Happy Days: The Children of the Stones

Radio 4 broadcast a great documentary on the 1977 children's TV series Children of the Stones yesterday presented by Stewart Lee, who seems to have become a cultural curator of all things weird and esoteric, having made a programme about British pioneers of electronic music a short while ago (A Sound British Adventure) and appeared on the radio 3 arts programme Night Waves with Iain Sinclair to talk about the Welsh author of eerie and occult tales Arthur Machen. These are all things which evidently loom large in his own inner cultural landscape. He talks of how watching Children of the Stones as a youngster chimed with his own concerns with non-conformity and a mixture of fear and fascination with a great numinous unknown. He also credits it with sparking a lifelong interest in stone circles and long barrows. That other modern explorer of megalithic sites and the mindset which created them, Julian Cope, is on hand to provide a singular dissenting voice. His objection centres around an unease with the either/or paradigms found in post-war stories, including Children of the Stones and The Wicker Man, which feature some sort of cultish leader – usually pagan, as he notes. He has not time for the idea that the viewer might feel sympathy for Iain Cuthbertson’s Hendrick, the controlling magus of Milbury, the village in Children of the Stones, or for Lord Summerisle, the aristocratic squire and religious revivalist of The Wicker Man. For him, they are authoritarian figures who perpetuate a religious conflict which has no part in his worldview, which seeks to transcend such divides.

Touching the stone - Adam and Margaret (Gareth Thomas and Veronica Strong

Lee travels to Avebury and meets people who were strongly affected by the series when they were young, and also talks to members of the cast. Veronica Strong and Katharine Levy, who played mother and daughter Margaret and Sandra, are both on hand to recall the making of the series in the burning summer of 1976, and Gareth Thomas, who played the astrophysicist Adam Brake, who comes to the village with his son Matthew to make a scientific study of the stones, is present via a studio interview. Levy recalls working with the marvellous Freddie Jones (whose performance as the spluttering, irascible and impressively muttonchopped Victorian spirit General Sir George Uproar, presiding over his old manor house in Richard Carpenter’s The Ghosts of Motley Hall, I am currently hugely enjoying), who played the poacher Dai, the keeper of secret knowledge who lives in the sanctuary of the long barrow, and is resistant to Hendrick’s mesmeric influence. She remembers that he at first appeared a little strange to her and her fellow child actors, before she realised that he was keeping in character throughout. Lee makes the point that the series treated children as equals, and didn’t in any way talk down to them. This can certainly be found in the two relationships between single parent and child which are central to the story, Adam with Matthew and Margaret with Sandra, which have the sense of twin halves waiting to be joined to form a completed whole. The female on the inside of the circle and the male coming in, via the avenue, from the outside.

Evil magus - Iain Cuthbertson as Hendrick

Children of the Stones was written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, and Lee interviews Burnham, who is still proud of it to this day. He also reveals that he is writing a sequel, set 25 years after the events of the original. Normally, I would greet such news with a groan, seeing it as yet another example of the obsessive recycling of the past which obstructs the creation any new and innovative work. But there was something a little unsatisfying about the conclusion of Children of the Stones, which was a little throwaway. The cyclical nature of time which it seemed to propose would make a return entirely plausible, and perhaps allow for Margaret and Sandra to assert their independence from Hendrick and the ‘Happy Day’ ethos of bland, unquestioning contentment which he propagates, once more. I certainly don’t insist on happy endings, but I’ve never liked the fact that they are abandoned at the end, ossifying into pained and contorted megaliths. Veronica Strong certainly expresses a willingness to return to her role in the programme, and perhaps Katherine Levy’s participation in Lee’s documentary and her fond memories of the past indicate that she too might be willing to take part. Rather more oddly, Burnham also reveals that the American composer Robert Gross is working on turning the story into an opera – perhaps influenced by the time he spent studying in the West Country at Bristol University – which sounds as unlikely as Tod Machover’s adaptation of Philip K Dick’s strange late novel Valis into modern, electronic operatic form. I wonder whether Gross will draw on Sidney Sager’s superb, modernist vocal score for Children of the Stones, as performed by the Ambrosian Singers, who were well used to performing avant garde compositions. Drawing on the soundworlds of Berio and Ligeti, Lee talks of it as being ‘the most inappropriate children’s TV theme ever penned’, and all the better for it.

Jeremy Deller's Sacrilege - the bouncy 'enge

Lee also talks to Avebury museum curators past and present, talking about current views on the meanings of the stones for ancient people, and on the sort of people who come to the village. He puts it to one of them that ‘presumably, as the curator of the Avebury museum, you don’t feel the purpose of the circle was to harness an evil ray from space’. He also talks to James McGowan, who created a website for the programme, and who moved down to the area from Scotland. I can certainly empathise with his memories of visiting the sites in the programme. I remember going to Avebury as a child and re-enacting the scene in which Adam touches one of the stones and is filled with troubling vision before being violently thrown back (a scene presaged by one of my favourite bits of dialogue from the series, in which Margaret asks him ‘would you do something for me…touch one of the stones…I just want to see if you’re the kind of man I think you are’, to which Adam replies ‘and what kind of man is that!’) I was recently able to do this once more, in a rather more wholehearted and, I like to think, spectacular manner, when Jeremy Deller’s mobile sculpture ‘Sacrilege’, better known as the bouncy Stonehenge, came to town and provided me with 15 minutes of unbridled joy before the heavens opened.

Lee traces the influences on the programme and those which it has had on subsequent generations. He cites The Wicker Man, The Village of the Damned and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit as being in a similar vein, with the eccentric and bizarre goings on in rural settings which recurrently featured in episodes of The Avengers (some written by Burnham, who also occasionally appeared in them as an actor) also setting the scene. Burnham also quotes Thomas Tryon’s 1973 novel of modern day Paganism in a rural American town as being an influence, and there’s also something of the spirit of Charles Williams’ novels such as War in Heaven and The Greater Trumps in there. Avebury is rechristened Milbury in Children of the Stones, which might have had an influence on the naming of Ghost Box artist Jim Jupp’s musical project (and the imaginary rural town which it inhabits) Belbury Poly. Certainly, the Ghost Box ethos, with its blending of post war modernism with ancient Pagan echoes, and its recasting of the graphic art and soundworlds of 60s and 70s British television programmes in the Children of the Stones mould (‘twenty minute splurges of psychedelic madness’ as Lee characterises them), is very much of a part with the spirit of the times, as viewed from a contemporary perspective. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz is seen as exhibiting a similar sensibility to Children of the Stones, as is Gary Spencer Millidge’s comic Strangehaven, set in a Devon village which is the centre of occult activity, and from which it is difficult to leave. Its author retrospectively acknowledges the coincidental similarities, having subsequently viewed the programme. It’s an indication that the themes and concerns of Children of the Stones, as well as the power of the ancient British landscape, continues to exert a fascination. Happy Day!

A Sound British Adventure

The Unit Delta Plus studio

A Sound British Adventure, broadcast at the very domestic hour of 11.30 in the morning on Radio 4, the optimum time for the unwitting absorption of deceptively experimental sound, was a brief scan of the development of electronic music in these isles in the 50s and 60s. It was presented by the comedian Stewart Lee, who introduced himself as ‘the only friendly e-list celebrity they could find who’d been to a Stockhausen concert’. In fact, he’s eminently qualified for the gig, having displayed a long-term, wide-ranging and well-informed interest in the esoteric borderlands of music. He wrote the Wire Primer on The Fall, won Celebrity Mastermind with a specialist round on the free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey, produces short reviews for the Observer of albums by the likes of Matana Roberts, Boris, Trembling Bells, Epic 45, Muhal Richard Abrahams alongside the Fingerbobs soundtrack, wrote the introduction to a biography of free improvisation saxophonist Evan Parker, who he also included in an evening of free improv he curated for the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and took part in a performance of John Cage’s chance-based composition Indeterminacy (he read the texts which form part of the piece). His recent shows, in which he played a Krautrock selection including Kraftwerk, Neu and Amon Duul as interval music, ended with a Carpet Remnant World transformed into a model utopia, the tubular discards becoming dream towers shining with cheerful points of light, all set to the gorgeous, deliquescent electronic melodies of Ghost Box artist The Advisory Circle’s Now Ends the Beginning, the opening track from their brilliant recent album As The Crow Flies (also reviewed by Lee in The Observer).

The programmed anchored the early development of British electronic music in the experiences of war, making the point that much of the technology used was army or navy surplus equipment. Tristram Cary, whom we hear in an archive interview from 1972, was an ex-navy man who perceived the musical possibilities of electronic sound whilst listening to the whistling undulations of short wave radio signals. Desmond Leslie (a collection of whose eccentric experiments was released on Trunk Records a while back), another electronic music ‘hobbyist’, was an ex-Spitfire pilot and UFO enthusiast who, like Cary, cobbled together his apparatus from redundant forces’ equipment and whatever else could be put to use. The amateur status of these early pioneers is emphasised, and comparison made with the electronic composers on the continent, who received state funding to make ‘serious’ works of art at the studios of French station ORTF (the Office of French National Radio-Television) and West German National Radio in Cologne. Over here, Daphne Oram was producing electronic music to sell washing machines and OMO washing powder, and the largely unsung Fred Judd (whose very name conjures up an unpretentious, artisanal approach to sound creation) was producing the first all electronic score for the ITV puppet-based children’s science fiction series Space Patrol in 1963 – the same year that Dr Who first appeared on the nation’s screens with its Radiophonic Workshop produced theme music and sound effects. The story of the Radiophonic Workshop and its involvement has been told on several occasions already, and this programme, after an essential acknowledgment of its massive contribution, turns its attention elsewhere.

Would early British electronic music be so well-loved were it not for its utilitarian, semi-amateur status? Probably not. It certainly wouldn’t have been heard by so many people had it taken the European route to subsidised art music. After all, the likes of Stockhausen became a byword for unlistenability amongst the general public in the late 60s and 70s, even turning up as the butt of jokes in Man About the House. Some of the British composers did feel frustrated at the limitations imposed upon them by commercial or soundtrack requirements, however, and yearned for the artistic freedom afforded their continental counterparts. Peter Zinovieff, the co-founder of EMS (Electronic Music Systems) and inventor of one of the earliest successful models of synthesiser in the 60s, admits that he was ‘rather snobbish’ and was far more interested in the possibility of Stockhausen visiting his Putney studios than in Paul McCartney and all the other pop stars parading through in the late 60s, wanting try out his new instruments. Tristram Cary is cited as being another of the real progenitors of British electronic music, and he was capable of producing both abstruse modern classical music and popular, accessible film soundtracks. His music for the 1955 radio play The Japanese Fisherman, a little of which is played on the programme, was the first electronic score to be commissioned by the BBC, and evoked the solar burst of the first atomic bomb. In the same year, he produced his darkly sardonic score for the Ealing comedy of post-war seediness and decline The Ladykillers, which seemingly had little in common with such electronic experimentation. Although it could be argued (at a considerable stretch) that the sounds of the trains which are a constant sonic presence in the film call to mind Pierre Schaeffer’s early work of musique concrete Etude Aux Chemins de Fer, built up from the recorded sounds of steam locomotive. Trunk Records have released an excellent compilation of Cary’s music, It’s Time for Tristram Cary, which includes the collage-style soundtrack, mixing electronic, jazz and light styles, that he produced for Don Levy’s fascinating 1967 promotional short Opus (which you can find on the bfi COI – that’s Central Office of Information - collection A Portrait of a People).

Peter Zinovieff is one of a number of people interviewed for the programme, others including Radiophonic Workshop composer Brian Hodgson, Portishead’s Adrian Uttley (who also featured in the BBC4 Radiophonic Workshop documentary Alchemists of Sound), Radiophonic Workshop archivist, historian and composer Mark Ayres, and senior lecturer Dr Michael Grierson, the director of the creative computing course at Goldsmiths College who also looks after the Daphne Oram archive held there. Zinovieff is brusquely frank about the productions of his past, dismissing his alliance with Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire in Unit Delta Plus as having created ‘terrible music’. His offhand manner, which displays a disinclination to temper raw opinion with tact or politeness, leads to refreshingly unvarnished recollections. He makes no pretence at having liked Daphne Oram, or of having enjoyed any kind of professional relationship or sense of shared artistic principles or interests. ‘I found her rather dull’, he says, ‘a bit schoolmarmish’. There’s a hint of disgruntlement at the attention she has received recently, and the central position that she and her Oramics machine have been granted in the story of British electronic music as told in the Science Museum’s Oramics to Electronica exhibition. He dismisses the Oramics machine (which derived its sounds from photographically reading waveform shapes drawn onto slides) as a ‘completely wild idea from someone who wasn’t very scientific’. Zinovieff was evidently a musician for whom science and electronic music creation were inseparable, with composition taking on the quality of semi-mathematical, machine-aided calculus favoured by his idol Stockhausen. He liked nothing more than to retreat into his EMS studios in Putney to work, playing with the possibilities of sound generation and developing the next generation of synthesisers. He proudly pointed out that the money from the sales of EMS synths, which became very popular with the likes of The Beatles (he even sold one to Ringo and gave him a few lessons) and Pink Floyd, was all channelled back into the studio.

Brian Hodgson’s view of Daphne Oram was a little more generous. He described her as ‘a lovely lady, completely eccentric’, and praised the Oramics machine as being a revolutionary idea, with potential ‘unmatched ‘til the Fairlight’ (the first real fully integrated computer music system), and an idea which worked on a practical level at that. Michael Grierson played an unnamed piece from the Oram archives which documents her first attempts at producing sound from her newly constructed synthesiser – the first tentative steps towards a new music. Hodgson is also a little kinder on the brief lifespan of Unit Delta Plus, citing the music which they created for two Shakespearean productions at Stratford (Macbeth and King Lear) and for a production of Medea at Greenwich Theatre. Electronic music was evidently better suited for tragedies. He also recalls the White Noise LP An Electric Storm in Hell which he made with Delia Derbyshire and David Vorhaus, and the 1967 multi-media ‘happening’ the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at the Roundhouse (which predated the better known 14-Hour Technicolor Daydream at Alexandra Palace by three months) to which Unit Delta Plus contributed, along with Paul McCartney. His Carnival of Light, a 13minute improvisation with tape effects produced with input from the rest of the Beatles, was made especially for the event. McCartney had paid several visits to Zinovieff’s Putney studio, once more demonstrating that he was the Beatle most interested in avant-garde and experimental art and music beyond the comforting bounds of rock at this time.

The adoption of electronic music, and the EMSVCS3 synthesiser in particular, by rock and pop musicians in Britain really rounds the programme off. By this time, it had entered the musical mainstream, adding interesting new colours and providing expanded possibilities for sound creation. The pioneers’ work was done. As Lee points out, electronic music is now ubiquitous, its means of production accessible to a far wider range of people via PCs and laptops. New tools tend to lead to new music, as Adrian Uttley points out. But, as Zinovieff adds, making good music still ‘depends on your imagination’. The tools may change and become more sophisticated and easier to use, with a bewilderingly vast palette of potential sounds, but the roots of inspiration remain the same. The programme is available to listen to for another week or so over here.