A Tribute to John Barry

I cannot say at exactly what age I first became aware that I was a fan of the James Bond films. But I guess it would have been around the age of 9 or 10, which would have been about the same time that I started to learn to play the electric organ. Indeed, it wasn't long before I made a Christmas tape of my playing for my grandparents. It's chosen (by me) theme? The James Bond songs.

My two great loves (music and films) combined into what now sounds embarrassingly amateurish, and is chock-full of mistakes (I was only 11 when I did it), but the one thing I do recall was that despite the many different instrumental sounds that our organ could produce, I always tended to go for either "Strings" or "Brass" in most of what I played. A preference I now recognise as perhaps having been an early attempt to emulate the sound and style of John Barry, who scored 11 of the first 15 James Bond films that I was at that time beginning to become mad about, and whose death was reported yesterday.
In its excellent leading article today, The Times asks what the film Jaws would have been without the signature 'der-dum' theme. Or the shower scene in Psycho without the screeching strings. The point it makes is that "the art of a great music score is to fuse so perfectly with what is on the screen that audiences are sucked into the mood of the movie...without their realising why." A kind of orchestral pathos I guess. Of which John Barry was, in my humble view, a master (he did win 5 Oscars - no actor has ever done that to my knowledge - although criminally none of those were for Bond soundtracks).

My music collection now contains quite a few movie soundtracks (including all the Bond films). But where other composers' film scores do contain beautiful pieces of music (I particularly like James Horner's 'Apollo 13', Thomas Newman's 'Road to Perdition' and James Newton Howard's King Kong), many are often mixed with random snippets ('cues') which are not so much tuneful as they are background noise to the particular segment of film (usually action) that they are written to support. Disappointingly, starting with Goldeneye, most of the recent James Bond soundtracks have been full of these, at the expense of melody.

But John Barry's earlier Bond soundtracks contained music that was of a style and quality all of its own. Lush sweeping pieces of such stand-alone quality that the film directors and editors often saw fit to include them in their entirety within the body of the film, even if they were several minutes long. As such, I regard many of the Bond sountracks just as much classical music as anything by Beethoven or Mozart.

Invariably fitting the style and using the instruments of the locations and time in which the films were based (eg Japan in You Only Live Twice, India in Octopussy, or Las Vegas in Diamonds are Forever) there are numerous personal favourites that I could post here. Aside from most of the film title songs themselves (Diamonds are Forever, Moonraker and On Her Majesty's Secet Service being my favourites), or the entire Octopussy soundtrack, here are merely 3:

Flight Into Space - this is 6m30s of music that completely fits the section of film it defines, namely Bond travelling into space. Don't judge the music by the often criticised over the top plot of the film; this piece is arguably as good, if not better, than the main theme from Star Wars, or Holst's "The Planets", in fitting perfectly the part of the story it represents.

Bond Lured to Pyramids - again from Moonraker, this is merely a section of the film where Bond is walking out of the Brazilian jungle and into an old Mayan pyramid, doubling as the villain's lair; yet despite this rather incidental section of plot, I think this piece is fantastic.

Wine with Stacey - from A View to a Kill, a beautiful instrumental of the Duran Duran title song, which Barry co-wrote and arranged.

Ironically, when I was driving Jack to school yesterday, a random piece from On Her Majesty's Secret Service started playing on my 'shuffling' ipod (this one, if you're interested). Jack has already discovered a liking for the official title songs from the Bond films (we even had to find him a personal CD player so that he could listen to them endlessly on repeat - his favourite is You Only Live Twice, which he first picked up from the sample used in 'Millennium' by Robbie Williams). But when asking me what the song that was playing yesterday was, and hearing me say it was from a James Bond film as well as explaining to him the difference between a song and a score, I could tell that his interest was hooked.

This despite the fact that Jack has yet to really discover or appreciate the brilliance of John Barry's finest composition; but given that he is only 4 days shy of his 6th birthday, We Have All The Time In The World.