Cosey and Delia

Cosey Fanni Tutti's latest album – a solo album – is based on the soundtrack she created for the film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. The film, directed by Caroline Catz (best known for her role as the headteacher in the TV series Doc Martin), is about the life and work of the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s. CFT gives a fascinating account of how she created it in the book, Re-Sisters. Having spent time talking to people who knew Delia, she then visited the John Rylands Library in Manchester to listen to digital recordings of the 'legendary tapes' themselves, which are held there (tantalizingly, they're not freely available because of copyright complications). I get the impression that the tapes are a kind of 'sound diary' of Delia's working life. CFT managed to assemble a collection of old, analogue equipment, which allowed her to explore Delia's way of working:

I'd made copious notes on how I'd go about composing and finding the right sounds that would reflect Delia's style while staying true to myself and to Delia's ethos of obtaining previously unheard sounds. Re-Sisters, p.119

She also had access to Delia's VCS3 synthesizer 'patch sheets' (diagrams showing the positions of the controls and the ways different parts of the machine were interconnected to produce a particular sound). As she said, recreating one of Delia's 'patches' was unlikely to produce the same sound but was at least an interesting starting point. (Elsewhere in Re-Sisters, she talks about Keats' idea of 'negative capability' and the importance to artists of just letting things happen). One should stress that the end result is very much the work of CFT and definitely not a recreation of Delia's music. I suppose one could describe it as a dialogue with Delia's ghost.

I've been a long-time fan of Throbbing Gristle but, until now, I'd not taken the time to get to know the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti outside of the band. It's a voyage of discovery for me, it's still in progress, and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

In addition to her music and performance art, CFT has written two books: an autobiography, Art Sex Music (2018) and, most recently, Re-Sisters: The Lives and Recordings of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe and Cosey Fanni Tutti (2022).