The great John Barry, one of the titans of film music, has died at the age of 77. He had been in poor health for some time. Condolences to his family and close friends.
Barry is one of the main reasons I fell in love with film music. As I began accumulating soundtrack albums, a large proportion of them were by him – the great Bond scores, the Oscar-winning masterpiece The Lion in Winter, the swinging 60s sound of The Ipcress File and The Knack, the latter-day romantic triumphs like Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time and the score which turned me into a film music fanatic, Dances with Wolves, in my opinion his finest score and one of the top few film scores ever written.
I remember the great concerts he gave in London and Birmingham in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s – and feel privileged to have attended them all. At the first one, as he was introduced onto the stage by his old friend Michael Caine, one of the greatest film music-related nights of my life was about to being.
One of film music’s master melodists, it is a real shame that his career seemed to end somewhat prematurely, as younger filmmakers didn’t understand how great themes and one of film music’s keenest dramatic senses could benefit their films. But what a body of work he left behind for us all to enjoy forever.
Rest in peace.
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