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In 1919, whilst a very young undergraduate, William Walton met Sacheverell Sitwell, the youngest of the three Sitwells. Having decided that Walton was a genius he introduced him to his brother, Osbert and eventually the Sitwell family more or less adopted him. He had such a resemblance to the family, especially Edith, that they could well have presented him as one of the family. Financial support for Walton was forthcoming from Dr Strong, Dean of Christchurch, Lord Berners and Siegfried Sassoon. They also provided him with an entrée to society, contemporary classical music and Jazz.

Edith Sitwell was writing poems which were concerned with word-play, rhythms and onomatopoeia. They had started out as technical exercises - she was attempting to obtain, purely through the written word, the rhythm of the waltz, polka and fox-trot. When Edith was told that this was very clever - but just a façade, the name stuck. It was then decided that they would sound better if they were set to music - and who else should do this but Walton?

The music and words were to have an equal contribution. To attain this, and to eliminate the personalities of the speaker and instrumentalists, Osbert decided the whole performance should be screened from the audience by a curtain designed and painted by Frank Dobson. In order to amplify the volume of the speaker to equal that of the instruments, the speaker used a type of megaphone called a Sengerphone, which jutted through the curtain.

The history of the Edith Sitwell/William Walton Entertainment Façade is a complicated one, further confused by the Sitwells' attempts to have us believe that the first public performance was a near riot - when it was nothing of the sort. As Edith herself put it, Façade started as an enquiry 'into the effect on rhythm, and on speed, of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances, placed outwardly and inwardly (at different places in the line) and in most elaborate patterns'. This was 1921-2, a time of literary experimentation and revolt, with James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land standing out as among the most significant works of that period. The Sitwell brothers suggested that the verses would benefit from musical accompaniment. Façade was at first intended for private performance only, and one cold January evening in 1922, in Osbert's Chelsea home, 16 poems were recited to music composed - at first reluctantly - by the Sitwells' twenty-year-young protégé and lodger, William Walton.

The success of this novelty (with reciter and musicians all concealed behind a painted curtain and Edith declaiming her verses through a kind of megaphone) led to another private performance and eventually to a public presentation in the Aeolian Hall in June 1923. By then the content and order of the Entertainment had been changed: three poems had been dropped and fifteen added. And so with successive performances further changes were made until a final order of 21 poems was decided on and published. Altogether, at one time or another 44 poems were used in the developement of Façade (43 if one of the titles was a purely instrumental item).