Category: Radiophonic Workshop

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1975 2023 Artists (by group or surname) D Doctor Who Music Reviews R Radiophonic Workshop Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Year

Doctor Who: Revenge Of The Cybermen – music by Carey Blyton

5 min read

Order this CDThere are quite few releases out there now of unused/rejected film scores. But with television? Not so much. The production timetable of TV just can’t handle an unusable score. It’ll either use less/none of what’s produced, but in most cases, there’s no time to hire someone else to come up with a replacement score, assuming that the budget can absorb a replacement. And it’s rarer still for anything left on the cutting room floor to ever be heard again.

All of that is to explain that Revenge Of The Cybermen, the more-than-complete score from Tom Baker’s first season-closing story as the star of Doctor Who in 1975, is a highly improbable release. The powers that be weren’t exactly crazy about the music Carey Blyton turned in, his third and final contribution to the series’ music. (His two prior scores were in Jon Pertwee’s first and final seasons, under a different producer.) With little time for a fix, Blyton’s recordings were handed off to Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to add some analog synths to the existing music…and then the makers of the show didn’t use most of that either. In the end, Revenge Of The Cybermen‘s four 25-minute episodes were sparse on music, and the vast majority of what’s on this CD was never heard in the show. Add to that the fact that it’s a Tom Baker-era score, and the music presented here is all sorts of rare. (The discovery that Blyton had kept tapes of his largely-unheard work for himself makes this release possible; even Revenge‘s DVD release and the 50th anniversary soundtrack collection had very little music from this story.)

The liner notes are particularly fascinating, digging into Blyton’s own correspondence to examine his reliance on non-traditional instruments, something the composer felt was a good fit for the show’s often non-traditional subject matter. But to Blyton’s mind, this meant instruments that had fallen out of common use in orchestral ensembles – some of them decidedly closer to “ancient” than “futuristic”, which may have been meant to signify the Vogans rather than the Cybermen, but may also have explained the synthesizer overdubs ordered by the show’s makers. All of this information helps to explain why so little of Blyton’s distinctive music was used…and, perhaps, why he was never tapped to provide music for Doctor Who again.

3 out of 4The resulting sound is spare (like Doctor Who’s more frequent composer, Dudley Simpson, Blyton simply couldn’t afford to assemble a full orchestra), and in all likelihood, this album will achieve the hat trick of feeling odd both to modern audiences (accustomed to the full force and fury of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales) and to fans of the 20th century series’ frequent scoring with synthesizers and radiophonic sound. There are synths here, but they weren’t intended to be there in the music’s original formulation, and they don’t really “rescue” it in any meaningful way (assuming you listen to the original, non-overdubbed pieces and feel that some kind of triage was needed). It’s an interesting listen that may fall into the category of being only for completists or the very curious. Despite that, it’s still incredible to hear a complete – and almost completely unused – score from a Tom Baker story from the ’70s.

  1. Doctor Who – Opening Title Theme (0:45)
  2. Return to Nerva Beacon (2:02)
  3. Can Anyone Hear Me? (0:36)
  4. Cybermat / Unspool / Plague (1:53)
  5. Cybership I (0:23)
  6. Searching Kellman’s Room (1:05)
  7. Sarah vs Cybermat Part 1 (0:31)
  8. Sarah vs Cybermat Part 2 (0:18)
  9. Sabotage (0:42)
  10. It’s Happening All Over Again (0:11)
  11. The Skystriker (0:26)
  12. On Voga (0:40)
  13. Sarah and Harry Captured Part 1 (0:47)
  14. Sarah and Harry Captured Part 2 (0:10)
  15. Cybership II (0:19)
  16. Enter Vorus (0:08)
  17. Remote Control Threat (0:33)
  18. Tyrum and Vorus (0:37)
  19. One More Pull (0:17)
  20. Caves Chase (0:50)
  21. Caves Chase Continued (0:29)
  22. Surrounded (0:35)
  23. Boarding Party (0:59)
  24. The Beacon is Ours (0:41)
  25. Tyrum Fanfare (0:15)
  26. Prisoners (0:13)
  27. Fresh Orders (0:19)
  28. It Cannot Be Stopped (0:21)
  29. Loose Thinking / The Bomb (1:27)
  30. The Countdown Has Commenced (1:01)
  31. Cybermarch (1:27)
  32. Radarscope (0:23)
  33. Adventures on Voga (1:19)
  34. Rockfall (1:15)
  35. Surface Party and Detonation (1:47)
  36. Nine Minutes (0:26)
  37. Cybermat vs Cybermen (0:44)
  38. The Biggest Bang in History? (0:45)
  39. Waltz – All’s Well That Ends Well (0:17)
  40. Doctor Who – Closing Title Theme (53” Version) (0:54)
     
    Alternative and Synthesizer Cues
  41. Sarah vs Cybermat (end of part 1 alternative) (0:20)
  42. Sarah vs Cybermat (start of part 2) (0:56)
  43. It’s Happening All Over Again (random organ) (0:06)
  44. Sarah and Harry Captured (alternative) (0:46)
  45. Put That Gun Down (synth cue) (0:20)
  46. Cybership II (alternative) (0:24)
  47. Remote Control Threat (alternative) (0:35)
  48. One More Pull (alternative) and Vogan Gunfight (0:58)
  49. Cybership III (synth cue) (0:17)
  50. Caves Chase (alternative) (1:20)
  51. Cybership IV (synth cue) (0:23)
  52. Caves Chase Continued (alternative) (0:36)
  53. Surrounded (alternative) (0:38)
  54. Boarding Party (end of Part 2 alternative) (0:25)
  55. Jelly Babies (synth cue) (0:10)
  56. Tyrum Fanfare (edited cue as used) (0:10)
  57. It Cannot Be Stopped (alternative) (0:37)
  58. Loose Thinking (alternative) (0:31)
  59. The Bomb (alternative) (0:19)
  60. The Countdown Has Commenced (alternative) (0:06)
  61. Looped Cybermarch (0:29)
  62. Looped Cybermarch with Synth (0:47)
  63. Adventures on Voga (synth cues) (1:07)
  64. The Red Zone (Random Organ) (0:06)
  65. Heartbeat Countdown I (synth cue) (1:25)
  66. Heartbeat Countdown II (synth cue) (1:09)
  67. Rockfall (alternative) (1:17)
     
    Bonus Tracks
  68. Session Tapes – Random Organ, Specimen Gong, Timps (3:08)
  69. Session Tapes – m42a & 42b (improvs) (1:58)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: November 24, 2023
Total running time: 51:54

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Categories
2017 Artists (by group or surname) Non-Soundtrack Music R Radiophonic Workshop

The Radiophonic Workshop: Burials In Several Earths

3 min read

The Radiophonic Workshop is back, minus the BBC. If the band’s retinue of veteran analog electronic music pioneers can keep turning out original material like this, it might result in a new generation of fans wondering why they were slumming it for the BBC for so long. The Radiophonic Workshop is made up of former members of the storied BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an experimental electronic music & effects department of the BBC founded in the late 1950s to provide unique music and sounds for the steadily growing output of the BBC’s radio and television channels. The work, in those days before samplers and digital synthesizers, was grueling; membership in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was always fairly limited because you had to love what you were doing, working with oscillators a beat and tone generators and analog reverb and tape loops. The Workshop remains, perhaps unjustly, best known for the original Doctor Who theme music dating back to 1963, but its body of work spread so much further than that…until the BBC closed the Workshop’s doors in the 1990s.

But its members, it turns out, weren’t averse to workshopping their unique sound without Auntie Beeb paying the bills. Having spent over a decade as a touring group recreating their sound the old-fashioned way for audiences who already knew their work and audiences only just discovering them, the Radiophonic Workshop has now gifted us with a new album with the unmistakable sound that gained them a following in the 1960s and ’70s. Is it abstract? At times, yes – about 13 minutes into the lead track, you’d swear they were trying to make a musical instrument out of the sound of the Liberator’s teleport from Blake’s 7. Everything from white noise to whalesong crops up. But what’s amazing is how tuneful it is at times. Echoing piano is a constant presence, along with actual guitar work (Paddy Kingsland, whose Doctor Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide scores in the early ’80s were ear-wormingly hummable, take a bow). There are a few places where a groove emerges from the soundscape and the Radiophonic Workshop proceeds to rock out.

Not a bad feat considering that some of these gentlemen are past what many touring musicians would consider retirement age.

4 out of 4The real fascination of Burials In Several Earths is that it’s electronic music created in a way that has almost been lost to time and the march of technology. That description doesn’t really do it justice though – that sounds more like the description of a tech demo. The Radiophonic Workshop is making actual music this way, delighting audiences on stage, and bolting new chapters onto a legacy of ridiculously hummable short tunes from a bygone age. At times ethereal, at times exciting, the one thing Burials isn’t is boring.

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  1. Burials In Several Earths (18:58)
  2. Things Buried In Water (22:01)
  3. Some Hope Of Land (25:15)
  4. Not Come To Light (3:58)
  5. The Stranger’s House (11:23)

Released by: Room 13
Release date: May 19, 2016
Total running time: 1:21:35

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