Clive Blackburn

Clive Blackburn was Delia's partner for the last 21 years of her life and is the sole beneficiary of her estate.

The Mail on Sunday article is based on an 2005 interview with him and in 2008 he was interviewed by Breege Brennan for her Master's thesis and by Kara Blake for The Delian Mode film.

Quotes

She worked very hard to achieve the effect that she wanted," explains former partner Clive Blackburn, "she was a perfectionist and it was very hard to get her to stop work on a piece when she thought that it could still be improved, even though it sounded absolutely fine to other people.

Because she was one of the experts at that time [the mid-sixties] on the synthesizers and all the groups were adopting them but didn't know anything about them, they used to come to her. [...] I met her in 1978, which was after she'd left the BBC. She'd a thing up in Cumbria. It all got a bit much for her and she left London, went off to Cumbria but wasn't doing any music at all, did various jobs and came back on a visit to London and I met her then through a friend of ours and then eventually she ended up moving in to Northampton [...] and eventually I moved in with her in 1980. Through her I met a lot of the people that she had worked with in the past and they used to come to her to do a bit of music and also for advice, to listen to things. She was a bit of a guru and people used to come to her and really respected her ability in music.

After Delia's death, Brian Hodgson did not visit the Northampton house. I cleared the house and removed all of the tapes from the attic, then drove down to London and handed them over to Brian, together with all of the papers I had found which were related to her music. Brian then passed all of this on to Mark Ayres, the Radiophonic Workshop archivist.

External links

• Clive provided a web page About Delia with biographical information, some photos and Delia's favourite poem.