Phyllis Wood: The Chalkhurst Requiem

It is 1970s Britain. A fetid grey smog hangs over the country. Moisture drips from the black branches of diseased trees. In the front garden of a semi-detached house, a young boy plays with the local dog, chewing on its ears and slapping its rump. The dog is delighted, but the boy is bored, his actions filled with a crushing ennui. Entering the house he finds his mother’s rationing book lying open on the table. From it he can see that the only food they'll be getting that week will be five pounds of butter and a bit of an egg. Sick of butter and bits of egg, he slumps down onto the sofa and lets the warm death of sleep begin to fog his eyes.

I am this boy (I am not sure if that was obvious already). A noise from the TV stirs the boy (or “me”). It is a noise the like of which he (I) has (have) never heard before. Wrenching my eyes open, I am confronted by a monstrous, demented creature. Although I am aware it is contained with the TV screen, it is as if it is filling the room, bearing down on me from all angles, swamping me with all the horror in the world, its eyes, lit with the fires of hell, burning rivers of terror down my face. If I had to describe the sound it is emitting, I would say it was somewhere between a banshee’s wail and a hydra’s cough. But I don’t have to describe it. This was the cry of the Flanjus, a chthonic beast familiar to millions as the arch nemesis to Professor Jake in the eponymous TV series. This was the cry that shook the nation out of its torpor. This was the cry that signalled my entry, aged 8, into the world of adulthood.

Although I have watched every episode of the subsequent 54 series of Professor Jake, the cry of the Flanjus remains as powerful to me as ever, and when hearing it I cannot help but be taken back to that afternoon that I have just described in unnecessary detail. I have my own son now (the goon is 2.7 years young!), and although it may be misguided I often try and replicate my first experience of the Flanjus’ cry for his benefit. Creeping up on him when he is sleeping, I attempt my own vocal approximation of the sound. What it lacks in authenticity, I like to think it makes up for in volume. Pubert often seems upset, however, at my attempts to amuse him, and usually I end up just chucking him a burger and leaving in disgust.    

And so we have arrived, tediously and circuitously, at the subject of this review: Phyllis Wood. This spectral enigma was the creator (or ‘creatress’, for the feminists) of the Flanjus’ cry. After joining the BBC in the early fifties as a humble postmistress, Wood worked her way up the lardy pole to become the backbone of the BBC’s sound effects and theme music department. From the late fifties to the early nineties she worked on thousands of TV programmes, some of them remembered fondly (Prisoner 281, Waffle and Spork), others not (What’s in Uncle Arthur’s Big Cheese Hands?, Frank Furter and the Sour Kraut). She was also responsible for the sound effects in all those frankly terrifying government educational films about how to stand in the parlour (whatever that is) and melt with dignity in the event of a 20 megaton nuclear bomb falling on the country.

After the day was over, however, the lights switched off, and the actors packed away, Wood would slink back in to the BBC studios, turn the equipment back on, make about a gallon of strong coffee (half milk/half no milk, mixed together) and set to work. It was during these clandestine sessions that she produced the work that she is most critically respected for. This music, released posthumously in a steady stream since her death in 2004, amounts to over seventy hours of raw, punishing sounds. But it is all merely a prelude to the album I hold in my hands today, The Chalkhurst Requiem.

This song cycle, produced over the last ten years of her life in her house outside Guildford, represents the apotheosis of her talents. It is a powerful and moving work that asks of the listener something more than the usual passive acceptance, and rewards tedious persistence. The emotions in the music, however, were given an extra dimension after it emerged recently that Wood had been one of a pair of conjoined twins. Separated at the age of two, Wood's twin was taken away and brought up in a different family. It was pathologically feeble, however, and died aged 43 after scraping a meagre living as a laboratory assistant in a minor university (Hull). The trauma of this separation though, haunts Wood's music. Song titles such as Wrenched From My Side In A Tangle of Skin And Bone, The Hurt I Suffer Is Still So Real  hint at her pain.

In the last years of her life, the pain was not only psychological, however, but also physical. The scar from the separation that ran down the right side of her body caused her such agony that she could only relieve it by the heavy use of medicinal marijuana. As she would beaver away with her synths and reel-to-reel tape recorders, her retired accountant husband would roll up enormous joints and feed them to her (a figure of speech there. Wood didn’t actually eat the cannabis cigarettes. Imagine that, her old gob munching on a big doobie. I’m “laughing out loud” just thinking about it). This drug use inevitably comes out in the music, which is all pleasingly monged.

So there you have it, Phyllis Wood, a woman whose singular artistic vision ran through every work she produced, from the Flanjus’s cry, to music for embarrassingly racist 70s TV shows, to the Siamese dream of the Chalkhurst Requiem. A demure accountant’s wife, a sound pioneer, a terrifier of children, and a stoned genius. Wood was all of these things. You’re not fit to lick her boots.