In 1958 an anonymous group of overworked and under-budgeted BBC employees set out to make some
new sounds for radio and TV. They ended up changing the course of 20th-century music. For
millions of people the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was the first electronic music
they had ever heard. Sampling loops and the earliest synthesizers-long before audiences knew
what they were-made up the groundbreaking scores for news programs auto maintenance shows and
children's programming. They also produced the Doctor Who theme one of the first electronic
music masterpieces. The Beatles Pink Floyd and others borrowed from them. A generation of
musicians raised on BBC programming-Aphex Twin Portishead and Prodigy among them-took these
once-alien sounds and carried on the Workshop's legacy. Ignored for decades by music historians
the Workshop is now recognized as one of the most influential forebears of electronica
psychedelia ambient music and synth-pop.
