JOHN BARRY · THE PERSUADERS · 1971
The sound of intrigue and melancholy
I like to believe that I came into this world just as the golden era of TV theme tunes was unfolding.
The incredible, big budget orchestrations that underpinned the opening sequences of shows such as The High Chaparral, Thunderbirds, Black Beauty and Star Trek were arguably bigger than the shows themselves.....and it was often these theme tunes that I most looked forward to each weekend as a young boy.
But there was one that first captured and entrapped that sense of intrigue and melancholy in me. Looking back, it's also testament to the power of music to completely alter the complexion of something that might otherwise seem quite banal.
It was the theme from The Persuaders.
As an inquisitive songwriter in later years, I discovered that it was written by one of the compositional supremos of the era, John Barry.....also responsible for many of the great Bond scores and a whole raft of film and television music.
The Persuaders starred Tony Curtis and Roger Moore as an unlikely duo solving crimes and mysteries.....Curtis the rogue and rebel from New York, Moore the sophisticated English gentleman.
If ever I had a man crush, it was probably on Tony Curtis in this role.....rough diamond, sultry dark looks, leather jacket and the stunning Ferrari Dino. Being a ginger haired, freckly white boy not born into riches, at least two of those were destined to elude me. But the impact of Curtis lived on and, a few years later, my mum got me a leather jacket from Blackbushe Market one Christmas. Once I started wearing that, I felt I was a step closer to becoming a rebel.
I think there were two key elements that drew me so deeply into the music.
The first is a nerdy songwriting device called extended chords, where we add notes to basic chord triads that introduce varying degrees of dissonance. The sequence moves between Am / Am9 / Em / Em9, and it's those added 9ths against the minor chords that help create that extraordinary sense of intrigue and melancholy.
But the second, and most impactful element for me, was the exotic, mournful sound of the instrument playing the lead melody.....the cimbalom. It's a large concert hammered dulcimer from Eastern Europe, with metal strings stretched across a trapezoidal box and struck with handheld mallets.
What a haunting sound.
And that particular musical discovery never left me.
When I started working with Adam on The Final Quarter, the cimbalom was destined to become part of the album's sound world. You can hear it on “Water on Stone”, “Waiting On God” and “All Things Must Come To Pass”.
So a sound that first stopped me in my tracks as a young boy watching television eventually found its way onto a PATH record many decades later.
TIM
