TamTam Books News

Tuesday, September 14, 2004:

I’ve always been a John Barry fan. The original James Bond scores are magnificent of course, but also his early pop music work is superb as well. I strongly suggest that one get the "John Barry: EMI Years." It is a three-volume set of Barry’s work before the Bond years. He had a group called the John Barry Seven, and it's sort of a mixture of the Shadows with the Ventures – but it has that combination of James Bond and jazz. Excellent recordings!

The following interview with Barry is from the Guardian U.K. (of course), and what is interesting is that he just finished doing a musical based on Graham Greene’s incredible novel "Brighton Rock." Not only Greene’s greatest work, but also an essential 20th Century novel. This is a really good interview with Barry (who was married to Jane Birkin in the 60’s), and what I found interesting is his memory of the war years during his childhood. Also the fact that Wolf Mankowitz at one time was part of the Brighton Rock project.

Wolf was a short story writer who wrote the screenplay and original story for "Expresso Bongo" with Laurence Harvey and Cliff Richard. Magnificent film in ways because it deals with the late 50’s Soho London scene. In fact Wolf is in the opening credits of "Expresso Bongo." Buy the DVD, just to see Harvey in this 1959 classic. Ok, enough, here’s the John Barry interview.

BEACH BOY

He wrote music for Bond and won Oscars for his soundtracks. But all along John Barry cherished one ambition - to write a musical of Brighton Rock. He tells David Peschek how he finally did it

Wednesday September 15, 2004
The Guardian

You might reasonably expect John Barry's house to be one of the few places in New York State where you can get a really good cup of tea, and you would be right. Driving there across Long Island, the low rise sprawl that characterises Hicksville - the actual town - is quickly replaced by lush woodland. It's a reminder of how New England got its name: it is like England, only even more verdant, and with better weather. Since 1980, Barry has lived on Centre Island, a secluded, sylvan community attached to the rest of the Oyster Bay area by a narrow peninsula, where his more arriviste neighbours include Billy Joel and Rupert Murdoch.

The perfect English tea arrives courtesy of Barry's American wife Laurie: Earl Grey, white porcelain, finger sandwiches, a small landslide of cake. It's very much a family home, quietly luxurious but welcomingly unruly with five dogs and three cats, plus Barry's nine-year-old son, Jonpatrick, and a friend preparing for a fishing trip. There are also pigs: a litter of weathered stone piglets truffling outside the French windows and, above the fireplace in the drawing room, one of those outlandish animal portraits from the early 1800s, a Zeppelin-shaped black pig so large it dwarfs its top-hatted keeper.

"I like pigs," Barry says by way of explanation. "After the war there were extraordinary restrictions on food. If you were a farmer, you were allowed to have pigs. You could keep one and the rest had to go to the food ministry." Barry's father, a proprietor of a small chain of local cinemas, had bought a large family house in Fulford, a small village outside York, where Barry had been born, and with it came pigs. With his house in Chelsea's Cadogan Square and his accent - Parkinson, but a little softer and a little more classy - unchanged by years of transatlantic living, the pigs are a reminder of Barry's indelible Englishness.

Entirely happy in the US, he will admit to missing two things. The first: "Grouse. The glorious twelfth. There's no such thing here as game; really smelly grouse." The second is the semi-legendary Covent Garden restaurant and de facto salon Rules. "I used to work in the morning and then go down to Rules. Have a wonderful meal and wine and relax." He tells a marvellous anecdote from the 1960s, complete, as are all his stories, with pitch-perfect impressions of the players, in which a "wonderful meal" attended by Michael Caine, Jean Shrimpton and Terence Stamp culminates in the unexpected appearance of Bond film producer Harry Salzman. Salzman had been enthusiastically derogatory about Barry's theme song for Goldfinger, which subsequently became a huge hit, and paid for his rudeness that lunch time when Stamp, possibly after a few glasses of wine, told him to his face he thought him "a cunt".

Barry will return to London next month for the premiere of the musical of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which he has written with lyricist Don Black. Though he will be for ever associated with his film themes (he has five Academy Awards), particularly his music for the James Bond series, Brighton Rock is actually Barry's fourth musical - and the culmination of an ambition that dates back 40 years. Bill Kenwright, one of the UK's most successful theatrical producers, discovered Barry's desire to turn the bleak, tense 1947 film into a musical when he was a young actor performing in the chorus of an earlier Barry show, Passion Flower Hotel. He never forgot it.

Barry, though, "was reluctant at first" to return to Brighton Rock, "thinking it was just cursed". Two earlier attempts had run aground. The first was made while Greene himself was still alive. Greene had previous experience as a librettist and initially, Barry explains with amusement, he wanted to write the lyrics. "I said, 'Well, you're a very literal writer and lyric writing is the exact opposite. But, of course, if you want to have a go ... ' I gave him a couple of titles and he came back about two weeks later with a foolscap piece of paper, full. It was exactly what I thought it would be. I played him a couple of Irving Berlin things, so he could see the brevity of how it works. He backed off very nicely." Did he get to know Greene well? "I don't know if anybody got to know him well."

A preliminary meeting at Greene's house in Albany Street, off Piccadilly, with screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz and Roy Boulting (who had produced the film; twin brother John directed) had proved inauspicious. "Within half an hour, they started in on each other. I still don't know what it was about - I think Wolf had written something for him [that Boulting didn't like] and it was so difficult to get Wolf to write a second draft. They had this unbelievable row and stormed out of the apartment. Graham - he had these big pale blue watery eyes - sat there in silence. Eventually he said, 'Would you like a drink?' I said, 'Absolutely!' He got a bottle of red wine, we sat and drank it, and that was the end of it."

The second attempt, under the auspices of producer Daniel Angel (probably best know for the Douglas Bader biopic Reach for the Sky), foundered on the volatile personality of Joe Losey, then notorious for directing Dirk Bogart in The Servant. "He was ... very difficult And there was no joy in the man. I knew it wasn't going to work out."

This time around, the director is Michael Attenborough, whose father Richard starred in the original film. The whole experience, says Barry with genuine excitement, has been "extraordinary, just extraordinary". It has also been intensely collaborative from the start, a process radically different from film work which, Barry admits, suits him better. "You go off for six, seven, eight weeks, and only occasionally call the director. I have always loved being alone in that way."

Many potential collaborators were put off by the film's darkness. Barry doesn't even sound entirely convinced by his own attempt to suggest it isn't. "I remember Kander and Ebb [the writers of Cabaret] met me in a restaurant and said, 'It's very dark.' I just said, 'I think it's got a lot of colour.' The gang's terrific and Ida's great and Rose is lovely." Come on, though, it's Brighton Rock. You can't really get away from the fact that it is very tense and very dark. "Right," he concedes. And then: "I tended to like dark things. I've always had a tendency ... sad things and romantic things."

In his music, he says, "I always drop into minor chords. If I do something that's in a major, I have to work to pull myself out of it. Even then, it's got a plaintive thing. It just comes out that way." Then, suddenly: "I think it comes from the second world war."

In his rare interviews, Barry repeatedly refers to his association of music with a sense of loss. As a child, he saw "a really, really, terrible movie, one of those movie biographies of Chopin, called A Song to Remember. I remember him bleeding on the piano keys and all that. That really struck me at that age." Barry's mother, a talented musician, had given up a potential career as a concert pianist. "I think it was the one thing she had a sadness about. But she had a great life with my father."

Born in 1933, the young Barry was devastated when his school was bombed. "That night I think there were about 40 people killed. The headmistress was killed." Barry's father was in the auxiliary fire service. That night he came home "black. Wet, black. I remember the whole sky was red. I went down with my mother the next day. And I remember the stench. York is full of narrow streets, and the buildings on both sides had been on fire and they had melted the Tarmac off the road. All this jewellery and whatever got into the tar, it's still there. I still think of that when I walk down the road."

Has that melancholy tendency ever manifested as depression? "My mother had on her side a history of depression. It's not a depression that's there all the time. It's very seasonal. Autumn. Alan Jay Lerner mentioned it to me - it's to do with the time of year you're born. [Barry's birthday is November 3.] Even as a child it struck me, that time of year, the closing of the year."

That pervasive melancholy is the abiding motif in all Barry's greatest themes. If the pace is brisk, it is always undercut by a brooding, languorous sensuality which, in turn, is undercut by an inexorable sadness, a sense of something ominous, the pain of loss. Much of his 1960s work evokes the twin spirits of postwar Europe: liberation (sexual liberation; freedom of travel) and fear. Barry readily acknowledges the influence of Anton Karaz's haunting music for The Third Man, which he saw as a child and is still among his favourite films. A sense of unease stalks even his music to the Bond films - essentially glossy entertainments, the cold war without tears.

Eventually, partly because work on the 1974 musical Billy (also written with Don Black) meant he took on no film projects for a year and partly because he "had a sense that all the good books had been done", Barry stopped scoring Bond. "I just thought that I'd done enough. It's very difficult when you hit a beam like they did with those books, and they did all the good stories first. I was fortunate to be there at the beginning. It was a terrific trip for me." Pause. "It's amazing how they have spun it out."

He is quietly damning about the state of contemporary film music. "There were some extraordinary film composers in the 1930s and 1940s. The passing of Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith signals the last of that era. I don't want to knock anyone - I've met one or two [current composers] who shall remain nameless and I've been very unimpressed with their lack of love for film."

His son, Jonpatrick, keeps him busy. He is more settled than he has ever been. Fourth wife Laurie, whom he first met because she was best friends with Barbara Broccoli, daughter of Bond producer Cubby, is 22 years his junior and bustles efficiently around him. Having a nine-year-old at 70 is: "Terrific. I recommend it to anybody. Everybody says, 'He's so like you.' It's like looking in a mirror. Mannerisms, little things he does with his hands that I don't even know about until a bell goes off in my head." And there it is again, in a throwaway line, music and memory and the passage of time.

· Brighton Rock starts previewing at the Almeida, London N1, on Monday. Box office: 020-7359 4404.






Tosh // 8:49 PM
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