These Machines Haven't Finished
These Machines Haven't Finished is a documentary by Benjamin Cook about the 2017 Delia Derbyshire Day event including interviews with Carol Churchill, Peter Zinovieff, David Butler and others, and foorage of Sonic Boom and others performing.
Transcription
David Butler at 45:35:
When she left the BBC, she makes her way North up to the borders of Scotland and England and she settles in the village of Gilsland[?]. She went up there to become a radio operator got Laing pipeline and the reports of people who worked with her said she was brilliant at the job and everybody who worked with her respected her and her abilities and skills. It doesn't fit with the narrative of what many people think an artist should be doing, and that idea that when she goes up North, that these are lost years, these are failed years rather denied[?] her agency. It denies her "I'm making a decision. I don't want to do that any more." While she's up there she married a local labourer, David Hunter. This was not a happy relationship by all accounts, and she moved instead several miles away from Gilsland to the hamlet of Banks which is right beside Hadrian's Wall and there she worked and lived in the LYC Museum, in the gallery. Now, the LYC was this extraordinary community art centre established the Chinese-born artist Li Yuan-chia and she's there across 1976 and 1977 and she has to manage the place. Now, Li being visited a couple of time by various journalists wanting to report, you know, what was this magical place? And you look at some of the newspaper reports and they said "This is incredible. What he desperately needs is somebody to help him run this place." and Delia is perfectly suited to doing this.
Before she joined the Radiophonic Workshop, when she fist joined the BBC, she was a studio manager so she would be liasing with the artists, booking them in. helping with exhibiting them and she exhibits, while she is there, Manuel Hoycasten, Elsa Stansfield, people she had worked with previously, so to pitch this as "She's going to the wilderness"--- it's not really the wilderness. There's still a lot of myths, rumours and erroneous notions about what happened to her.
