Music interview: Will Gregory on Hull City of Culture's Basil Kirchin weekend

Composer Basil Kirchin, whose work is to be celebrated at Hull City of Culture.

The work of musician Basil Kirchin is being celebrated as part of Hull City of Culture next weekend. Duncan Seaman reports.

Basil Kirchin may not be among Yorkshire and the Humber’s most celebrated musicians but his work over a 60-year period can certainly be described as among the most visionary to have ever emerged from this region.

A prodigious drummer in his father Ivor’s jazz band, he went on work with future Beatles producer Sir George Martin, create film soundtracks – most notably the 70s British horror film The Abominable Dr Phibes – and experiment with industrial, orchestral, psychedelic, ambient and found sounds.

He died in 2005 aged 77 but next weekend Hull City of Culture 2017 is due to celebrate his work and influence with a weekend of concerts under the banner Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story.

Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, who has curated the closing concert of the Basil Kirchin weekend.

Among the musicians taking part are Sean O’Hagan of The High Llamas, saxophonist Evan Parker, improvisational duo Spring Heel Jack and Jerry Dammers, founder of The Specials. The closing concert at Hull City Hall, Mutations of Musical Modernism, is being curated by Will Gregory of the band Goldfrapp, with contributions from Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, Bjork collaborator Matthew Herbert, Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rouke and pianist Matthew Bourne as well as the BBC Concert Orchestra. It’s being recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Here and Now.

Gregory may be a relative newcomer to Kirchin’s work – “It’s slightly embarrassing to admit that I didn’t know about it until I spoke to the people who are organising this concert, Serious,” he confesses – but having immersed himself in his recordings he says: “I’ve come to really love it.”

He adds: “It’s funny because you speak to various people and half of them say ‘I’ve never heard of him’ and half of them go ‘I know all about him’. It’s like ‘How have I missed out on this all this time?’ but it seems to be quite common that people haven’t heard of him.”

Fifty-seven-year-old Gregory, who studied music at the University of York, recognises in Kirchin a fellow sonic explorer. “He’s definitely part of a movement that came up through the 50s and 60s to do with certainly his experimental side because he was working with tape and he was working with found sound. He was excited with the nature of once you had a sound on tape you could manipulate it and do things with it and incorporate it into live performance – that’s something I’ve always been interested in, that idea, and been inspired by pioneers from that period who did that.

Basil Kirchin began his musical career as a drummer in his father's jazz band.

“But then he’s somebody who’d got two strands to his output which is his film music and the stuff he did for library music – Abstractions of the Industrial North and various other pieces. We haven’t found scores for them but we’ve found people who’ve helped transcribe them so we’re bringing them back to life. And of course he did the film music to Dr Phibes so we’re able to bring a bit of that to the concert too.”

Kirchin’s took his first musical steps at 13 when he joined his father’s jazz band, then one of wartime Britain’s top swing groups. He went on to play in various ensembles before rejoining his father in the 1950s to cut a number of discs for Parlophone with the producer George Martin.