WELCOME TO DD DAY 2025!
Welcome to our selection of online content prepared for you for Delia Derbyshire Day 2025.
DD Day is on 23 NOVEMBER because this is the date Delia’s revolutionary realisation of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme first beamed into British living rooms (in 1963).
The theme for our 2025 programme has been the 10th anniversary of Delia Derbyshire Day as a registered charity.
Our DD Day 2025 activities have been gratefully awarded funding support from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
We are a growing organisation with no core funding so if you are able to, you can support our work via our donations page and get your own Delia-n merchandise from our shop.
Content list:
- new art responding to heritage
- our first podcast series
- an interview with Madelon Hooykaas, friend and collaborator of Delia Derbyshire
- our first social impact report
- Reform Radio show by our 2025 volunteers
Online premiere! 3 new artworks inspired by heritage
6 NW England based artists have cooked up wonderful new creativity inspired by the Delia Derbyshire and Delia Derbyshire Day Archives. This year we drew from our community of artists who have already worked with us, and so could help us celebrate our 10th anniversary with knowledge of our work. Each work is a collaboration between 2 artists with new work responding to the theme of a statement about our current times, as well as our 10th anniversary. We hope you enjoy these lovingly crafted creations!
‘The Music of Uncertain Lives’ by Suzy Mangion (sound/music) and Andrea Pazos (visuals)
The more uncertainty in life, the more we crave order. This piece was composed using a simple random number generator. Numbers selected the sound settings. Numbers selected the archive items. It is the music of uncertain lives.
Alluvium by Joy Ingle (sound) and Alexis Maxwell (visuals)
Alluvium = a deposit of clay, silt, and sand left by flowing floodwater in a river valley or delta, typically producing fertile soil.
Alluvium winds its way through the history of a creative energy centred on the work and life of British electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire. It treats the Delia Derbyshire Archive as a landscape layered with traces, where past experiments and contributions settle and accumulate, reflecting an ongoing movement of ideas flowing into new hands. The works and voices of artists who have worked with Delia Derbyshire Day over the past decade weave together along with new material inspired by Derbyshire and her eponymous archive at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library.
‘Glimmers’ by Zolatec (music) and hippiezilla (visuals)
‘Glimmers’ is a four-part audio-visual piece commissioned for Delia Derbyshire Day’s 10th anniversary. Inspired by Delia’s playful spirit and inventive approach to sound, as well as by Deb Dana’s concept of ‘glimmers’ within the poly vagal theory, the piece traces a journey from constriction to hope. It explores the resilience needed to create change in difficult times by focusing on finding small moments of joy, beauty and defiance in everyday life. Through layered imagery and sound reflecting identity, heritage and environmental factors, the piece highlights how these ‘glimmers’ can restore hope in a seemingly hopeless world, using joy as an act of resistance.
DD DAY PODCAST – SERIES 1 AVAILABLE NOW!
Our first podcast! 5 short and sweet episodes with people involved with Delia Derbyshire Day discussing the charity, our work, the heritage and of course sharing knowledge about Delia’s work and heritage.
This podcast series was designed by our trustees and our wonderful team of younger volunteers for 2025. We want to present a range of voices and perspectives so we have a variety of hosts and guests who are involved with our work. We also want to keep it fun and accessible, so have kept the conversations around 20 minutes long and inserted quirky segments like ‘Did you know?’ and Delia’s Dessert Discs.
INTERVIEW WITH MADELON HOOYKAAS
ABOUT RE-DISCOVERED FILM ‘DAYDREAMS’
2025 volunteer Marla Broadway posed ten questions to the visual artist and filmmaker Madelon Hooykaas. This presented a rare opportunity for us to find out a bit about what it was like working with Delia firsthand. But as well as looking back, it offers a chance for Madelon to reflect on the charity established in Delia’s legacy, and how its values of ‘Creativity, Curiosity, Collaboration and Openness’ are different for artists in the present day.
The context for this interview: Video art pioneer Madelon Hooykaas got in touch with us to tell us about an exciting re-discovery: ‘Daydreams’, a short art film that Madelon and Elsa Stansfield made in 1972 with a soundtrack by Delia. At this year’s Manchester event, we screened ‘Daydreams’ where a feeling of “slowly waking up” is captured. The soundtrack, features a slow, dissonant yet playful piano improvisation based on a popular nursery rhyme. A tender electronic motif appears fleetingly, as the voiceover ponders the tension between the ordinary, mundane pattern of daily life and the final rupture of death. The film was produced as a pilot for One of These Days, enabling Stansfield and Hooykaas to demonstrate their eligibility for the funding. This film is not available online.
READ OUR SOCIAL IMPACT REPORT
Today we publish our Social Impact Report carried out by Turn Up the Value, designed by Andrea Pazos.
Our chair of trustees, David Butler, opens the report with:
“It has been the greatest of joys to experience the growth, reach and enduring impact of Delia Derbyshire Day since the charity was founded in 2015.”
We have collected data, quotes, case studies to charter our first decade as an arts heritage charity with the aim of social change via heritage and the arts.
PLEASE EMAIL us at deliaderbyshireday@gmail.com if you use a screen reader – html version coming soon.
3 of our 2025 volunteers made a special DD Day 2025 radio show! They chat ahout their experience with DD Day this year, share their favourite Delia tracks and chat ahout our new music/sound commissions.
HAPPY DELIA DERBYSHIRE DAY 2025!
THANK YOU FOR COMING ON THIS JOURNEY WITH US SO FAR,
HERE’S TO MORE INSPIRATION, EMPOWERMENT AND CREATIVITY INSPIRED BY THE LATE GREAT DELIA DERBYSHIRE
Do peruse our website for more info about our work and what we have been up to this year.
We are a growing organisation with no core funding so if you are able to, you can support our work via our donations page and get your own Delia-n merchandise from our shop.
