John Barry and cinema’s most talented composers

I don’t know who is editing the BBC’s PM programme these days – I’ve lost touch with my old corporation mates – but whoever it was deserves a word of praise for the manner in which the show covered the death of the composer John Barry. A long montage of the man’s most gilded, and brilliant, songs, from the elephantine trumpeting of Goldfinger to the warm and cosy harmonica of Midnight Cowboy. The temptation when someone famous dies is always, on a news programme, to get someone who once met the dead person to tell you that he was an incredibly talented man, and nice too. The montage was a far, far, better way of covering the story.

And it got me thinking. I suppose Barry has a good claim to being the most talented of all those composers who have devoted their careers to film. Certainly few were as immediately recognisable (not always a good thing); those sequences of descending notes, the minor key Duane Eddy twanged guitar.

The two most obvious contenders for the title, other than Barry, are I suppose Ennio Morricone (especially for Once Upon A Time in America) and Dimitri Tiomkin (especially for Wild is the Wind). And of course Rachmaninov and Schubert, although they didn’t know they were writing for films. I’d like to put in a bid for Gabriel Yared (exclusively for the overrated and typically overwrought Betty Blue), Michael Nyman for A Zed and Two Noughts, Ry Cooder for Paris, Texas and Southern Comfort (although they are almost identical). Others, I suppose, will go for John Williams but – just as with Vangelis – I’ve always found his music a little too precious.