Category Archives: Music

So farewell to John Barry, who has died at the age of 77.

Here’s what has always been my favourite Barry composition.

It’s easy to dismiss You Only Live Twice because it’s a Bond theme – or because Robbie Williams famously sampled it a few years ago.

But this record has handsomely repaid my endless listening over the years because of – among other things – its harmonic richness.

The arrangement builds in depth and strangeness through the song: listen to what’s happening beneath the vocal at 2:12 and you’ll hear how Barry could take the simplest melody and wring emotion from it through orchestration.

The more I think about it, the more this record reminds me of another of my favourite tracks, released a year before.

What do they have in common? A canny, unusual arrangement by a master at work (in this case, Brian Wilson). An intense emotional depth delivered through harmonic sophistication.

And a mono production which glues everything together in a magical way stereo just can’t.

Who knew these records were long-lost cousins?

So this weekend I finished watching the Michael Jackson movie This Is It, after stumbling across it on Sky Anytime the other day.

I recommend it, albeit reservedly, as it’s genuinely one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a long time.

I always loved the title of the Manic Street Preachers’ greatest hits album, Forever Delayed. It’s that feeling which pervades the film: we’re watching intricate, massively expensive preparations for a season of concerts which can never, and will never happen.

We’re shown segments of CGI-heavy footage – some in 3D – shot and processed to incredible standards for back-projection during the shows.

But the performance intended to happen in front of it lives on only as scrappy bits of captured rehearsal footage – some in costume, some not; some sung fully, other bits busked as Michael insists on saving his voice.

We see amazing special effects – but not integrated with the show. Instead they’re tested in isolation: a cherry picker taken on a dry run; some pyrotechnics detonated on an empty stage.

We watch as dancers rehearse being jettisoned into mid-air by pneumatic trapdoors. But other elements, like the giant on-stage bulldozer during Earth Song, don’t seem to have ever been caught on camera – so we’re shown “artist’s impression”-style computer graphics to illustrate how they would have looked.

There are dozens and dozens of people on the movie’s credits, with very important-sounding titles. But what they were actually working towards isn’t here at all.

Only a compromised, perhaps rushed, probably cynical, sketch of a sketch of it. And that fascinates me.

I took two significant learnings from This Is It.

Firstly, Michael Jackson – captured candidly – was an extremely creative, involved individual whose eccentricities were far less apparent in the company of people he trusted.

Secondly, his company had literally the most bad-ass ident in corporate history. You can enjoy it below.