Miranda Sawyer – The Observer, Sunday 19 August 2012

For those who prefer their music clever and obscure, Stewart Lee took us through the higgledy-piggledy homemade beginnings of UK electronic music in A Sound British Adventure.
I’ve heard a version of this story several times on Radio 4; Lee managed to make it seem fresh.

Derek Smith – The Stage, 23rd August 2012

There was something charmingly anorak-like about BBC Radio 4’s A Sound British Adventure, comedian Stewart Lee’s homage to early British electronic music makers. Hunkered away in sheds and studios around the country, and mostly using surplus military electrical equipment, these boffins developed highly individual new sound genres, each with their own distinct style and sense of creative purpose.

They included Desmond Leslie, who achieved notoriety not only for co-writing the book Flying Saucers Have Landed, but also for punching Bernard Levin on That Was The Week That Was, after the writer criticised a play featuring Leslie’s wife.

Funding was never available for the research of their electronic output, but, with the advent of new technology in the home, companies needed a fitting, futuristic sound as a backing track for commercials to create the aura of a brave new world.

The eerie, metallic sounds fitted perfectly. Programme producers were initially suspicious of the radical new ‘music’, and it wasn’t until early 1963 that an electronic-based signature tune was used, for the children’s puppet-based show Space Patrol. Later that year, the very first series of Doctor Who aired, complete with its now iconic opening theme.

To quote one contributor, “jaws dropped”. It sounded like it came from another world, and it did – the eccentric, talented and weird world of the early electronic sound ‘scientists’.

Louis Barfe – Lady.co.uk – 24th August 2012

Now, when most music has an electronic element, it might seem strange to refer to ‘electronic music’. However, it is a very distinct genre, referring to music created largely from tape loops, tone generators and other synthesised sounds.

For many, the term will be synonymous with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which produced a great deal of famous radio and TV music, including Delia Derbyshire’s original version of the Doctor Who theme, but Britain had a thriving electronic music scene away from the BBC studios at Maida Vale too.

Introduced by stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, who billed himself as ‘the only radio-friendly E-list celebrity the producers could find who had been to a Stockhausen concert’, A Sound British Adventure paid homage to pioneers inside and outside the BBC. Many of the pioneers were demobbed servicemen and women, taking advantage of military surplus equipment to create noises that could be turned into music. The arrival of magnetic tape in the late 1940s made it possible to edit, reverse, speed up and slow down sounds.

Many of the most futuristic and ethereal sounds were created simply. The popping of a cork or snapping of a wooden ruler on a desk could be recorded, pitchshifted and, with painstaking editing, formed into a melody line.

Unsurprisingly, such dedicated activity attracted eccentrics. One of them, Desmond Leslie, is best remembered for a non-musical achievement, as he was the man who stepped forward from the audience of That Was The Week That Was in 1962 and punched Bernard Levin live on air. He was avenging a stinking review given by Levin to his wife, actress and singer Agnes Bernelle. So, it was nice to be reminded of the hinterland behind his ongoing notoriety.

So many television documentaries now are full of irrelevant interviewees and the same old clips, as well as being blighted by smirking narration. The people interviewed in this programme were either the composers themselves or acknowledged experts, and the clips were rare and interesting, while Lee’s narration was unobtrusive and affectionate.

My only complaint is that half an hour for this documentary was too short.

Mike Higgins – The Independent, Sunday 19 August 2012

As with so much in life, the British and the French had startlingly different approaches to the early days of electronic music. Over in Paris 60 years ago, the national broadcaster embraced the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and his peers with premises, money and an immensely grand department name. Here in the UK, as A Sound British Adventure made clear, the only places to hear comparable bleeps and glurps were the sheds of demobbed chaps who had grown fond of the weird noises from their radio sets during the war.

Chaps such as Desmond Leslie, a former Spitfire pilot and early UFO expert. (He also punched Bernard Levin on live television, but that’s another story.) And Tristram Carey, a former Navy man, whose years of monkeying about with military surplus kit finally paid off when he became, in 1955, the first man commissioned by the BBC to produce a piece of original electronic music, to accompany a radio play (about the atomic bombing of Japan).

And, as we heard, what an eerie soundtrack it still is. Yet as narrator Stewart Lee reminded us in this diverting dip into the archives, the BBC – and its orchestras – were wary of these pioneers. Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe established the BBC Radiophonic Workshop rather in spite of their employers. Doctor Who and its famous theme tune notwithstanding, some of the most memorable snatches of electronic music were used by advertisers on ITV to sell washing machines (wonder music for a wonder device!).

But an avant-garde is nothing without a bitch-fest, and some of the spiciest put-downs came from a prime mover of the movement. Peter Zinovieff was the British inventor who devised the VCS3 synthesizer that Pink Floyd used to swirly effect on Dark Side of the Moon. Oram, he told us impishly in a 40-year-old recording, he found “rather dull”. He was “much more interested in Stockhausen coming round than Paul McCartney – [who] came for lunch a couple of times”. It’s safe to say, I think, that Zinovieff hasn’t got Crazy Frog for his mobile ring tone.

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