Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall, May 26 2018

I don’t believe in bucket lists. I don’t think an arbitrary score card of life experiences that, once filled, turns you into the living embodiment of the ‘Guess I’ll die’ meme is something that’s healthy.

But if I had a bucket list, last night I would have crossed an item off it.

Seeing the Radiophonic Workshop play in the Elgar Room at the Royal Albert Hall was deeply weird and profoundly wonderful. The Workshop, during the days when they had BBC attached to the front of their name, were pioneers of electronic music in the most literal sense of those words. Along with titans like Delia Derbyshire, these men were, and are, musicians and engineers in equal measure and the cheerful way they went about assembling an entire genre of music still echoes up and down today. To give you an example from my own life; the first three albums I was consciously aware of are:

The Greatest Hits of Eric Clapton

The Greatest Hits of The Sisters of Mercy

Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre

The ghosts, or perhaps more accurately the seeds, of all of them were audible last night. Across a 90 minute gig, with no breaks, the group sprinted through a good chunk of their back catalogue. Legendary track Incubus, a collision between walls of sound and delicate instrumentation, was a standout as were the inevitable dives into the halls of BBC science fiction TV. It turns out I have a Pavlovian reaction to the Hitchhiker’s Guide activation sound. That ‘CHIKKA-bum CHIKKA-bum BUM CHA’ noise, played over the Infinite Improbability Drive sequence made me grin and the grin was still on my face ten minutes later. Judging by the crowd, and the exuberance with which the band went to work, I was far from alone too.

The music they played was feverishly varied, ranging from walls of sound to an honest to God pseudo-funk piece that wouldn’t sound out of place in a heist movie. The work was sometimes melodic, sometimes atonal, sometimes orchestral and sometimes minimal. The only common factor (aside from frequent graphic and musical hints of a certain Gaillfreyan troublemaker) was that there was no common factor

But for all that, what really came across last night was the joy these people feel in doing work that has defined their lives and the lives of so many others. An early skit involved a heavily disguised Dalek expressing its love for Alexa. In one interlude, the band explained how there was a Stephen Hawking quote they wanted to use, so wrote to him for permission. Instead of simply granting it, Hawking recorded the quote and sent it back to them and they use it to this day.

The band are also aware of who they’ve worked with and of their position as part of a vanguard of electronic music. Another interlude saw the gig dedicated to the engineers they’ve worked with, not all of whom are still with us. During another, a cheery admission that album Burials on Several Earths was improvised over the course of a day while they ‘drunk a lot of tea’. There’s no front to this group, no sense of anything to prove, because they’ve proved it all. The Workshop, living and dead, present and past and future, have changed the shape of music forever. And, as they sprinted into an epic 10 minute long rendition of ‘Regeneration’, their take on Derbyshire’s epic Doctor Who theme, you couldn’t help but smile as widely as they were.

Verdict: An extraordinary night, from an extraordinary group of people whose work is the cornerstone to so much. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart