Inventions for Radio

This 6 LP boxset (to be followed by a CD edition in Spring 2024) represents the first official release of the four Inventions for Radio by Barry Bermange and Delia Derbyshire, initially broadcast on the BBC Third Programme across 1964-1965. These groundbreaking radio features ('The Dreams', 'Amor Dei', 'The After-Life' and 'The Evenings of Certain Lives') combined a collage of interviews with members of the public, on subjects such as the existence of God, the process of ageing and the dream condition, with electronic music and soundscapes by Derbyshire. The 'Inventions' have been described as pioneering a 'poetic realism' (Plowright 1996) and established a distinctive form of radio feature. The 'Inventions' were important not just for their formal achievement but for their socio-political significance as well, integrating the thoughts and experiences of people from different socio-economic backgrounds and providing an atypical outlet for working class voices in particular, on subjects they would not normally be heard discussing on British radio and television at that time.

The boxset was produced by the composer and audio engineer Mark Ayres and my role as co-producer was to curate the supporting archival images, research and identify archival audio recordings that have been included on the discs, and provide an extended 11,800 word essay ('The Necessity of Invention: The Origins, Production and After-Life of the 'Inventions for Radio'') in the accompanying booklet that tracks the development of the Inventions, their reception and impact as well as an analysis of their content. The essay combines material from an earlier journal article I wrote on the Inventions, published in 2019, with new research and analysis. The boxset has been reviewed in the November 2023 edition of Electronic Sound magazine as 'indispensable' (Fischer, 2023) and the December 2023 edition of The Wire as 'an act of sonic recovery… absolutely essential' (Kulkarni, 2023: 99).