John Barry (composer)  

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John Barry Prendergast, OBE (3 November 1933 – 30 January 2011) was an English film score composer. He was best known for composing 11 James Bond soundtracks and was hugely influential on the 007 series' distinctive style.

In a career spanning almost 50 years, Barry received a number of awards for his work, including five Academy Awards; two for Born Free, and one for The Lion in Winter (also won a BAFTA), Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves (which also won a Grammy Award).

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Personal life

Barry was educated at St Peter's School, York, and also received composition lessons from Francis Jackson, Organist of York Minster. Living in his native England until the mid 1970s, Barry spent some time in Spain (for tax reasons)Template:Citation needed but subsequently lived for many years in the United States, mainly in Oyster Bay outside New York.Template:Citation needed

Barry suffered a rupture of the oesophagus in 1988, following a toxic reaction to a health tonic he had consumed. The incident rendered him unable to work for two years and left him vulnerable to pneumonia.

Barry was married four times. His first three marriages ended in divorce: Barbara Pickard (1959-63); Jane Birkin (1965-68); and Jane Sidey (1969-71). He married his current wife, Laurie, on 3 January 1978. Barry has four children, one each from his first, second, and fourth marriages, and one with Ulla Larsson, with whom he lived for a while in the sixties, but did not marry.

He died suddenly from a heart attack on 30 January 2011.

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Career

His family was in the cinema business which first sparked his musical interests. Although originally a classical pianist Barry also decided to learn the trumpet and started growing an interest for composing and arranging music. But it was during his National Service that he began performing as a musician. After taking a correspondence course (with jazz composer Bill Russo) and arranging for some of the bands of the day, he formed The John Barry Seven, with whom he had some hit records, including "Hit and Miss", the theme tune he composed for the BBC's Juke Box Jury programme, and a cover of the Ventures' "Walk Don't Run". The career breakthrough for Barry was the BBC television series Drumbeat, when he appeared with The John Barry Seven and arranged for many of the singers, including Adam Faith; he also composed songs (along with Les Vandyke) and film scores on Faith's behalf. When Faith made his first film Beat Girl in 1960 Barry composed, arranged and conducted the score that was not only Barry's first film, but the first soundtrack album to be released on an LP in the UK. Barry also composed the music for another Faith film Never Let Go, orchestrated the score for Mix Me a Person, and composed, arranged and conducted the score for The Amorous Prawn.

Barry was employed by the EMI record company from 1959 until 1962 arranging orchestral accompaniment for the company's recording artists. From 1962 Barry transferred to Ember Records where he produced albums as well as arranging them.

These achievements caught the attention of the producers of a new film called Dr. No who were dissatisfied with a theme for James Bond given to them by Monty Norman. Barry was hired and the result would be one of the most famous signature tunes in film history, the "James Bond Theme". (Credit goes to Monty Norman, see below.) When the producers of the Bond series engaged Lionel Bart to score the next James Bond film From Russia with Love, they discovered that Bart could not read or write music. Though Bart wrote a title song for the film, the producers remembered Barry's arrangement of the James Bond Theme and his composing and arranging chores for several films with Adam Faith. Lionel Bart also recommended Barry to producer Stanley Baker for his film Zulu. Bart and Barry worked together in the film Man in the Middle.

This would be the turning point for Barry, and he would go on to become one of the most celebrated film composers of modern times, winning five Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards, with scores for, among others, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy, Born Free, and Somewhere in Time.

Barry is often cited as having a distinct style which concentrates on lush strings and extensive use of brass. However he was also an innovator, being one of the first to employ synthesizers in a film score (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), and to make wide use of pop artists and songs in Midnight Cowboy. Because Barry provided not just the main title theme but the complete soundtrack score, his music often enhanced the critical reception of a film, notably in Midnight Cowboy, Out of Africa, and Dances with Wolves.Template:Citation needed

One of Barry's best known compositions is the theme for the 1971 TV series The Persuaders!, also known as "The Unlucky Heroes", in which Tony Curtis and Roger Moore were paired as rich playboys solving crimes. The score for the series was composed by Ken Thorne. The theme went on to be a hit single in some European Countries and has been re-released on collections of 1970s disco hits. The instrumental recording features Moog synthesizers. Barry also wrote the scores to a number of musicals, including Passion Flower Hotel (lyrics by Trevor Peacock), the successful West End show Billy (lyrics by Don Black) and two major Broadway flops, The Little Prince and the Aviator and Lolita, My Love, the latter with Alan Jay Lerner as lyricist.

During 2006, Barry was the executive producer on an album entitled Here's to the Heroes by the Australian ensemble The Ten Tenors. The album features a number of songs Barry wrote in collaboration with his lyricist friend, Don Black. Barry and Black also composed one of the songs on Shirley Bassey's 2009 comeback album, The Performance. The song entitled, "Our Time is Now", is the first written by the duo for Bassey since "Diamonds Are Forever".

In November 2008, a 300-page biography, John Barry - The Man With The Midas Touch, by Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker & Gareth Bramley, was published by Redcliffe Press, Bristol.

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James Bond series

Template:Citations missing After the success of Dr. No, Barry scored eleven of the next 14 James Bond films (but with Monty Norman continually credited as the composer of the "James Bond Theme").

In his tenure with the film series, Barry's music, variously brassy and moody, appealed to film aficionados, as witnessed in the sales of the soundtrack albums.Template:Citation needed For From Russia With Love he composed "007", an alternative James Bond signature theme, which is featured in four other Bond films (Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Moonraker). The theme "Stalking", for the teaser sequence of From Russia With Love, was covered by colleague Marvin Hamlisch for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). (The music and lyrics for From Russia With Love's title song were written by Lionel Bart, whose musical theatre credits included Oliver!). Barry also (indirectly) contributed to the soundtrack of the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale: his Born Free theme appears briefly in the opening sequence.

In Goldfinger, he would perfect the "Bond sound", a heady mixture of brass, jazz and sensuous melodies. There is even an element of Barry's jazz roots in the big-band track "Into Miami", which follows the title credits and accompanies the film's iconic image of the camera lens zooming toward the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.

As Barry matured, the Bond scores concentrated more on lush melodies, as in Moonraker and Octopussy. Barry's score for A View to a Kill was traditional, but his collaboration with Duran Duran for the title song was contemporary and one of the most successful Bond themes to date, reaching number one in the United States and number two in the UK Singles Chart. Both A View to a Kill and the Living Daylights theme by a-ha blended the pop music style of the artists with Barry's orchestration. In 2006, a-ha's Pal Waaktaar complimented Barry's contributions "I loved the stuff he added to the track, I mean it gave it this really cool string arrangement. That's when for me it started to sound like a Bond thing".

Bond soundtracks worked on:

Industry trade papers reported during the late 1980s that the studio decided to go for "a new sound", coinciding with Timothy Dalton assuming the role of James Bond (replacing the departing Roger Moore).Template:Citation needed This occurred after The Living Daylights, Dalton's first film in the series, which was Barry's last Bond score.

David Arnold, a British composer, saw the result of two years' work in 1997 with the release of Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, an album of new versions of the themes from various James Bond films. Arnold thanks Barry in the sleeve notes, referring to him as "the Guvnor". Almost all of the tracks were John Barry compositions, and the revision of his work met with his approval — he contacted Barbara Broccoli, producer of the upcoming Tomorrow Never Dies, to recommend Arnold as the film's composer. Arnold also went on to score the subsequent Bond films: The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.

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Authorship of the "James Bond Theme"

Sole compositional credit for the "James Bond Theme" is attributed to Monty Norman, who was contracted as composer for Dr. No. However, Barry, while not publicly denying that, has implied otherwise. Some 30 years later, in 2001, authorial matters came to a head in the High Court in London after Norman sued The Sunday Times for publishing that claim in a 1997 article naming Barry as the true composer; Barry testified for the defense.

In court, Barry declared he had been handed a musical manuscript of a work by Norman (meant to become the theme) and that he was to arrange it musically, and that he composed additional music and arranged the "James Bond Theme". The court also was told that Norman received sole credit because of his prior contract with the producers. The verdict was that Monty Norman composed at least part and maybe all of the "James Bond Theme". How much, remains an open question.

On 7 September 2006, John Barry publicly defended his authorship of the theme on the Steve Wright show on BBC Radio 2. The BBC issued an apology and removed the interview from their website.

Contemporary research indicates that Norman composed the bare notes of the tune, while Barry created the very distinctive orchestral arrangement. This is, among other things, based on the theme's strong resemblance to his previous music, like the song "Bee's Knees", and the fact that no other music in Dr. No sounds like the "James Bond Theme".Template:Citation needed

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Awards and nominations

Five Academy Awards

Academy Award nominations

Grammy Award

  • 1992 Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media for Dances with Wolves

BAFTA Award

  • 1969 Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music for The Lion in Winter

BAFTA Fellowship Award

  • 2005

BAFTA nominations

  • 1987 Best Score for Out of Africa
  • 1992 Best Original Score for Dances with Wolves

Emmy Award nominations

  • 1964 Outstanding Achievement in Composing Original Music for Television for Elizabeth Taylor in London (a 1963 television special)
  • 1977 Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition for a Special (Dramatic Underscore) for Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years

Max Steiner Lifetime Achievement Award (presented by the City of Vienna)

  • 2009

Barry was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1998.

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Other major film scores

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Musicals

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Television themes

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Other works

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Hit singles

(Excludes co-composed hits, e.g. Duran Duran's A View to a Kill)

  • "Hit And Miss" as The John Barry Seven plus Four, UK#10 (first charted 1960)
  • "Beat For Beatniks" as The John Barry Orchestra, UK#40 (1960)
  • "Never Let Go" as The John Barry Orchestra, UK#49 (1960)
  • "Blueberry Hill" as The John Barry Orchestra, UK#34 (1960)
  • "Walk Don't Run" as The John Barry Seven, UK#11 (1960)
  • "Black Stockings" as The John Barry Seven, UK#27 (1960)
  • "The Magnificent Seven" as The John Barry Seven, UK#45 (1961)
  • "Cutty Sark" as The John Barry Seven, UK#35 (1962)
  • "The James Bond Theme" as The John Barry Orchestra, UK#13 (1962)
  • "From Russia With Love" as The John Barry Orchestra, UK#39 (1963)
  • "Theme From 'The Persuaders'" as John Barry, UK#13 (1971)

The 4 highest-charting hits all spent more than 10 weeks in the UK top 50.

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