When Trunk Records owner Jonny Trunk finally found him, Basil Kirchin was living in poverty with his Swiss wife Esther in a tiny terraced house in the Yorkshire port city of Hull, still at the peak of his creative powers, working his way through the later stages of cancer.
Jonny set about recording the story of Basil’s remarkable life.
And Basil had a message for the world:
“I can tell you what I’m going to tell you now is something to keep in your mind for the rest of your life because it’s true and it represents the sum total of the knowledge of the planet, which is this: we are living in four dimensions: time – it’s a dimension and just believe me, our four dimensions are within an infinite amount of infinities – the challenge is, it’s up to you to make your life worthwhile… because we didn’t ask to be born, but we are fucking born. I want to take it on, I want my life to be meaningful, I want to know that when I die, I’ve left something behind to show I was there. You realise what I’m doing is I’m coming to you with the map that’s going to show you where the treasure is, and I found I felt I could trust you with this knowledge.”
Through interviews with many of Basil’s friends and collaborators, Mind On The Run tells the story of Basil’s life and reveals his unique musical vision…
At the age of just 14 years, Basil joined his father Ivor’s big band – and later the Teddy Foster Band and The Ted Heath Band – rising to become the UK’s leading drummer at the peak of the dance band era, with fans including Billy Eckstine, Sean Connery and Elizabeth Taylor.
But Basil was always searching for something more – he wanted to understand the secret of swing; and more than that, he wanted to live it.
During the 1950s, long before the Beatles discovered transcendentalism, Basil read the works of Jiddu Krishnamurti and travelled to India to meet his gurus and explore the concept of ‘choiceless awareness’.
He came back to the UK with a new, freer approach to music and soon established himself as a composer of film scores, starting with the cult mondo documentary Primitive London in 1965, followed by John Boorman’s debut Catch Us If You Can.
Other films soon followed including Negatives, The Shuttered Room, I Start Counting, The Strange Affair, Assignment K, The Mutations and Freelance - peaking with the acclaimed score for the cult horror The Abominable Dr Phibes in 1971.
But just as Basil had achieved recognition, in typical fashion he pushed into unchartered musical territory. With an Arts Council grant he bought a Nagra tape recorder and began investigating found sounds, recording – amongst other things - autistic children, lions, geese and the industrial sounds of Hull docks, manipulating his tape recordings to reveal what he called “boulders of sound”. The two resulting albums – both titled Worlds Within Worlds and released by Columbia and Island – were commercial flops at the time but have subsequently become highly influential, cited by Brian Eno as being the foundation of ambient music.
Basil and his beloved wife Esther moved to the northern port city of Hull, where Basil not only had free rein of his friend Keith Herd’s Fairview Studios and the accomplished Fairview musicians, but also easy access to supplies of cannabis from Amsterdam, which he’d smuggle through customs in an adapted amplifier with a secret compartment.
Through the 70s, 80s and 90s Basil lived in poverty, single-mindedly pursuing his sonic vision and producing startlingly different music but never reaching an audience until – in the early 2000s when he was dying of cancer – he was tracked down by Jonny Trunk who released his work and helped him to influence a new generation.
Basil died in Hull in June 2005, but his music is still being discovered. As the journalist Richard Williams states in the film:
“the resonance continues…”.