Flatpack Festival
Film for all the senses

Stalking Delia

Ian Francis
Friday 19th September, 2008 Posted by Ian Francis

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Some unexpected discoveries today. We're going to have a little reading room with some material relating to Delia Derbyshire at Towards Tomorrow on Saturday. I thought it would be nice to include a picture of the house where she grew up, so drove down to Coventry after lunch and knocked on what I thought was the right door. Not only was the man who lived there a musician, and extremely accommodating, but in the process of restoring the house he had also been carefully gathering material from the attic left by the previous residents. Like Delia Derbyshire's gas-mask for example (above right). And a pile of her old school-books. (Typing this is not making it any more real.) Now, Derbyshire has been over-mythologised in some ways, and I probably shouldn't treat these as relics of Tutankamun. But blitzed and battered Coventry helped shape the kind of music that she ended up making, so it was something of a buzz to touch and smell and read about the world that this woman grew up in. A massive thank you to Andi for sharing this material with us; if someone else had moved in, it might well have been lost. We won't be exhibiting any of it on Saturday but there may be a few scans and extracts, and hopefully this box of delights will be making its way to an appropriate archive soon.

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