[JamesSouthall]

I inherited much of my musical taste from my father (which is probably true for a lot of people, but now I’m nearing 50 and it still largely holds – I still love listening to the sort of music that he listened to) but film music is the big exception. He had no interest in that.

Ironically my love of film music originated in my love of the films – like most people of my generation I grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek films etc and recorded end credits pieces off the tv onto tape and played them incessantly. We were not financially well-off when I was growing up and buying albums was a luxury very rarely afforded – it was only when I went to university and became very reckless with money that I started buying a lot of albums. This was helped by the bizarre coincidence that when I went to university and met my new neighbours in the student accommodation, one of them was Tom Daish, who was a great big film music fan. Our mutual amazement that having never met another human being who had heard of Jerry Goldsmith or James Horner and then having two of these people living in neighbouring rooms was quite something.

My use of “ironically” in the previous paragraph is because as I got more into it, the films themselves were of no particular relevance to my enjoyment of the albums. I know a lot of people still think of the albums as some sort of musical souvenir of a film they like – this is evident from the commentary whenever one of the record labels inadvertently use a different take of a piece compared with the one in the film, or whatever – I like film music because of its musical qualities (who can say why, but it’s probably to do with the inherently dramatic nature of it, the musical storytelling) not because of the association with any particular film, even though that is what drew me in in the first place in my very young days.