Radiophonic
Workshop/White Noise,
Jazz Café —
nostalgia and
modernity
Fifty years on from London’s first electronic
music festival the sounds were still avant garde
Mark Ayres from the Radiophonic Workshop. Photo: Roger Thomas
MARCH 23, 2017 by: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Fifty years ago London’s first electronic music
festival took place at the Roundhouse in north
London. Among the attractions at “The Million Volt
Light and Sound Rave” was The Beatles’ “Carnival of
Light”, a 14-minute sound collage over which Paul
McCartney and John Lennon were recorded
screaming, according to an attendee, like “demented
old women”.
The piece has not been heard since. “Avant-garde a
clue,” scoffed George Harrison, who loathed it. Alas,
it was not exhumed from the vaults for a show at the
Jazz Café held to mark the anniversary of the nearby
Roundhouse event. The other notable absence was
the visionary electronic composer Delia Derbyshire,
a one-woman disproof of Harrison’s philistine
remark who died in 2001.
Held under the auspices of London’s newest
electronic festival, Convergence, the concert opened
with a relic from the Light and Sound Rave. White
Noise played at the original event, an experimental
electronic act whose 1969 album An Electric Storm,
made on the first British-manufactured commercial
synthesiser, has acquired a cult following.
In 1968 White Noise comprised Derbyshire, David
Vorhaus and Brian Hodgson. Only Vorhaus remains.
At the Jazz Café, he summoned the venue’s usual
musical fare with jazzy runs on a curiously designed
upright bass that looked like something the Star
Wars cantina band might use. Mike Painter joined
him, tapping out fractal beats on a touchpad. Rather
than An Electric Storm’s trippy ambience, the music
had a harder edge, a vibrant conflux of psychedelicfunk, jazz-rock and techno.
