“I was literally born into the world of film theaters. My father owned eight cinemas in the north of England. I distinctly remember being taken to the back of a hall when I was three years old. I didn’t know what to expect. All I noticed were the swinging doors and a big, dark auditorium – and then I saw this huge, black and white Mickey Mouse on the screen and heard the audience laughing. And I just thought, ‘Wow, my dad makes big black and white mice for a living’.”
In a sonorous voice, Barry talks about his first encounter with the film. He himself didn’t make his mice with cartoons or feature films, but primarily with film compositions for around 120 feature films. His most popular works include the scores he wrote for eleven Bond thrillers, but also his Oscar-winning works for “Born Free” (1966), “The Lion In Winter” (1968), “Out Of Africa” (1985 ) and “Dances With Wolves” (1990) – soundtracks that prove that he is at home in both action-packed spy films and the cinema of big emotions. Above all, it is his ability to pick up fragments of emotions in a film and transfer them to his music in widescreen format.
His career began over 60 years ago when, after some success with his pop group, the “John Barry Seven”, he was commissioned to compose a score for the film “Beatgirl” in 1960. A lightweight beatnik film from England, for which Barry’s pop sound was just right, especially since British film producers at the time almost exclusively relied on composers with a classical background (such as Muir Mathieson or Malcolm Arnold).
What does the typical John Barry sound sound like?
In the course of the generational change, Barry got the chance to write the theme music for the first Bond film “Dr. No” and to demonstrate his unmistakable signature here: the rhythmic guitar line, the explosive sound of the brass section with the deep trombones and the tight trumpets, the entire orchestra in full swing – a sound that is essential to the “Bond myth” contributed and accompanied Barry throughout his career. But Barry kept a sense of proportion, also took on completely different commissions and occasionally even spoke of “million-dollar Mickey Mouse music” in relation to the Bond scores.
Barry: “Harry Saltzman was pretty pissed. What I meant by that, and what any intelligent person can understand, is that cartoon music always runs parallel to the action, while with classical film music you can work counterpoint to the action. Working on an action film is very similar to the approach to cartoons, especially Bond films, where everything is oversized anyway. Everything on a very large scale, with an 80-piece orchestra, almost like Wagner in his time. But that was also part of the fun. That’s what the audience loved about it.”
Variety of styles
A striking feature in his subsequent works is the sound of the cimbalom (similar to the dulcimer), which is in the foreground in films such as “The Ipcress File” (1965) or in the theme of the TV series “The Persuaders” – the perfect soundtrack for the Cold War era: Dark harmonies and elegantly swinging arrangements underline the mood of the films. A music that creeps menacingly around the corner, but at the same time also provides the silver lining on the horizon.
Despite all the stylistic diversity of his compositions, it is probably these idiosyncratic elements that cause today’s pop musicians such as Portishead, Goldfrapp and Pulp to rave about the “Barry touch” – homages that the master always acknowledged calmly: “Obviously there is a whole Series of modern bands listening to my records; I often receive songs marked ‘Inspired by John Barry’. I do not mind. It’s flattering. I listen to the stuff too, but sometimes I have to think: ‘Oh my God.’ “I couldn’t rediscover myself with some of the pieces.”
While Barry worked on several films a year in the ’60s and ’70s, later today he only took on commissions sporadically. Shortly before his death, he also completed the music for a musical (based on a Graham Greene novel) and released two albums with the somewhat pretentious titles “The Beyondness Of Things” and “Eternal Echoes”. For him, it was an opportunity to break away from the time constraints of film production. Even if it was the soundtracks that determined his life.
John Barry died on January 30, 2011. He received five Oscars throughout his career.
A (slightly modified) article by Michael Tschernek from the RS archive