Basil Kirchin

Basil Kirchin (8 August 1927 – 18 June 2005) was an English drummer and composer. His career spanned from playing drums in his father's big band at the age of 13, through scoring films, to electronic music featuring tape manipulation of the sounds of birds, animals, insects and autistic children".

Basil Kirchin was born Basil Philip Kirchinsky, son of Lilian Kay Kirchin (Walters) and the bandleader Ivor Kirchin (Isaac Kirchinsky) in Blackpool, Lancashire. He debuted at age 13, playing drums with his father's orchestra at the Paramount, Tottenham Court Road in London. After the war he left his father's band to play with the bands of Harry Roy, Teddy Foster, Jack Nathan and Ted Heath, but he returned to work with his father again in 1951. The Kirchin Band's early recordings for Parlophone were produced by George Martin. The Kirchin Band travelled with their own PA, which meant Basil was able to record the band's live performances live off the soundboard. By 1957, the rise of Skiffle and Rock and Roll had brought an end to the Big Band era and Kirchin decided it was time to move on "because you're a prisoner of rhythm. And I was fed up playing other people's music".

A decade before it became fashionable, Kirchin went to India and spent five months in the Ramakrishna Temple. He then moved to Sydney in October 1959 with his wife Theresa but as his possessions were being unloaded from the ship a strap broke and everything, including his recordings of the Kirchin band, was lost beneath the sea. This loss would trouble him for the rest of his life.

In 1961, Kirchin returned to Britain. His father Ivor had secured a residency at the newly opened Mecca Locarno club in Hull, and Basil spent his time between London and Hull. In Hull he befriended local musician Keith Herd and began working on experimental pieces, "soundtracks for unmade films". In London he lived with songwriters Jimmy Jaques and Pat Ryan, and contributed heavily to the Johnny Keating album 'The Keating Sound'. He also produced material for the De Wolfe library using the talents of young session musicians such as Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page and Tubby Hayes. In 1967, the Arts Council awarded him a grant to purchase a Nagra tape recorder. This he used to collect ambient sounds, animal noises at London Zoo and the voices of autistic children. Kirchin experimented with slowing down the recordings to reveal "Little boulders of sound". "Take birdsong, all those harmonics you can't hear are brought down – sounds that human ears have never heard before". His experimentations were partly financed by composing film music for Catch Us If You Can (1965), The Shuttered Room (1967), The Strange Affair (1968), I Start Counting (1969) and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971).

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