Enter The Psych Library

This month’s slept-on sensation: hypnagogic funky cues for string quartet and band.

Stringtronics Mindbender PEER INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY LTD, 1972

AS MUSICAL DIRECTOR of the BBC Big Band, Barry Forgie worked on jazz presentations with names including Tony Bennett, Dr. John and Amy Winehouse. In the early ’70s, though, he was engaged in the shadow realm of commercial library music – the genre-hopping, off-thepeg background sounds for film, TV and ads which aficionado Jerry Dammers called, “a super genre all of its own… a sort of underworld where the record-buying public or critics wouldn’t dream of venturing.”

A case in point: 1972’s bewitching six-song suite Mindbender, made in a day by crack session pros to realise Forgie’s vision of strings in rhythm. The fact that six more songs by other people were bolted on the end is somewhat confusing, but such was the nature of the library music beast.

Born in Peterborough in 1939, Forgie was a precocious composer who played trombone in Salvation Army bands and jazz groups. After studying music in Cardiff, he taught in Croydon by day and played the London big band circuit by night. After being tutored by composer Ken Thorne (whose screen credits included Help!, The Monkees’ Head and The Magic Christian), he moved into arranging for bands and orchestras in 1967. “I came into the profession, into the studio scene, as a copyist and doing odd bits for people,” says Forgie today.

He also led his own Barry Forgie Band, one of whose BBC broadcasts was heard by publisher Dennis Berry of the Denmark Street-based Peer International Library Ltd. label. Berry duly got in touch to suggest he write some library music. After he’d done “a few” Forgie came back with a suggestion.

“I wanted to do something completely different,” he says. “I said to Dennis, I’ve just got this idea of doing original stuff with a string quartet and rhythm section, but not drums. Peer International had sumptuous string things, but they didn’t have what I was thinking of, which was sort of jazz-rock with a string quartet being the featured sound. What normally happened in those days was, Dennis would ask you to do an album along particular lines, but in this case, it was all what I wanted to do, and he was very good and went along with it.”

One afternoon in 1972 – Forgie can’t recall the time of year – he went into Lansdowne studios in Ladbroke Grove with string player Tony Gilbert and the players dubbed the Lansdowne Quartet. “I don’t know whether he just made the name up on the day, and I’m afraid I can’t remember their names,” says Forgie, who selected the remaining musicians from the session scene.

“You didn’t have rehearsals outside the studio or music sent ahead or anything like that,” he recalls. “It was live, a three-hour session with a 15-minute break, not a lot of time when it’s completely new music, and also some of it

“It was live, a three-hour session with a 15-minute break…” BARRY FORGIE

Barry Forgie conducts the BBC Big Band, with special guests Claire Martin and Iain Mackenzie, at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre on September 3.

quite involved. But it was ver y enjoyable. We did put on these little echo effects in the mixing session but there are no overdubs.” The six Forgie-penned songs they recorded impart rare and intoxicating moods, from the dramatic yet debonair chase of the title song to the chloroformed castanets of Mediterranée, but always with a secure rhythmic pulse and strings that swell and retreat as if proffering some hidden prize. A certain real-leather texture redolent of the early ’70s predominates, but the pieces aren’t shy of ambivalent emotional spaces: Hunted occupies a similar zone of groovy perilousness as Roy Budd’s Get Carter theme, with electric piano and dub effects, while Catharsis’s baroque tension-theme adds viscous blues guitar (the song’s sense of ner vous strain may be due to the musicians having to finish it in a hurry). The last piece, Dawn Mists, is an exquisite, shimmering drift into somewhere beyond: a cratedigger’s pick, it was sampled by Madlib on his 2004 track Falling. Some commentators have detected the influence of David Axelrod and Ennio Morricone: Forgie says not, but does admit to his admiration for Quincy Jones. In order to make up an album suitable for industry expectations, Berry added six songs by library music regulars Nino Nardini, Roger Roger and Anthony Mawer, which sonically relate to what went before while lacking the same impact. “I won’t comment on those,” says Forgie with a chuckle. “I think I felt at the time, well, if Dennis liked it that much, why didn’t he come back to me and ask me to do another six? I would have been really happy to do it. But, I wasn’t bothered about it.” Forgie says Mindbender didn’t do great business as a source for cues for the screen, and by 1977 he had left the library world for the BBC Big Band, where he continues his life in music. “I still do odd things and I still like writing,” he says. Would he, 51 years on, do those extra six songs for Mindbender? “It’d be fun to do,” he says. “It’s only a string quartet and a rhythm section… but someone’s got to pay for it.” He adds he’s “bemused” at its continuing popularity among fans of hidden music, “but I’m quite happy with it. I worked a lot with [the other players] and even now we’ll talk about it, Do you remember when we went to Lansdowne and did that? We thought it was just another library session, might make money, might not, but it seems to have sort of struck a chord. Sometimes you get the chance to do something that is both commercially viable and also musically viable. In that sense, it was special.”

Lord of the strings: Mindbender creator Barry Forgie in 1972.