John Barry
With No Time To Die still waiting to
make it to cinema screens, we take
a look at the rockin’ roots of thelegendary Bond score composer
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efore all those box-offi ce gold
Bond soundtracks – plus the
subsequent roll call of killer
fi lm compositions – John Barry was the
have-a-go hero of pre-Beatles British
rock’n’roll. Yet his contribution remains
largely overlooked. From 1957, as founding
member of The John Barry Seven, the shy
Northerner was in the vanguard of young
musicians, creating their own homegrown
version of the dynamic new music that was
sweeping in from the States.
Barry’s original prowess as a performer,
producer, arranger and writer soon shone
through. Several notable self-penned hits –
from the Juke Box Jury TV theme tune toa twangy cover with guitarist Vic Flick
of The Magnifi cent Seven – led to him
arranging for singer Adam Faith, before
rocking his fi rst fi lm score, 1960’s Beat Girl.
Born John Barry Prendergast in York
on 3 November 1933, he was the youngest
of three. His English mother was an
accomplished classical pianist and his Irish
father, John Xavier, a projectionist during
the silent fi lm era, who later owned a chain
of eight cinemas in the north of England. In
the gloom of the post-war era, these ‘picture
palaces’ acted like catnip to the locals. Being
immersed from an early age in such magical
surrounds infl uenced Barry’s musical
direction. Multi-tasking around his family’sempire, he became a profi cient projectionist,
but it was the music of the movies that
really inspired him. Childhood highlights,
he later recalled, included Max Steiner’s
The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, and Erich
Wolfgang Korngold’s The Adventures Of
Robin Hood. “The most extraordinary score
ever” he considered to be Anton Karas’s
zither-laden theme to The Third Man. “It’s
funny, but when I remember back, or when
I see fi lms again years later, it seems that
I remember them very much because of the
music,” Barry later mused.
The piano, which he learned to play aged
nine – hit by a stick across the hand when
he got it wrong – was swapped for theWORDS BY JULIE BURNS