TAPE LEADERS: EXCAVATING EARLY BRITISH ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Abstract

AbstractThis article questions the narrow representation of the history of much early British electronic music, and challenges the way historians and writers have tended to cherry-pick and lionize certain individuals, while ignoring all the others that fall outside of the limited and regularly repeated version of events. It is an extension of the research presented in my compendium Tape Leaders, conceived during 2010 with the aspiration to catalogue all the early British electronic music composers who became active before 1970, presenting a biographical entry for as many experimenters as I could trace and documenting more than 100 individuals, including hobbyist tape activists, who have never before received recognition. Tape Leaders presents a completely different picture to the consensus that positions the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a handful of others, at the centre of electronic activity in Britain, with allegedly very little else happening until universities caught on at the end of the 1960s and began to offer courses and studio facilities.