covers and warrant major press hype, with viewing figures on original transmission (between ’73 and ’76) averaging eight to 10 million: regional repeats between ’78 and ’81 (when I first encountered it, ironically seeing final episode ‘Death In Deep Water’ first), didn’t fare too badly either.


Laurie in the studio in the ’70s. As if he ever went home.


in eight years. New compositions (OK, some were variations on existing themes, but that never stopped The Ramones being brilliant) every week – all tailored to each individual storyline, and all while working on other projects, such as the sig for the quintessential “Chap” show, Jason King. Bloody hell. It takes your average band three years nowadays to produce an album of unit- shifting mediocrities. Put against Johnson’s impeccable work rate, that doesn’t even bear thinking about – it’s like pitting Steve Cram against Stumpy O’Leg MacNolegs.


Listening to Edsel’s excellent reissues (and reading Laurie’s own exhaustive notes within), it’s amazing how well these tracks stand up outside their narrative context, and obvious that the composer not only digested influences from military tattoos to hot jazz, but intuitively understood his subject matter. Science-fiction based Avengers episodes like ‘Joker’, ‘Return Of The Cybernauts’ ‘From Venus With Love’ and ‘Hidden Tiger’, all walk, as he puts it, “a thin line between fact and fantasy”, their shrill, quirky tones dripping with the atmosphere of gleaming white rooms, push-button contraptions and laser death rays, but you also find creamier arrangements that take the listener (and more importantly the viewer) into space, even if Steed and his companions remained distinctly earthbound.


The resulting “limbo land” in which these programmes (or rather, as LJ proudly describes them, films), were set is an essential aesthetic of that magical time which existed ‘twixt ’60 and ’80, and a world many of us still dream of living in – though maybe without the violent deathings. Sometimes it fails – the waltz from ‘Quick Quick Slow Death’, for instance, is slow and deathly with little quickness involved – but even if the music isn’t your bag, it’s impossible to vada the names (from jazz greats Don Lusher and Kenny Baker on trumpets to a young Rick Wakeman on jarring organ and stylophone chords) without slight awe.


Unlike, say, James Bernard, Johnson was never rooted in one era, as The New


36


Avengers 1975-77 CD demonstrates. This need for “library” music to reflect current trends has led to the usage of the term “Now Sound” – which, ironically, many attempt to recreate today in a “retro” style very redolent of “then”. Mind you, would you want to recreate the sound of 2007? Even though that, technically, it is in the past? I thought not. For me, “now” remains resolutely ’70- 73. And talking of which….


The ’70s brought the end of The Avengers as we knew them, for a few years, at least – but no end of work for our man with the baton. His notoriously incongruous “caper” theme, to Robert Fuest’s superlative horror thriller And Soon The Darkness (’70) is as fondly remembered as the suspenseful content and


“John Barry has had,


through his Bond themes, more impact worldwide, but Laurie Johnson added a uniquely British slant to the concept of the soundtrack.”


subdued, moody photography of the film itself: in ’72 came the galloping, mediaeval tones of Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. British Horror was at peak popularity, and soon, Laurie’s music would be synonymous with it – every Saturday night on ITV. A country house or urban office block, a screaming woman, a flashing knife and a splatter of blood across the velvet drapes, followed by a series of shots through the world’s most unsettling fish-eye lens.


Possessing arguably the scariest theme tune ever, Thriller (for ‘twas its name) was again the brainchild of Avengers creator Brian Clemens (who deserves his own article) and Albert Fennell, Laurie’s lifelong partners in crime. A series of 44 self-contained 65- minute films shot on primitive videotape, it was popular enough to grace magazine


The formula was interchangeable but addictive: murders, robberies or supernatural events in an English village, suburb or London locale, an imported American star (for the purpose of networking abroad through Fox) and a brooding menace that hung like the chandeliers over the fluffy purple carpets, sputnik chairs and nylon frocks. The definitive ’70s cult show, with Johnson’s crawling clarinets, ominous oboes and tremulous trumpets providing not only a trilling sense of surprise but a cheeky payoff. Would episodes like ‘Kiss Me And Die’, ‘Nurse Will Make It Better’, ‘The Colour Of Blood’ and ‘Murder Motel’ have been as good without it? I think not, matey. In America, new credit sequences were added in which actors who clearly weren’t in the film (shot from the waist down) wreaked all sorts of mischief, often accompanied by cheap- looking animations, dream sequences, and original music: not all these themes were Johnson’s doing, but those that were, such as the funky, bass-and-Rhodes-driven ‘One Deadly Owner’, are noticeably superior.


Talking of funk, let’s consider for a moment how many dancefloor/nightclub scenes in British film and TV were indirectly influenced by Johnson’s sound. While the propulsive horns and spiralling guitars are by no means his invention, he refined and defined them (in the UK anyway) and in doing so accidentally developed two new genres. Thus the average film director’s idea of a nightclub circa ’71 is now replicated worldwide (if you know where to look) by future generations of kipper-tied sophisticates, Chap readers and lounge lovers who might not have boogied and frugged (like, er, some of us still do now) to it otherwise. The “exotica” sound of Les Baxter and Martin Denny may predate his best work by a decade, and John Barry has had, through his Bond themes, more impact worldwide, but Johnson, along with KPM, added a uniquely British slant to the concept of the soundtrack. After all, there’s a world of difference between turning your influences into something fresh and merely replicating them verbatim. That’s why The Soundtrack Of Our Lives are absolutely scintillating and Oasis were utter shite.


Who and what were Johnson’s primary inspirations? Jazz played a major part, in particular The Count Basie Big Band (boasting the snappy brass arrangements of Neal Hefti) and trumpeter Harry James, while with the groundbreaking piano-less quartets of Gerry Mulligan, noted for their then unusual fusion of brass and woodwind, is audible in the composer’s choice of instrumentation, as is the “chamber” style quintet led by Mulligan’s drummer Chico Hamilton. Other pointers may include the dance bands listed earlier, alongside their US equivalents Glenn Miller, Claude Thornhill and Boyd Raeburn – all great musical ciphers


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