Dale Smith’s analysis of The Devil’s Chord commences with a pugnacious gauntlet thrown by Russell T Davies: “People are perfectly free to have opinions, but they’ve given it five minutes’ thought. We live with it 24 hours a day. You can absolutely guarantee we have given it more thought, and we have more reasons for doing what we’ve done than you can possibly imagine.” Suitably mollified, Smith devotes considerably more than five minutes thought to this musical episode, crafting an insightful and eclectic Black Archive.
Smith’s analysis is rooted in a thought-provoking cultural history of post-war Britain, all of which is underpinned by The Beatles. This Black Archive contextualises their now-forgotten rebellious iconography and considers the four mortal musicians’ distance from their band and its phenomenon. The other side of the coin is James Bond, with Smith heavily citing John Higgs’ Love and Let Die to use 007 as the symbol of the establishment. Bond is something of a third wheel here, reduced to embodying tradition and remorseless longevity against the Fab Four’s mutable, zeitgeist-compressed innovation.
This analysis is more than worth a moment of your time
What follows over the next couple of chapters is a wide-ranging discussion of The Devil’s Chord’s themes, taking in everything from music’s status beyond all human culture and history to the Byzantine nuances of copyright law. While these insights are stimulating, it does mean that it’s not until the fourth chapter that the Black Archive focuses on the episode itself. Here, alas, the book runs aground amid many quotes from RTD on the episode’s inspiration, casting and myriad other topics. These anecdotes obscure critical appraisal of the episode itself, meaning The Devil’s Chord gets pretty short shrift in its own Black Archive. That’s not to say there aren’t valuable insights - Smith reveals the episode’s surprising musical gaffes, from confusion over tune, harmony, and melody to, bizarrely, not featuring a bona fide Devil’s Chord. But there are plenty of ideas that don’t feel fully thought through. For example, we are told early on that The Devil’s Chord is neither a musical episode nor a celebrity historical, but not what it actually is. Instead, Smith stresses the finished teleplay’s ordinariness: its Pyramids of Mars-aping structure and its place in a season that settled for eternal retooling past Davies-era story arcs after promising something more radical. The final chapter, meanwhile, upbraids certain Doctor Who fans as people prone to eviscerating any new regeneration. It’s a fair point - too much vitriol has been hurled at the undeserving Time Lord and their handlers for me to disagree. However, I would have liked a wider range of critical views to support this, rather than relying heavily on the assessments of Elizabeth Sandifer.
Despite having some misgivings about this Black Archive’s analysis of its focal episode, the five chapters, and the two witty appendices that follow, ensure this book makes for a rewarding read overall. It’s ultimately appropriate that The Devil’s Chord has launched a dreamier discussion of ideas, riffing on the episode’s themes just as sixties musicians reinvented existing musical styles. There’s the occasional bum note, but this analysis is more than worth a moment of your time.