Music in my life, part four...

LIKE HAVING TEETH PULLED

I have often encountered people who get very scathing about those of us who listen to classical music and react overtly to it. "Pulling faces," they say. They're also prone to wax comical about the expressions and movements of actual musicians when playing. "What's he swaying about like that for? Pretentious git." I wonder, do they think it's being pretentious when someone eats a hot curry and their eyes water?

People differ. Some people can listen to music in perfect stillness, and some don't actually listen at all, preferring to use it as a background to their sparkling conversation. Others, like me, feel the music in their bodies, in their bones, in their hearts, and the feeling has to come out somehow. There is, of course, no wrong way to appreciate music, but our way does sometimes look a bit ridiculous, and I understand that. Unless, of course, we're dancing. (No, sometimes even then. Honesty above all.)

I rarely dance, a fact for which I believe there was a move afoot to institute a National Day of Thanksgiving (held up in committee when Mr Stephen Fry put in a parallel bid on his own behalf) but I did quite a bit for a while, back there in college, in my efforts to become a real live boy, and that was when I discovered that this Abba outfit (much liked by Ms Tinkly And Contrived up there in part three) actually weren't half bad. This was the time when "Dancing Queen" was up there at number one, and I started to enjoy myself.

Unfortunately, other college-related things weren't going so well, like, um, studying. I had become a stalwart of the Theatre Workshop, was collaborating on a cartoon in the college paper Magus (Gleitzman, with Philip Morton) and also doing my own ("Ivor"), which I'd started for a short-lived school newspaper back in Devon, and I was starting to take an interest in the world around me, but the actual German and Latin stuff wasn't going so well. I was asked to repeat my second year, and so returned to More House after the hot, Ommadawn-enriched summer of seventy-six, but the only thing I achieved was a problem-ridden production of a very ropey version of Frankenstein I'd written (now lost to posterity, thankfully) and on Boxing Day of that year we got a letter inviting me not to return. (Yeah, happy Christmas, Mum and Dad, I'm a failure. That went down well.)

EXILE

I spent 1977 and 1978 at home in Devon, theoretically looking for jobs. All I wanted to do was get back to London, and preferably to More House, even though I knew that option was closed now. So I occupied my time rewriting Frankenstein to tighten it up and remove some of the obvious imbecilities (and that version is lost to posterity as well), recording an unabridged reading of The Lord Of The Rings with music and sound effects (ditto), and sporadically writing off to potential employers.

I see I've neglected film and telly music. There was plenty of this. One of the first LPs I bought was "The Epic Film Music of Miklos Rosza," which contained some very nice arrangements of that brilliant composer's work that I've never found again. My brother, meanwhile, had "Great War Movie Themes," which had some other good pieces, and later he got very much into John Barry (and possibly Barry John, though I can't be sure; he did support some football team or other).

It was in the field of horror movies, though, that I found my greatest joys, obsessively replaying my recordings of the soundtracks and trying to imagine what was happening in the quiet bits. Almost from the beginning, the horror genre seemed to inspire composers, and Franz Waxman's score for Bride Of Frankenstein was only the beginning. Hans J Salter and Frank Skinner picked up the torch at Universal, Les Baxter, Ronald Stein and David Lee did excellent work for Roger Corman, and what can one say about James Bernard at Hammer? For someone who didn't know the first thing about orchestration when he started, the boy done triffic. (I'm sorry, I mentioned football, didn't I?) I mean he produced some remarkable compositions. And in among there were Clifton Parker and Gerald Fried, Marc Wilkinson and Paul Ferris, and a host of others. And now, thanks to the miracle of fans being interested, a many of these fine scores are available on shiny disc (not Paul Ferris's score for Witchfinder General, though: come on, deWolfe, perform a digital extraction). Truly we live in a Golden Age.

Television also provided music of interest. There was once, long ago, a series called Supernatural (no, not that one, this one), which consisted of horror stories framed by a version of the standard gentlemen's-club device, and the music was a short section of an organ concerto by Poulenc. If you've heard it, you'll know it; if not, I have to say that my efforts to locate a Youtube clip have so far met with failure. (Silly of Robert Muller to name his series after one that was going to be so famous, really.) Crown Court introduced me to Janacek's Sinfonietta, which has some marvellously atmospheric bits. And in the world of the specially composed, Dudley Simpson was doing very well for Doctor Who, and also for the short-lived Moonbase 3 and the rather longer-lived Blake's Seven. I recorded them all. I tried to puzzle out the chords of that amazingly snaky theme to I, Claudius by Wilfred Josephs, who had also attracted my attention with his music for The Ghosts Of Motley Hall, written by Richard Carpenter who had done Catweazle and went on to do Robin of Sherwood...

There's just too much. Too much music, as Derek Brimstone didn't quite sing on Bob Johnson and Pete Knight's musical retelling of The King Of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, and with a deft flip of the mind we're back with rock. Folk-rock, to be precise, and concept albums and solo albums, oh my. We'll be back after the click.