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White Noise – The Danny Baker Connection

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Regardless of what you think of Cradle To Grave, the TV adaptation of Danny Baker’s life-affirming book Going To Sea In Sieve, it must be said that there are some lovely touches of detail in the show, especially those relating to music.

Continued…

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  1. One such obscure detail has intrigued me since the very beginning, namely the posters on young Danny’s bedroom wall, visible in every episode. There we see a couple of large record shop promo posters for LPs on the Island label.

    One is for Heartbreaker, the 1972 final album by Free. A nice item indeed 43 years on, but nothing especially unusual otherwise.

    The other poster however is much more interesting. It’s An Electric Storm a 1969 LP credited to White Noise. This is one of the most obscure records of the Island pink label period and a clean copy is valued at £125 in the latest Record Collector price guide.

    It’s a very early electronic record, unlike almost anything else on the label at the time. I daresay many folk here have never heard of the LP, or the loose conglomerate who recorded it.

    The mastermind behind the project was David Vorhaus, but Delia Derbyshire (of BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Dr. Who theme music) was also involved.

    As an Island records historian I’d love to know the thinking behind the placement of this poster. Was Danny (or the producers) being wilfully obscure, leaving Dylan-like clues to his musical heritage, or did they just have a couple of old record shop posters lying around?

    Has anyone else pondered the significance of this, or indeed, wonder who or what White Noise is?

    Many tears ago I wrote a piece about the early Island label for Record Collector and a short extract concerning White Noise follows. Forgive the rather smug, earnest tone of the writing. It was 25 years ago, after all (and it was Record Collector).

    Island ILPS 9099 – THE WHITE NOISE – AN ELECTRIC STORM

    Phase-In: Love without Sound / My Game Of Loving / Here Come The Fleas / Firebird / Your Hidden Dreams / Phase-Out: The Visitation / Black Mass: Electric Storm In Hell

    Release Date: 1969

    Musicians: David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, Paul Lytton, John Whitman, Annie Bird, Val Shaw

    Producer: David Vorhaus for Kaleidophon

    Given that An Electric Storm can often be found languishing in the ‘Experimental’, ‘Exotica’ or, even worse, ‘New Age’ racks these days, this debut outing from David Vorhaus is, it must be said, not nearly as unlistenable as may be expected.
    The lush synthesizer passages, girly whisperings and bizarre sound effects clearly pre-date the mid 70s electronic music boom by at least five years, while elements of The Cure, Kate Bush, OMD etc can also be detected, lending this curious mélange of vaguely psychedelic ‘songs’ a distinctly ahead-of-its-time feel. All very interesting, to be sure, but it was hardly vintage Island material, was it?

    Even stranger, the album remained on catalogue for many years after its expected deletion date had passed suggesting that, two decades on, sales were still holding firm enough to ward off the dreaded boardroom axe which had previously seen off many a finer Island release.

    Although just who the paying customers were/are is anyone’s guess.

    File under: Curio.

  5. I thought I had a memory of a White Noise track appearing on an Island sampler, but it appears I was wrong. Well, it appeared on a German-only sampler, but I wouldn’t have owned that.

  7. It’s an especially odd release for Island at that point and flies in the face of the prevailing prog/folk tide that was the label’s bread and butter in 1969.

    For example, here are the 5 consecutive Island LPs released in mid-1969 at the same as White Noise :

    TRAFFIC – Last Exit
    SPOOKY TOOTH – Spooky Two
    THE WHITE NOISE – An Electric Storm
    CLOUDS – Scrapbook
    BLODWYN PIG – Ahead Rings Out
    FAIRPORT CONVENTION – Unhalfbricking

  8. Regular listeners to Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone will be familiar with record as he had it as his featured album a few weeks ago.

    Personally I love it. It’s very strange and it has the slightly pervy quality that loads of sixties records have. (See also the Anthony Newley/Delia Derbyshire single)

  10. It was the first thing that leapt off the screen when I watched the initial part of Cradle To Grave. Not only was it the most intiguing entry in The Island Book Of Records, perhaps equalled in curiosity by Henry Wolff’s “Tibetan Bells”, but I’d heard a vinyl copy at a party, irredeemably knackered by stoner stylus-fingers, back in the day and had always wanted to listen again under better conditions. Alas I’d never parted with cash for my own copy, other titles taking understandable precednece in times of financial pressure (i.e. continuously for decades). When it first came out on a CD (and I got to read the sleeve notes at last!) I discovered that it used something calling itself “Bedini Audio Spatial Environment (BASE)”, and carried the logo “3D Island” on the label. Some heeby-jeebie stuff from David Vorhaus apparently. Whatever, it’s a great curio, a real hi-fi tester’s delight, and a perfect neighbour-frightener. In fact, as the sleeve has it, “The emotional intensity is at a maximum”.

  12. This might be the place to mention that Hux Records’ long hoped for compilation of Quintessence Island unreleased studio tracks is at last in progress. Hurrah!

  13. Late 80s, early 90s at university, a group of us got into psychedelia and the pursuit of interesting and rare records. Hapshash & the Coloured Coat and Dr Strangely Strange were others that we pursued but I never heard. I had the White Noise on a cassette with Gong’s Camembert Electrique on the other side – they seemed a good pairing of wild sounds, the aforementioned girly whispering and silly songs, e.g.
    My Game Of Loving – I Am Your Fantasy
    Here Come The Fleas – Wet Cheese Delirium

    Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

  17. i had this album at the time. sits nicely alongside similar synth/experimental records like the united states of america, fifty foot hose, music emporium. island was a pretty directionless label at the time, probably slinging mud at the wall. the only similar uk album i can think of rightnnow is spooky tooth/pierre henris awful ceremony album, on islandntoo i think?

  19. David Vorhaus went on to release 4 more White Noise albums up to 2000. The second album came out on Virgin in 1975.

    White Noise 2 – movement ll (A)

    Here’s a bit more from Vorhaus on Chris Blackwell’s decision to put out An Electric Storm:

    “I was just a teenager and pop seemed a very desirable thing – being on TV. I certainly fancied the idea of making an electronic pop record. The first two tracks on An Electric Storm are made up from a recording I made of a friend singing which was then developed in the Radiophonic Workshop. I imagined this would make a hit single. Thank God Chris Blackwell put me right. He said, “Hey, don’t do a hit single, make an album. This could be a cult classic.” I thought, I don’t want to be a cult, I want to be a pop star. But I was completely green about that. He also pointed out that the average pop buyer was under 13 years old. Whereas I was in the world of Bartók, Stravinsky and so on – I didn’t really want to be aiming at a market of 12 year olds.

    Actually, he didn’t so much convince me as bribe me. He said, “How much money do you think a hit single makes?” And we sat down and worked it out and it came to about £3,000 – about £60,000 in today’s money. So he wrote me a cheque for £3,000 and said, “There, you’ve had your hit single, now go make an album.”

    The response when it came out was very disappointing. The record company were worse than useless. Chris Blackwell had been great but he was elsewhere at the time. The record company didn’t have a clue what to do with it and it sold about a couple of hundred copies. So we thought, Well, we got the advance – other than that, it was a waste of time. Then, gradually, it began to get about by word of mouth. It was big on the offshore pirate radio stations – Kenny Everett must have played it 10,000 thousand times.”

  22. Delia was posh (a good thing, and ridiculously more sexy than the norm today) wasn’t she!

    When did people stop talking in that way? I mean, Brian Jones is just as posh, and he was in The Stones. End of the Grammar Schools?

    I don’t think either is a ‘studied’ poshness either…..erm, hello Stephen Fry, who clearly spotted a HUGE gap in the market, circa 1980, and has been the go-to posh guy ever since.

    I blame Jagger going native (i.e. starting to talk common) at the turn of the 60s, and definitely by the time of Hyde Park in July ’69.
    After that, the more thick you could sound seemed to be the way everyone moved toward.

  23. I watched the George Martin documentary again the other night and, as ever, enjoyed it tremendously. He had a fantastic accent for a London lad born into mild poverty.
    It was another reminder of the sheer serendipity of the Fabs ending up on an obscure label that had a classically trained producer who’d specialised in comedy records. Can you imagine the disaster that would have ensued with Norrie Paramor at the helm?

    • I was amazed at the revelations about Norrie Paramor in the Mark Lewisohn book Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years

      For all these years (sorry) we’d believed the accepted story of how the Beatles were signed to Parlophone, as it appears in Brian Epstein’s book A Cellar Full Of Noise and repeated in every other Fabs book since – until now.

      ie: Epstein takes Fabs demo tapes to HMV shop in Oxford Street to have them made into acetate records. Bloke who works there is impressed by the band and rings his his mate George Martin at Parlophone to arrange an audition. We all know what happened next.

      It turns out that was the simple, sanitised version and it was much more complex than that.

      The real story was more like this. It seems Norrie Paramor (George Martin’s nemesis at Parlophone’s more successful arch rival Columbia) was placing his own self-penned songs (written under various names) on his artists’ B-Sides, thus raking in the royalties, against every rule in the book.

      Martin blew the whistle on Paramor during an interview with David Frost, much to EMI’s displeasure.

      It seemed like EMI might not renew Martin’s contract at one point, until he was given an ultimatum: record this new band The Beatles the bloke at the HMV shop has been banging on about for months, or else.

      So, against his will George was more or less dragged kicking and screaming into the Beatles audition and in fact was in the canteen for the first few songs, until Norman “Hurricane” Smith sent for him during Love Me Do feeling they might have something worth signing.

      • I’ll have to get started on that tome. Didn’t know the Paramor story at all, but there’s a small hint in the Arena documentary as regards Martin’s late arrival at the initial sessions.
        The Beatles loved his recordings with Sellers and Milligan – Paul talks about wearing out his copy of “songs with Swinging Sellers’ in the docu.

        • I had it as a real book and also a Kindle, until eventually getting the audiobook version, which was the way I finished it.

          There’s so much new info in the book, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

      • I should add that “the bloke from the HMV shop” actually worked for EMI’s in-house publishing company Ardmore & Beechwood, located in the offices above the HMV shop in Oxford Street.

        It was he who hawked the Beatles demos around town for months until finally getting the Parlophone audition for the band in return for the Lennon & McCartney publishing.

        Despite his hard work though, Ardmore & Beechwood were dumped after Love Me Do in favour of Dick James, who secured the publishing rights for the major part of the Beatles career.

  25. I have that White Noise LP. I borrowed it from the boyfriend of a girl I knew, I think he paid about twenty quid for it in some second-hand shop in Gloucester in 1979 or 1980 or something, which was a lot of money back then [you could go out all night on a Friday and not even spend a fiver, etc]. Then they split up and I never gave it back. I am such a cad.

    It’s a cracking piece of vinyl.

        • Oh dear. The Bowie’s all there, from “Images” [cartoon cover] to “Black Tie White Noise” [ha ha, how ironic]. Ronson’s “Slaughter On Tenth Avenue”. Some Al Stewart, including the wonderful “Orange”. A 12-inch Black Uhuru single, “What Is Life”. But no White Noise. I reckon I must’ve let my lad have it when he moved to Brighton. I’ll have to ask him about the label.

          By the way, the cat’s had another piss down there.

  26. Interesting thread. The Delia and White Noise stuff doesn’t play, unfortunately, in my territory. Collected a fair amount of Island issues at the time but I suppose I wasn’t quite ready for White Noise. First electronic stuff I got was Zero Time by Tonto’s Expanding Headband (Atlantic, 1971) because, I would guess, Peel was playing it.

    Anyone else know it? The guys involved, Margouleff and Cecil, went on to do the programming on that terrific run of albums Stevie Wonder produced in the early mid-70s.

    • Heard Tonto’s on OGWT aeons ago. Managed to score a CD with both of their albums on it which is, apparently, a bootleg. For whatever reason, their CDs weren’t available then.

    • I’ll confess to being indifferent to the White Noise on release. It didn’t sound anything like Free, Tull, Fairport or the other Island big names, so we didn’t know what to make of it. I came back to it years later and was pleased to find it had aged gracefully and still sounded fresh.

      Like you Tonto’s Expanding Headband was my introduction to electronic music. It was the big stoner LP of the early 70s.

  28. tonto made a couple of very fine albums, available on one cd. strange how moogs were ever considered cold and machine-like. gorgeous bubbly swooshes, very organic-sounding to me. headphone music. i listen to it a lot. pop quiz: “tonto” means …?

    this: the (fucking) beatles are to the afterword what hitler is to the rest of the internet.

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