[Graham Watt]

Just a little nugget taken in isolation from the long view… although it might actually be more significant than it sounds. I’m one of the many “older gits” whose childhood and adolescence was shaped by “taping direct from the telly onto cassette”. In some ways it might be geekism at its saddest (my friends had started going to school discos and stuff), but it certainly attuned my ear to composers’ styles.

This was before Halliwell’s Film Guide, which gave a composer credit for the major studio films at least. And so I taped the Main Titles from almost all films shown in Blighty from between about 1973 and 1979. In most cases, certainly in the early days, I would have absolutely no idea who the composer was, but I quickly latched onto the style(s) of Rózsa and Herrmann (unmistakeable), but also people like Herschel Burke Gilbert (after hearing RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11, I just knew that it had to be him within the opening bars of WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS). And so on with a multitude of composers.

That’s just part of my own “Film Music Origin Story”.