Sound On Sound has published on its site Steve Marshall’s excellent article The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a feature that ran last year in the SOS magazine.

It offers a great introduction to the people and history of the Radiophonic Workshop:

The story of the Radiophonic Workshop began half a century ago, in 1958.

Britain in the 1950s was a bleak place, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. Food rationing had continued right up until 1954, when bananas finally came back on sale; anything worth having was still in short supply. We now think of the ’50s as the rock & roll years, but the UK charts for 1958 tell quite a different story. Elvis was there for a few weeks; so was Jerry Lee Lewis — but the chart is mostly dominated by the likes of Perry Como, Connie Francis and Vick Damone. It was a dull time for music, but things were about to get more interesting…

There are also several amazing images of the Workshop in its early days.