A Few Defining Moments in a Lifetime of Library

LISTEN to the SOUNDTRACK

When I was 5 I sat cross-legged in Miss Blackwell’s class in the main assembly hall at my junior school watching the Schools programmes and remember vividly the credits for ‘Stop, Look, Listen’.

The theme tune to ‘My World’ stayed with me for years and when I bought a copy of ‘Happy Pastimes’ on Themes blind many years later I instantly recognised the music.

I was born in the year that News at Ten adopted a KPM track, ‘The Awakening’ as it’s theme tune and this music theme, along with ‘Mastermind’, ‘Dave Allen at Large’, ‘This is Your Life’ and may others filled my head with sounds that have stayed with me until now.

When i was 10 I was watching ‘Grange Hill’ and wondering why ‘Give Us a Clue’ on ITV had the same theme tune.  

TV and music have always been important to me.  At 10 I was recording onto cassette my favourite TV programmes and listening to them again and again.  Consequently incidental music and themes found their way into my head more and more.  To this end I can hear just a second or two of something and instantly it sparks in my brain as recognition.

When I was 15 videos were big.   We had rented a video recorder from Radio Rentals in town in the pre-video shop days- no one could afford to buys one back then.  The shop had only a handful of Intervision tapes and I soaked up Dawn of the Dead, Rabid, Shivers, Carrie, etc multiple times. 

Why was I hearing the ‘News at Ten’ theme in the middle of ‘Beyond Atlantis’ and why was ‘Mastermind’ playing in ‘Delirium’?

In the middle of a video boom we could watch anything.   All the horrors my big brother and sister had seen at the cinema and told me about.   I was wagging school to watch ‘The Exorcist’ at my mates house and watching films that would have otherwise been forgotten forever if VHS & Betamax hadn’t saved their sorry asses.

When I was 20 I was at art college and as old cassettes came up for sale at car boots and markets I got more and more into video nasties and cheap exploitation films.  I love these films.   I was a big record collector; hip hop, house, funk, soul & jazz as well as film soundtracks. I started to record some of the music from the videos as there were no soundtracks ever released for these films.  I’d listen to these on my two deck stereo in my room.  

When I was 25, against my better judgement I found myself a huge fan of Australian soap drama ‘Prisoner Cell Block H’.  I had a whole new bunch of friends which were in two camps really and both of these would come back from a club and watch Prisoner.   Whichever bunch of friends I was with I couldn’t get away from it.  I had labelled it as rubbish and never watched an episode, even though I was a massive fan of the Women In Prison genre. 

I started to secretly like it.   I had to back down as I had vehemently moaned about them making me watch that shit so many times.  Then I started to love it and secretly video it to watch myself.  I was hooked on it.  And the music.

‘Prisoner’ was an hugely successful Australian drama aired between 1979 and 1986. It told the story of the inmates and officers of the women’s prison Wentworth Detention Centre.  It broke barriers with storylines of rape, incest, lesbianism (daring at the time), hangings, murder, etc.  They were banging out two hours a week so it was soap standard production but the whole thing pulled me in and I loved it.   Murder, violence and death pretty regularly, fights and riots, women swearing and sticking it to the man.  I was in. 

My favourite cues:

Fugitive: Already familiar to me from ‘The Retriever’s I loved this. (@40 mins)

Industrial Sabotage:  I was desperate to find this and it took a while.  KPM all along (of course it was). (@36 mins)

‘Prisoner’ used library music through it’s entire run of eight years and 692 episodes, using well over 1, 400 different library tracks to help tell it’s story.  Initially producers asked composer William Montzing to score some music for a 16 part series and these can be heard in the early episodes but once it ignited and they want to long running serial the use of library cues became the norm. 

From episode 1, as drug addicted Sally Lee is chased down the corridors by screws Meg Jackson and ‘Vinegar Tits’ Vera Bennett with Brian Bennett’s ‘The Plot’ bursting out of our TV speakers to the final notes of Richard Harvey’s ‘Four Winds’ as the gate finally closes in episode 692.   Bruton and partularly KPM were used heavily by the music editors on the show.  De Wolfe were used in the middle period and labels like Sonoton, Sound Stage, Selected Sound, Intersound, Parry, Golden Ring and two tracks from Conroy made up the Wentworth playlist.

I noticed that I recognised some of the music from ‘Rabid’, ‘Shiver’s, ‘Dawn of the Dead’, ‘Scream For Vengeance’. ‘The Retriever’s’, ‘Delirium’, ‘Getting Even’, ‘Chocky’, the ‘Solpadeine’ advert, ‘The Sweeney’, ‘Columbo’, ‘Deep Throat’, ‘Shoestring’, ‘Girls On Top’, ‘The Hanged Man’, ‘The Famous Five’, etc, etc.  I had these on cassette and listened to them in my bedroom. 

Around this time I was making short films (usually a killer on the loose) with my mates.  I had an on-the-shoulder VHS camcorder that recorded directly on to a full sized VHS cassette.  We filmed things chronologically and edited in camera.  We would go back to mine and while they sat drinking tea I would put music on it and then we’d piss oursleves laughing at the finished product.   The music I used was from soundtracks (‘Carrie’ bucket scene sped up) or some track recorded from ‘Prisoner’ or an exploitation or horror film.  I still had no idea what a library track was at this point even though they were all around me.

Alongside this CD had come out and I was buying lots of soundtrack type stuff- ‘Easy Tempo’ compilations, ‘Dusty Fingers’, ‘Mood Mosaic’, etc.  I was heavily into obscure films and buying imported magazines and fanzines.  I was importing Italian soundtracks left and right and buying all the Lucertola Media and Crippled Dick CDs, one of which was the superb ‘3 Films By Jess Franco’ of which an edited down version became the much celebrated ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ CD.

When the ‘Sound Gallery’ came out it was another compilation in the vein I loved and this was really the start of my library music experience. Here was a stream of KPM tracks that I hadn’t yet linked to all this incidental stuff I was always listening to.

Library music came to me in big in two strands.

A ‘Prisoner’ fan had a couple of CDs that had some ‘Prisoner’ music on and I had to have them.  I so wanted to have the tracks without the bits of dialogue, the squeak of a door or the sound of car doors slamming over them.  I found out they were Bruton CDs from Zomba music so I got on the phone and got some CDs sent to me.  

I was amazed.

Track after track I recognised not only music from ‘Prisoner’ but also from films, TV shows and adverts.  It might seem silly to you now but this was pre-internet and I had no conception that these had once been records or how they’d been distributed.  A woman at Bruton told me that these CD compilations were of hand picked tracks that they felt still might have commercial appeal (at that time in the 90’s). They weren’t ‘archive’ releases but more a chance to get a bit of money out of old stock tracks I guess.  Anyway I loved them.  

By the time I got ‘Drama/Crime’ and heard what I didn’t yet know was BRJ 2 ‘Drama Montage’ I was ecstatic.  Here they were; so many of the tracks I had craved for years in crisp CD quality: ‘The Plot’, ‘In Danger’ (used in ‘Prisoner’ and ‘Scream For Vengeance’) and so many more.

At around the same time my fellow funk collector mate heard a KPM library LP played at a London record fair and couldn’t believe what he heard.  The Mohawks ‘The Champ’ had been a massive record for us for years at all the clubs we went to and we knew now that The Mohawks were in fact a crew of studio session musicians recording for labels like KPM. 

He hit gold when a mate of ours spotted an ad in our local paper; an old gentleman selling a load of KPM records.  My mate had a car so went and picked up 100+ LPs for £20, including both Big Beats, the Flamboyant Themes, etc, etc.

I went around his house and we went through them.  The geek in me was creaming his Levi Sta-press as LP after LP delivered the goods.  Beats, breaks, basslines, organ grooves, killer riffs.  I wanted to kill him I was so jealous.

Not only this but my head for a tune was buzzing.  He’ was dropping the needle and I was hearing ‘News at Ten’, ‘Grange Hill’, ‘Mary, Mungo and Midge’, ‘Noseybonk’, ‘Vision-On’, music from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, ‘Torso’, ‘Mastermind’, ‘Delirium’, ‘Beyond Atlantis’, etc, etc, etc

And ‘Riot’ that I loved from ‘Prisoner’ and ‘The Sweeney’.

I needed some bargaining power to get my mitts on this record that had ‘Riot’ on it. 

By the time the ‘Blow Up: Exclusive Blend’ was out in the mid-90’s I already had most of the tracks on cassettes form Paul’s records and was on the hunt for library records of my own.    I spent a good twenty years of my life in record shops.  Everyone hated going anywhere with me because I had to go through everything if i found a record shop or second hand shop.

I asked at a big record shop at a local town and the woman said her landlord had offered her a pile of these and she’d turned them down.  She gave me his number so my mate Emma drove me to where he worked and there sat a huge pile of records.  800+

He wanted £130 for them but I felt disappointed as I went through- none of the killer hammond organ green sleeved KPMs I was looking for.  It was just a pile of Bruton, De Wolfe, Rouge, Hudson, Chappell, Firstcom, Sonoton, etc.  My heart sank but I bought them anyway thinking there might be something good in there.  At this time it was all about the 60’s kitsch, funky sound- no one was chasing head nodding drama beats.

I got home and started ploughing through them.   It sounds stupid but i hadn’t really put two and two together and wasn’t expecting to find all the ‘Prisoner’ tracks I’d wanted but that’s what happened.  After my first needle-drop stint I had found 150 ‘Prisoner’ incidental tracks over a couple of days and many more  over the months and years (some tracks don’t jump out or are too hard to spot when needle dropping so many in one go and I found tracks I’d wanted for years were in this stash but remained unfound for a decade or more!).   This was way before YouTube when I only knew one person who had ever found a ‘Prisoner’ track.  He had heard some music on a reconstruction of the Carl Bridgewater murder and contacted the production company to see what it was.  It was ‘Breaking Out’ from Themes International; initially on LP TIM 1037 ‘Street Level’ but more recently on one of KPMs archival ’60’s & 70’s’ CD releases.   I had similarly found ‘Funky Feeling’ from the Bruton BRH 04- ‘Disco Happening’ LP, by calling ITV to ask about the disco music I heard in a ‘Girls On Top’ episode that I’d also heard loads in ‘Prisoner’.  I was calling old TV studios, hospitals and the labels themselves trying to get old records.  Someone at KPM told me they had skipped ‘several tons’ of vinyl…  doesn’t bear thinking about. 

I was jumping for joy as a track I LOVED was there amongst the piles and piles of records.  ‘Computer Crime’ was a ‘Prisoner’ standard, used multiple times over the years, most notably during a big fight in the 1982 cliffhanger ‘fire’ episode.  It had been worth £130.

It was in this haul where I first heard the ‘Dawn of the Dead’ cues too.  I found nine or ten LP’s that had music Romero used in this film I loved and had seen again and again.    I even faxed De Wolfe about them releasing a soundtrack and they suggested I find a publisher and get back to them.  I wish I had as years later the music did get a CD release and do really well. I got offered a lot of money for these DOTD records but kept hold of them.  I hooked up with Chris in Pittsburgh via on online forum.  He had a handwritten cue sheet for DOTD and between this and my records were able to start putting the soundtrack together. The cue sheet had loads of errors which resulted in me buying a few records (directly from De Wolfe at £18 each at the time) to find there was no Dawn tracks on them.  I think Romero had chopped and changed the soundtrack a few times in post production and it gives a flavour of tracks he was considering and threw out.  I recorded the tracks and sent to Chris and he compiled a homemade compilation which soon after started being sold online at £25 per CD. 

‘Mask of Death’ also appears in episode 375 of ‘Prisoner’! (@7 mins)

Every time I went back I found more and more good stuff. I started listening to the LPs in their own right.  The BRI series, many of the De Wolfe LPs I enjoyed having on in the background and I started to record the best stuff on to cassettes.

As MiniDisc took over I was starting to find out where to find records and making MiniDisc compilations and playing them as I walked to and from work.  I found ‘Drama Montage’ 1 and 2 at £40 each on a  website in the early pre-eBay days of the internet.  It seems like a massive amount to pay back then but I had to have them to see what other tracks were on there.   I started to think like a music editor and was buying stuff based in the track descriptions or anything that sounded remotely dramatic or suspensey. 

At this time I was buying 80’s drama and synth stuff for 50p because people were looking for the killer funk stuff.  My mate rightly predicted that all the stuff I was into might become collectable in a few years and people would be chasing it and that’s what happened. Once beat makers and producers started using library music in their tracks people were ravenous for it.    I was able to spot obscure library cues in hip hop tracks only because they were so familiar to me from TV shows.  

I was buying records from De Wolfe directly (£18) and I bought a copy of every Amphonic for £2.50 each from them directly.  Erica Dale found the last ‘Small Group and Synthesizer’ for me behind a large plant pot in their offices, after initially saying every copy had gone. 

At the time the Gap ad was using ‘Wild Elephants’ from that LP.

The labels themselves created strews of Kitsch archive CD releases and this led to many commercial released CDs too.  I started getting large amounts of records and focused mainly on KPM, Bruton and De Wolfe.  I bought loads of records at 50p or a £1 and KPM in particular I had many a small haul of them for a pound a pop.  No one wanted the 80’s ones seemingly. 

In March 2010, now in my 40’s I started a blog, the first retro-teque and started sharing rips of the records I had.  My recordings were awful, flat compressed 128kbps flies but I didn’t know how to do anything else.   Back then we were just happy to hear it. I made a load of compilations collating all this stuff I had been listening to for years.

M

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I also, alongside this had a website detailing the ‘Prisoner’ music. http://www.prisonermusiccues.com or something similar.  I got bored of doing both and in November 2012 I scrapped them and started a small message forum/ board for library music.   At the time I was bouncing between the-breaks, verygoodplus (formerly vinylvultures), ‘The Sweeney’ board, the ‘Prisoner’ board and I wanted one place where I could post an ID request or a shout out for a particular track. I had intended to change the name later and did suggest themoodcreators but people said stick with librarymusicthemes as it did what it said on the tin. 

I continue to buy vinyl but on smaller scale.  The last haul was only a couple of years back. 180 records for £30 (I did have to drive miles to collect them though).  The pictures didn’t look like much but I took a punt.

And what a punt it was. 

There is still some good shit out there.  This haul bought me so close to a complete KPM set so I just had to go for it.  Ever the completest.

The music forum has grown and I never imagined there were 100’s of people who like this stuff.  I had only imagined a place with about 30 people who I probably already knew but now with one place to go instead of many.

At 50, I continue to love and learn more about library music.  New fans keep coming out of the woodwork and I keep finding new tunes.

At 60, maybe I’ll have a full run of De Wolfes and that elusive Bruton catalogue I wished I’d bought when it came on eBay………

Keep Digging.  Keep loving the music!

LISTEN to the SOUNDTRACK:

1 Mini Link 11 – Johnny Pearson
2 The Awakening – Johnny Pearson
3 Cock Of The Roost – D. Jackson
4 A Hippo Called Hubert – Joe Griffiths
5 Mini Movement – Johnny Pearson
6 Glad Gadabout – Johnny Scott
7 Goofy – Cliff John
8 The Free Life – Alan Parker
9 Brass Monkey – John Cameron
10 Chicken Man – Alan Hawkshaw
11 Mini Link 10 – Johnny Pearson
12 The Good Word – Johnny Scott
13 Gala Performance – Laurie Johnson
14 Approaching Menace – Neil Richardson
15 Studio 69 – Alan Hawkshaw
16 Motivation – Alan Parker
17 Darkside – Brian Bennett
18 Summer’s Coming – Keith Mansfield
19 Time Zero – Hervé Roy
20 Mask of Death – Jack Trombey
21 Pop March – Johnny Pearson
22 In Danger – Brian Bennett
23 Unease – David Lindup
24 Funky Sunrise – Duncan Lamont
25 The Plot – Brian Bennett
26 Funky Feeling – Miki Antony/Barry Blue/Tom Parker
27 Riot – Johnny Pearson
28 Industrial Sabotage – Johnny Pearson
29 Fugitive – Johnny Pearson
30 Breaking Out – Ray Russell
31 Computer Crime – George Fenton/ Ken Freeman
32 The Four Winds – Richard Harvey
33 Life Of Leisure – Keith Mansfield
34 Wild Elephants – James Clarke

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