I Was Delia Derbyshire's Lover

Sometimes, earnest men with thinning hair and colourful T-shirts visit me to ask about Delia.

I replay our affair at will, cut into tiny slices, a recording rearranged and looped.

It was 1961. Everything seemed fresh.

I’d pick her up from Maida Vale studios in darkness, the white stone entrance like an end-of-pier pavilion. Idents, theme tunes, sound effects, recording and re-recording, she experimented late most nights; jerry-rigged machines making new sounds, looping and chopping, speeding up and slowing down.

“The BBC are paying us to record the future, before it happens,” she said when we first met, pushing hair back from her eyes.

Delia never slept well, the rhythm of childhood bombs falling on Coventry still waking her. When she thought I was asleep, she’d trace the bones of my face, fingertips scratchy with careless razor cuts from splicing tape.

Making love, I’d see her shaping patterns and counterpoints from the sound of breath, the creak of mattress, unreachable.

Once, I found her naked, tapping a lampshade we’d bought in Kensington with a pencil, eyes fixed ahead.

Television made the extraordinary commonplace.

New soon became old.

“Everything can be music,” she’d say.

In the end, I longed for silence.

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For more about Delia Derbyshire visit:

http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/

Hear samples of Delia's work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop:

http://tinyurl.com/2b4tj7