![]() He won five Oscars, including two for Born Free and one each for The Lion in Winter, Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves. Barry's music was used on the soundtracks of many other films – The Knack (1965), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The Lion in Winter (1968), Murphy's War (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Raise the Titanic (1980), Body Heat (1981), Jagged Edge (1985), Chaplin (1992), Dances With Wolves (1990) and Indecent Proposal (1993) – and he was a natural choice to write the theme for the Roger Moore/Tony Curtis TV series, The Persuaders! However, Barry always gave credit to the great classically influenced Hollywood film composers, such as Bernard Herrmann or Max Steiner, and echoes of their work would frequently bubble up in his own. The songs work because they were written for the movie." "We only bought in a couple of songs, Everybody's Talkin', sung by Harry Nilsson, and a John Lennon song, and for the rest we got young songwriters to score the scenes with songs. "That movie is still shown at the cinema school at UCLA as the epitome of how songs should be used in the movies," Barry said in 1997. It was a technique that would be copied by countless imitators. In 1969, he scored John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, one of the first movies to use a selection of pop songs on the soundtrack. He scored 10 consecutive Bond films and decided he had had enough after The Living Daylights (1987) because "all the good books had been done". Such was the potency of the Bond mystique that Barry's soundtrack album for Goldfinger knocked the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night off the top of the American charts in 1964, and earned the composer his first gold disc. Subsequently there was no such ambiguity, as Barry's scores for From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965) became popular the world over. The official story is that Barry merely arranged Norman's famous James Bond Theme, and when Barry claimed in a Sunday Times interview many years later that he had written it himself, Norman successfully sued for libel and was awarded £30,000 in damages. In 1962, he was signed up to work on the first Bond film, Dr No, although only as back-up to the composer Monty Norman, for a fee of £250. In 1960 he was asked to write music for the Peter Sellers/Richard Todd vehicle Never Let Go and then for the Faith comedy Beat Girl. He socialised with Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, collaborated with the pop stars Adam Faith and Nina & Frederik, and guaranteed himself the attention of gossip columnists by marrying the actress Jane Birkin. His father was a jazz fan, and would present concerts by such stars as Kenton and Count Basie.Īfter national service with the army, Barry formed his own jazz combo, the John Barry Seven, and scored a string of pop hits during the late 50s and early 60s, including Hit and Miss (the theme from TV's Juke Box Jury), Walk Don't Run and Black Stockings.īarry thrived on the feverish wave of creativity that made London the world's most fascinating city at the time. ![]() He began taking piano lessons with Francis Jackson, master of the music at York Minster, and studied with the jazz arranger Bill Russo, who had worked with Stan Kenton's orchestra. I was looking at this big black-and-white mouse on the screen, and he'd taken me to see a Mickey Mouse cartoon."īarry cherished an early ambition to join the family business and become a projectionist, but the combination of film and music made a deep impression on him. "I remember my dad carrying me through the foyer of the Rialto in York and pushing the swing doors open at a matinee. ![]() "My father had seven or eight cinemas, so I was brought up in the cinema," he recalled. His mother was a talented musician, but had abandoned the attempt to establish herself as a concert pianist. He was born John Barry Prendergast in York, where his father ran a chain of cinemas. ![]() He even became something of a pop star in his own right. ![]() Barry wrote epic, sweeping film scores for Zulu (1964), Born Free (1966) and Out of Africa (1985), introduced blues and jazz themes into The Chase (1966) and The Cotton Club (1984), and conceived the shivery, sinister music for The Ipcress File (1965). John Barry, who has died aged 77 following a heart attack, will always be associated with the golden age of James Bond, but though much of his most famous music was written to accompany the outlandish adventures of 007, his work covered a huge variety of moods and styles. ![]()
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