John Barry - a sixties theme by Eddi Fiegel

Author:Eddi Fiegel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

During 1963, while still running Ember, Topline Artists, Jinglewise and writing Bond scores, John had also carried on doing tours and working as Musical Director for other artists. Capitalising on the success of the Bond records, he went on the road with Shirley Bassey and Matt Monro. With his own orchestra, he played the first half of the bill, closing it with 'The Bond Theme’, and then they accompanied Bassey and Monro for the headlining second half. It was all very well making the most of Bond, but having to spend time away from London was becoming more and more of a bind, although John did find time while on tour to develop a brief ‘liaison' with Ms Bassey.

By the end of 1963 the musical world in which John had established himself was also beginning to change irredeemably. At Christmas the Evening Standard published a special supplement headlined simply: 1963 . . . The Year of The Beatles. The Beatles had erupted onto the music scene. Their second single “Please Please Me' entered the charts at number four; 'She Loves You' went in at number one and sold over a million copies, and their debut album stayed in the charts for thirty weeks. Their success was to be revolutionary, both musically and socially.

The arrival of the 'Mersey Beat Boom' effectively spelled the beginning of the end for the old hierarchical record-business system of which John had by now become a part. Throughout the 1960s A&R men would continue to wield power over artists, but gradually the latter began to assert their own creative identity — and the fact that The Beatles wrote their own songs inspired others to do the same. Suddenly, having lost control of many artists’ material, the influence of the A&R men became drastically diminished.

The “Mersey Sound' had also become 'the Liverpool Phenomenon', and thereby a subject of national debate, way beyond the norms of the relatively small world of pop. The Sunday Times, hitherto unknown to write about ‘pop', in an eerie precursor to the way dance music would be defined by the Criminal Justice Bill some thirty years later, described the Mersey sound as: “vigorous, aggressive, uncompromising . . . exaggeratedly rhythmic, high-pitched, thunderously amplified and full of wild, insidious harmonies’. Conversely, by the end of the year, The Times' music critic William Mann was hailing Lennon and McCartney as “the outstanding English composers of 1963”.

Whichever way you looked at it, the sound of The Beatles and the groups who emerged in their wake was nothing like the sound of The John Barry Seven. And before too long John was sending the Seven out on the road on their own, fronted by Vic Flick, and no one seemed to notice or mind.

The Seven carried on touring in various guises over the next couple of years, serving as a useful promotional tool for the “Seven plus Orchestra” format which John was still using to record his film themes. Flick and his colleagues soon left to take

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