Of all the prolific and talented composers from the past century, John Barry is outstanding in a career that spanned an incredible fifty years, creating outstanding theme music across several film genres. His family circumstance were well positioned to help determine his career choices later in life, with a mother who was a classical pianist and whose father was originally a film projectionist. Later on, Barry’s father would own a string of theaters in Northern England which he also worked in while growing up, learning a great deal about the entertainment industry. However, it was not until Barry served in the military while stationed in Cyprus, that he learned to play the trumpet, and was well on his way to becoming a musician.
Soon enough, he started a band called The John Barry Seven in 1957 and made his first television appearance the following year. He composed the theme song for a British musical show called Juke Box Jury and this helped his career gain momentum. An appearance with his band on another musical program called Drumbeat was another step in the right direction. Around this time he also started working with other established composers such as Les Vandyke, which led to jobs composing songs for British teen exploitation and crime drama films such as Beat Girl and Never Let Go after 1959.
Barry’s career really hit its stride when he replaced another composer and created the memorable theme for the first James Bond film Dr. No (1962). The huge box office success of this first Bond venture was no doubt instrumental for him to scoring eleven films of Bond series from 1963 through 1987. The scores for Dr. No, Goldfinger (1964) and subsequent Bond films make John Barry (along with Henry Mancini) one the composers most associated with the mod, “Swinging Sixties” culture before the hippie movement and “Flower Power” anti-war, anti-establishment culture took over the decade, moving the music industry more into the realm of psychedelic and hard rock taking center stage.
Barry remained busy as he would also score the music for a number of other well known films of the 1960s which included Academy Award winning historical epics such as the Lion In Winter (1968) and downbeat, contentious social issue dramas like Midnight Cowboy (1969) about the struggles of a bottom-feeding con artist and sex worker struggling to survive on the mean streets of New York. However, one of the spookiest scores Barry ever created was for the lesser known, under appreciated crime thriller Seance On a Wet Afternoon (1964). The violin and piano play a prominent role in the theme – giving off a very racy, but shivery effect at the same time which is well suited to an otherworldly psychological drama of this type.
Barry continued to score for a variety of film genres over the years such as the grim prisoner-of-war drama King Rat (1965), and The Glass Menagerie (1973) a highly rated tv version of Tennessee Williams celebrated stage play about a fading, troubled Southern Belle and her family conflicts. He also composed the music for one of Hollywood’s dystopian, unflattering portraits of itself – Day Of The Locust (1975) and The Cotton Club (1984) a turbulent Jazz Era story of the notorious Harlem nightclub in the 1930s. During his later career, one of his best scoring projects was Out Of Africa (1985) a romantic epic with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in the wilds of Africa during the 1910s.
Another jewel in Barry’s talented crown was Dances With Wolves (1990) a sprawling epic Western and box office hit directed, produced by, and starring Kevin Costner. Barry was awarded the well deserved BAFTA (British Academy Of Film & Television Arts) Academy Fellowship Award in 2005, and his work for Out Of Africa was ranked as the 15th greatest score of all time by the American Film Institute (also in 2005). His score for the popular action-comedy series The Persuaders (1971) is some of his most renowned work composing for British TV. While Barry may be most noted for those compositions with a heavy emphasis on brass instrumentals, but he was also among the first to utilize synthesizers in film composition with another James entry: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), and synthesizers would become a key component of pop music during the 1970s.
In any case, Barry’s prolific career and creativity would span close to fifty impressive years when he passed in 2011, and his music will be remembered for generations to come.
