawberry Fields was a standard MKII hired in by the studio and used on several recordings. It was later bought by Jeff Lynn, then sold on to Chip Hawkes of The Tremeloes and is now at the Beatles Story Exhibit at Albert Dock, Liverpool. The grey, reloaded EMI machine now belongs to (who else?) Paul MaCartney and is demonstrated here by Howard Goodall. You can find clips of Macca mucking about with his Melly on YouTube too.
Despite its shortcomings, there was nothing as good as the Mellotron for playing these kinds of sounds until the digital revolution at the start of the 80s and you could, with sufficiently burly roadies, take an orchestra or choir on the road throughout the 70s using later improved Mellotron models. The fact that it sounds a little wobbly and degraded was not necessarily a disadvantage either. There’s no space here to go into all the acts who used a Mellotron but several of the bigger names even had their own tapes made, impatient as they were for the sampling revolution to begin.
The Programme Effects Generator
The above list of issues with the MKII Mellotron for use as an effects machine led to the development of the BBC’s own solution, the Programme Effects Generator, in 1967. The BBC Engineering Monograph no. 71 on the Programme Effects Generator details the challenges of dubbing sound effects in the sixties.
With the current usage of recorded sound effects it is not unusual for a hundred inserts to be made in a half hour radio or television programme and, in exceptional cases, many more may be required. There is no basic difficulty in providing a large number of recorded inserts but the conventional methods of doing so impose severe penalties in the time required for preparation and in the cost of the equipment necessary.
BBC Engineering Monograpoh 71 – The Programme Effects Generator
The BBC’s engineers collaborated with Melloltronics to create a machine specialised for the purposes of playing back sound effects. It was built by Mellotronics Ltd. so some might claim it as a Mellotron, except this was a real sampler because you could record into it any sound you needed. Instead of installed tapes, it played off tape cartridges, a bit like those used for radio jingles. You could simply plug in the sound you wanted and have four effects going at once. Alongside the growing library of Sound Effects Centre 7″ records effects editing was becoming something like efficient.
“General view of a four-channel Programme Effects Generator mounted on a trolley” – BBC Engineering Monograph No.71 November1967.
Transistorised Coconut Shells
Louis Neibur, in his book Special Sound, got the impression that the BBC “reneged” on the deal with Mellotronics and plumped for a disc-based system, but it was actually built and delivered, albeit in small numbers. There were limited sales outside the BBC too with at least one at London Weekend Television. The BBC probably took the majority of the PEGs though and they were later auctioned off and at least some are in private hands today. Here is a wonderful clip of the PEG being demonstrated at BBC Pebble Mill as part of the first episode of Midlands Today to come from the brand-new studios, which opened in June 1971.
Tom Coyne demonstrates the Programme Effects Generator at BBC Pebble Mill Studios – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-birmingham-29109003
Stop Press
Well, isn’t always the way? Just a day after I posted this I found another reference to the PEG in another video. In 1980 the BBC made a training video about the Sypher Suite audio dubbing facilities. This one is not widely available but can be viewed at Ray (ex-RWS engineer) White’s site here.
The Sound Of Sypher – BBC 1980
Sound On Sound Magazine editor Hugh Robjohns was involved in project managing the installation of just such a suite and commented on the now lost-to-time old SOS forum
The PEG system was a unique BBC design that was essentially a mechanical ‘sampler’ to play sound effects instantly on remote cue using mellotron-like mechanics to pull lengths of quarter-inch tape from a special cassette over a replay head.
Hugh Robjohns, SOS Terchnical Edirto – SOS Foum (date unknown)
Better still, the video demonstrates the usage of the PEG (and indeed the whole suite) with episode 1 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Paddy Kingsland’s sound effects. There’s also a blast of Peter Howell’s Doctor Who theme.
When we get to the PEG, this is the commentary
This modern suite does have one peice of near antuquity. A small cartreidge that contains ordinary quesrter inch tape. It’s called PEG, and teh BBC finds it invaluable. You’ll see why in a minute.
The Sound of Sypher – BBC 1980
PEG Cartridge (note the rind for pulling out the tape, like a tape measure) (The Sound of Sypher (BBC, 1980)
So, as I said above, there’s no way the BBC switched away from the PEG in the sixties as it was still vital into the 1980s. If they “reneged” on a deal with Mellotron did they switch manufacture to somewhere else?
Anyway, the demonstration goes on to show how an effect, already on a PEG cartridge (which they just call a PEG or peg, I suppose) is loaded ready for automatic playback in sync with the video at a timecode the editor has programmed in to the computer.
“In goes a PEG” – The Sound of Sypher (BBC, 1980)
So, by the 1980s the tape-cartridge-based PEG was still in use and now under computer control.
Radiophonics & Mellotronics
The preceding story explains how the BBC moved away from the grams operators and into the 70s with tape cartridges and push button cueing of sound effects. Fascinating though this gear talk is (to me, anyway), why am I showing an interest within in this blog? The Discographic and this Discursive blog is supposed to be about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop recordings, or at least something to do with that topic. Horses’ hooves and car horns are not the domain of Special Sound!
Certainly not, but, in Mellotron Sound Effects Console there it’s a small section of the effects library called Radiophonics. That is what earns its place here. It’s really not Discography as usually defined, but it is close enough – being not solely part of a broadcast programme and existing outside the confines of the RWS tape archive.
The full list of effects is viewable here. As you can see there are 9 effects simply called ‘Radiophonics’. That’s not all though. There are Electronics, Wind, and ‘Goon Comic Noises’ which amongst others could be Radiophonic in origin.
Brian Hodgson (BBC TV, 1968)
In the RWS tape library, there is a reel (TRW 6292) of “Sounds For Mellotron” dated April 1965 and put together by Brian Hodgson. I asked Brian about this on Facebook, but he said, “We never had one but did supply some of the original Sounds”. OK, but we need to hear these sounds. What were they? Obtaining a working Sound Effects Console and listening to the sounds is somewhat beyond the scope and means of this blog. Demonstrations of such a working console are rare. In fact, the only one found on YouTube was of a machine which was about to be renovated and have its sound effects tapes replaced with musical ones. We do get a rendition of church bells and a baby crying before it was stripped down though (and the tapes were kept). Happily, there is another way to hear a Sound Effects Console.
G-Force Software M-Tron Pro
Way back in the year 2000, G-Force Software released the first virtual recreation of the Mellotron, the M-Tron. At that point in time the physical ‘tron had been out of production for fourteen years. A revival was inevitable though and through the 1990s artists with deep enough pockets adopted the unique sounds of the real Mellotron. Digital synthesizers and samplers had made the sounds of machine available too, with patches called ‘Tape Orchestra’, or suchlike, simulating the rusty tones of the venerable but redundant Mellotron of yore. G-Force took the lead with their dedicated M-Tron software version, but they didn’t stop there.
G-Force Software M-Tron Pro
In 2009 the M-Tron Pro was released with a plethora of new features and a vastly increased library of tapes included. Meanwhile, the original manufacturers were back with a new Mellotron and the two British companies had begun a fruitful relationship. The original tape banks of the Mellotron were still available on the robust Emitape tape stock so there was ample scope for further expansion of the M-Tron Pro’s sound banks. As well as the original factory tapes there were those specially created for artists, such as Black Sabbath and Tangerine Dream. In 2015, the Mellotron Sound Effects Console’s 50th anniversary, the ‘Streetly Mellotron MKII SFX Library’ including all 1260 effects from the original BBC collaboration was released. Finally, all the sounds from countless radio and TV productions were available in the same format as used in the sixties for anyone to muck about with!
And, yes, we can now hear the Radiophonic Workshop sounds, once the necessary sums have been paid to G-Force, of course. There are two groups of purely electronic effects which I believe are all from the Workshop. One called Electronic and one Radiophonics. The Goon Show effects still have a faint question mark in my mind but are probably not Radiophonic. Wind and other weather effects are all field recordings and, in fact, the Sound Effects Console tapes pre-date the simulated effects from the Workshop, which I covered in this post.
Rising warble into high hum (take off / warble akin to Bloodnok’s stomach)
High humming
High warble (alarm)
High humming (again)
High hum into falling warble (landing?)
High hum and high wable
Bursts of static/noise
Quick pings decreasing pitch
Blip-blip-whoop
Radiophonics
Mid-High chime
Slow whoops with deep rattle
Descending whoop (laser blast?)
Slow whoops with deep rattle (again)
Slow descending warble with a high thrum background
Slow high pitched warble
Slow lower chimes with low-pass filter modulation
Fast swoop down and up with mid-warble fading in
Swoop down to ships whistle tones
Swoop down to mid-chime
Effects Review
The Radiophonics effects sound noisier and more atmospheric, but otherwise similar enough to have come from the same source as the Electronic. In both groups, one sound is repeated on two keys. Presumably, this was to allow these background effects to be overlapped and continued for as long as needed. The general theme is science fiction or fantasy and these are not the most sophisticated examples of Hodgson’s work from this era. It seems that the brief was for generic electronic sounds rather than the more specific and dare I say realistic effects required for Doctor Who. They may have been recycled from Who or some other shows, although I have no information on that. Conversely, it’s been said that sounds from the Mellotron console were used on Doctor Who. I could watch a lot of extant DW from those first couple of years and then the following years to see if anything matches, but that is a rabbit hole too deep for me to follow, at least for now.
What does seem clear, having now heard them, is that these sounds were not picked up by the Sound Effects Centre and made available on discs. They were therefore exclusive to the Mellotron. This may well have been a stipulation of the brief, to avoid any copyright issues or just the desire for something new. This also undermines the statement in the Tape Recorder article that all the effects came from the BBC Sound Effects Library, not that it matters. And, whilst we’re on things that might not matter, an assumption could be that the purchase of a Sound Effects Console covered the effects’ copyright payments too, although I’d need to see more paperwork to sort that out. The same goes for the M-Tron Pro effects too, as no copyright usage warning is included with the Sound Effects Console pack.
Console Prizes
In conclusion, you could buy a Mellotron Sound Effects Console in the sixties and have rather exclusive access to genuine Radiophonic sound effects. This would have been a rather pricey way to do it though. It remains pricey. A MKII Mellotron today might cost you about £15k. This is below the rate of inflation though, so not exactly a wise investment. The Effects Console is rarer though, so that could be even more costly to acquire now. For a more reasonable £75 I was able to get the fabulous M-Tron Pro and the SFX pack. Still not cheap for 17-19 8-second-or-less effects, but that’s not all you get, of course.!
Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be until the release of Out Of This World Sound Effects (REC 225) in 1976 that anything like this was in the shops. Meanwhile, the next challenge is to find a TV or Radio programme which uses these Mellotron effects.
