James Bond composer John Barry dies, aged 77
British film composer John Barry, best known for creating music for the James Bond films, dies of a heart attack, aged 77. Culture Editor Matthew Cain pays tribute.
Barry’s nine Bond compositions included Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice.
He won five Oscars for best music for Dances With Wolves, starring Kevin Costner; Out of Africa, with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep; and Born Free, a story about a couple who raise an orphaned lion cub to adulthood.
He was a prolific composer; during his 50-year career, he was involved in more than 90 film projects, and won four Grammy Awards to go with the Oscars.
Fellow Bond composer David Arnold said: “It was with a heavy heart that I tell you John Barry passed away this morning.”
John Barry's creative legacy
Perhaps Barry's greatest achievement wasn't just in composing music that in the words of songwriter Guy Chambers is "superhuman", but instead in opening up the possibilities of music in film in a much wider sense, writes Culture Editor Matthew Cain.
Of course music and film have always gone together but I'd argue that this has never been more so than in the work of John Barry and those film composers who followed in his wake. In a John Barry score, music is used to set the tone of a scene, create a sense of period, help define characters or provoke a particular emotional response in the viewer. But as well as all this, Barry was one of the first film composers to harness the memorability of a great pop hit and use its catchiness to promote a film, to build excitement around its release and to help create its very identity in the eyes – and ears – of the public.
Read more on Matthew Cain's blog: Diamonds are forever: a tribute to John Barry
Later, he said: “I think James Bond would have been far less cool without John Barry holding his hand.”
The son of a classical pianist mother and a father who owned a chain of cinemas, Yorkshire’s John Barry learned the piano and trumpet from an early age. After serving in the Army he formed a rock n’ roll band with some of his fellow former soldiers, John Barry and the Seven in the mid-50s, scoring a Top Ten hit single with Farrago in 1958.
In 1960, Barry was commissioned to score what would be his first film, Beat Girl, and two years later, the producers of the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, approached him to be involved with the song that would become the James Bond theme, although the songwriting credit belonged to composer Monty Norman.
The huge success of the instantly-recognisable score, which has arguably become the most iconic of any film, was followed by compositions for Bond’s next two films, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, famously sung by Dame Shirley Bassey.
Legendary Italian director, Federico Fellini, once said that Goldfinger’s theme was his favorite movie score.
Barry had four wives, the second of whom was Jane Birkin; the singer actress, and former muse of Serge Gainsbourg.