Playlouder - Music is the Network

The John Baker Tapes, Volume 1: BBC Radiophonics 1963-1974 (Trunk)

John Baker is in his sound workshop at two in the morning, excitedly introducing electronic echo to the sound of a rubber band being snapped. “No, not quite…” he whispers to himself before taking a deep slug of tea.

Baker was paid by the BBC to create original music for radio and television. He amassed a sonic library; everyday noises that became the ingredients from which he could fashion melodies of melancholy, menace and cheerfulness. The themes and incidental music he created are probably reaching Mars around now. Lucky Martians.  

Some of the sounds are created with bottles of water. Water dripping from old cider bottles is recorded and the notes stored for experimentation. But if they are to be stretched, you feel they will be stretched humanely.

His output was more apparently unordered and challenging than the bulk of anaemic noise that now introduces and clutters British broadcasting. But it was a different time.

Take, for example, news programming. For the past two decades, it has been felt that news (or rather ‘THE NEWS’) must be preceded by sound which warns and instructs the viewer that they are about to hear matters of gravity. Introductory music must be weighty, bold and pompous to a degree that invites satire.

But as we discover in this collection of recordings, this consensus was not always so. Baker’s Big Ben News Theme from the late 1960s is light dreamy electronica – it suggests to us that the earth is a very curious place indeed, and wouldn’t it be interesting to find out about the strange things that have been happening there?

There is something gently subversive about his juddering Radio London Oranges and Lemons theme. The familiar tune was re-worked over and over. Some versions sound like they were recorded in the lounge room, some in the bathroom. Others seem to have been squawked by friendly aliens.

Commissioned for a technology fair in Brussels, COI Technology Pavilion is a little under ten minutes long. It’s rather like an unnerving avant-garde jazz interpretation of a drunken walk home through the streets of London. Tramps emerge from doorways and yell wildly as the pavement swims before your eyes. Whether this was considered an appropriate soundtrack for an event to showcase early transistorised videotape recorders, history does not record. If it had, Baker would probably have sped it up and played it backwards.

In the sleevenotes, John Baker’s brother explains that his prodigious workrate came to be sustained by drink, and personal tragedy drove him to a level of musical eccentricity that was increasingly out-of-step with the corporation. In 1974 the BBC sacked him.

It feels like quite a privilege to be allowed into his workshop – this is a fascinating release.