Barry Gray (18 July 1908 in Lancashire, England - 26 April 1984 in Guernsey, Channel Islands) was a British musician and composer who is best known for his work for Gerry Anderson.[1]
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He was born into a musical family and was greatly encouraged to pursue a musical career from a very early age. Starting at the age of five - with piano lessons - he studied diligently and became a student at the Manchester Royal College of Music[2] and at Blackburn Cathedral. He studied composition under the Hungarian teacher, Matyas Seiber.
Gray's first professional job was in London for B.Feldman & Co., where he gained valuable experience in scoring for theatre and variety orchestras. From there, he joined Radio Normandy as a composer-arranger. After serving six years with the RAF during World War II[2] he returned to the music industry to work with such worthies as Vera Lynn and Hoagy Carmichael.
In 1956 he joined Gerry Anderson's AP Films, where he first scored the puppet show, The Adventures of Twizzle. This was followed by Torchy The Battery Boy and then the famed Four Feather Falls, a puppet Western based on a concept suggested by Gray.
Gray's association with Gerry Anderson lasted well in to the 1970s. Perhaps most famous for his score to Thunderbirds and its theme "March of the Thunderbirds", Gray composed the themes to the other Supermarionation shows such as Stingray, Fireball XL5, Joe 90, and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Additionally, Gray is also known as the composer for the Anderson live-action shows, such as UFO and Space: 1999, as well as the Thunderbirds films and the live action feature Doppelgänger (aka Journey to The Far Side Of The Sun, 1969). Gray's professional association with Anderson ended after the first season of Space: 1999 when Anderson decided to replace Gray's original theme with one by another composer.
Gray's music is characterised by the use of brass and percussion sections, and made extensive use of leitmotifs, for example themes for the individual machines in Thunderbirds or the eponymous title character in Joe 90, who was accompanied onscreen by a wordless representation of the character's name. The ensembles required for Gray's scoring in series such as Thunderbirds and Stingray dwarfed those of most contemporary television shows; even the orchestra employed for the first supermarionation series, Supercar, comprised some forty instrumentalists.
In addition to composing and conducting orchestral scores, he also became interested in the Ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument that had been developed by Maurice Martenot, and used it to produce unconventional musical sounds as well as electronic sound effects in several of his scores, particularly Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and the feature film Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. His expertise and recognition in the field led to his providing electronic music and sound effects for such films as Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., and uncredited work on Fahrenheit 451.[2][3]
The Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society, Fanderson, has recently gained access to all of Gray's original studio tapes and is undertaking a major reissue project, compiling the themes and incidental music from Gray's various Anderson projects on a series of remastered CDs.
Saturday 8 November 2008, an evening event at The Royal Festival Hall, The South Bank, London. Ralph Titterton, restorer of the Barry Gray archive, co-producer of the Barry Gray original soundtrack CDs, and Cathy Ford, Barry Gray librarian, researcher and biographer, have joined with film composer, conductor and arranger François Evans to produce a concert to celebrate the centenary of Barry Gray’s birth. In aid of the The Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund charity no. 1099660.
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