Category: 2018

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1968 2018 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: The Invasion – music by Don Harper

5 min read

Order this CDThe scores for Doctor Who‘s 20th century Cybermen episodes seem to have a habit of taking a torturous route to being released in their original form. A bit of clarification is in order: this release contains the original recordings from 1968 by Don Harper (whose handful of other scoring credits include an episode of the BBC2 sci-fi anthology Out Of The Unknown, and stock music used in George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead), the only music he ever composed for Doctor Who. Better known as a jazz musician, Harper’s services were engaged due to director Douglas Camfield’s curious habit of actively avoiding using Doctor Who’s “house composer” at the time, Dudley Simpson. Though many composers contributed to the 20th century series, there’s not another score quite like this one in the series’ history. Harper’s jazz leanings are on display, along with a very good dramatic instinct for the uniquely eerie music heard throughout The Invasion‘s eight episodes.

Why the clarification? Because Harper also re-recorded this music for the De Wolfe production music library under the title New Decades, which itself was later re-released as Cold Worlds, whereas this release has the original 1968 recordings. (The stories behind Doctor Who’s music can be just as strange-but-true as the rest of its behind-the-scenes lore.) On the one hand, The Invasion’s score sticks out quite noticeably from what came before and after it (the following story, The Krotons, has also been the subject of its own soundtrack release). But Harper has a very good sense of what the show’s “feel” is, and unnervingly dissonant tracks such as “International Electromatics Headquarters”, “The Cyber Director”, “The Cybermen, My Allies”, and “Plans For Invasion”, though brief, make the case that Harper would’ve made a fine addition to the rotation of the series’ musical talent if he had been hired to do so again. A much chirpier tone – almost “smurfy” in a way, and yet very, very 1968 in its feel – takes hold in the track “Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart”, giving the newly-promoted future series regular his own theme music in only his second appearance.

But the story doesn’t end there. Harper recorded a total of barely 20 minutes of music, intended to be used and re-used to track eight 25-minute episodes, and then, somewhat confoundingly, Camfield didn’t even use everything that was recorded. (One almost gets the feeling at times that Camfield would have preferred to skip musical underscores altogether but was coerced into including incidental music by the producers.) Also included are several tracks of effects and sound-design-bordering-on-music by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, intended to provide additional musical options; tracks 15-34 are Harper’s unused score cues. Also tracked into the episode is a track by John Baker of the Radiophonic Workshop, “Time In Advance” (simply titled “Muzak” here), originally composed for an Out Of The Unknown episode of the same name. Baker’s work – with a lovely jazzy piano overdub sitting on top of an abstract yet tuneful radiophonic backing – sits nicely alongside Harper’s own jazz influences and doesn’t seem out of place. (I’ve never made a secret of the fact that “Time In Advance” is one of my all-time favorite pieces of classic Doctor Who music, so consider this reviewer’s biases fully on display here.)

3 out of 4With the brevity of the tracks presented, and the brevity of the score overall, it’s something of a minor miracle that this album tops out at just over an hour (thanks in large part to some of the lengthy, looped background sound effects tracks), and it’s a bit mind-boggling that a majority of the tracks presented have no story context, as they were left on the cutting room floor. So very much like the later Revenge Of The Cybermen release (perhaps not coincidentally the next TV outing for the Cybermen), a lot of what’s on the disc was never actually heard in the show itself. Harper achieves a great deal with very limited resources (the liner notes indicate that he never had more than five players, six if he too performed, presumably achieving a denser sound with overdubs), so it’s nice to hear his work free of the context of the show itself. It’s a pity so much of it went unused; some of the material that was left out is some of the most distinctive and enjoyable of the lot. Clearly, the Cybermen can’t have nice things.

  1. Doctor Who (new opening theme, 1967) (0:52)
  2. The Dark Side of the Moon (Music 2 Variation) (0:33)
  3. The Company (Music 7) (1:31)
  4. Hiding (Music 8) (4:54)
  5. International Electromatics Headquarters (Music 3) (0:16)
  6. Muzak (2:46)
  7. The Cyber Director (Music 5) (0:08)
  8. The Cybermen, My Allies (Music 7) (0:27)
  9. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Music 12a) (1:22)
  10. Plans for Invasion (Music 8) (1:25)
  11. Mysteries (Music 12) (1:31)
  12. Fire Escape (Music 11) (1:11)
  13. The Dark Side of the Moon (Reprise) (Music 2) (0:31)
  14. The Cybermen, My Allies (Reprise) (Music 7, looped) (1:07)
  15. Music 4 (Trapped in Gas Chamber – v. 1 & 2) (1:29)
  16. Music 9 (2:20)
  17. Music 10 (2:00)
  18. Music 13 (0:05)
  19. Music 14 (0:15)
  20. Music 15a (0:04)
  21. Music 15b (0:20)
  22. Music 15c (0:04)
  23. Music 15d (0:20)
  24. Music 15e (0:16)
  25. Music 15f (0:04)
  26. Music 15g (0:04)
  27. Music 15h (0:23)
  28. Music 16a (0:04)
  29. Music 16b (0:05)
  30. Music 16c (0:06)
  31. Music 16d (0:07)
  32. Music 16e (0:04)
  33. Music 16f (0:08)
  34. Music 16g (0:05)
  35. Part of TARDIS disappears (0:25)
  36. All of TARDIS disappears (0:24)
  37. TARDIS take off slow and painful (2:13)
  38. International Electromatics Headquarters Exterior (10:33)
  39. International Electromatics Headquarters Interior (6:26)
  40. Computer Background (0:21)
  41. Computer Whirrs (1:01)
  42. Electronic Eye (2:37)
  43. Cyber Director Appears (2:26)
  44. Cyber Director Constant (7:51)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: September 14, 2018
Total running time: 1:01:15

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Categories
1983 2018 D Doctor Who Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: The Five Doctors – music by Peter Howell

5 min read

It says a lot for the evolution, over time, of what listeners expect from a soundtrack purchase, when one considers that The Five Doctors – the 90-minute Doctor Who 20th anniversary special – once lent its name to an LP of “suites” from various 1980s Doctor Who stories, but didn’t merit its own full soundtrack release until 35 years after its 1983 premiere. But now that it’s here, was it worth the wait?

In the liner notes, composer Peter Howell himself says that he was firing on all creative cylinders in a way that he hadn’t before. The Five Doctors was a special production, not part of an ongoing season, so there was a bit of breathing room to come up with ideas. The Five Doctors score is one of the high water marks of 1980s Doctor Who soundtrack music, being possibly the first use of sampling, or at least the first use of sampling as a key part of the music. The unearthly, menacing exclamation point of the Cybermen’s percussive music cues is the slowed-down sound of a lid being pulled off of a metal can. The foreboding horn heard in the Death Zone on Gallifrey isn’t a brass musican instrument, but a sampled ship’s horn. And the Time Lord-centric story gets appropriately clock-like percussive elements, very much a first in Doctor Who.

Of course, none of that would really matter if Peter Howell wasn’t one of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s masters of memorable melodies. It really wasn’t until the Radiophonic Workshop came along that any of the show’s various resident composers had employed Ron Grainer’s theme tune as a leitmotif; even Dudley Simpson crafted his own theme for the Doctor that had virtually nothing to do with Grainer’s theme. But here, Howell leans hard on the show’s signature theme throughout the adventure, which really helps to point up the momentous nature of the story being told: the story doesn’t just involve the Doctor, it’s about the Doctor and the Time Lords. And it’s not just the motif itself, but the fact that it’s still – after 20 years – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop doing the honors, bringing all of the lovely analog tricks and reverb to the table in quoting that theme authentically. The Five Doctors was really the first Doctor Who music that even a non-fan could listen to and say, “That’s Doctor Who music, isn’t it?”

Much of the second half of the disc repeats the score, but with some sonic enhancements Howell added for a 1990s extended VHS reissue of the story, which restored some deleted scenes and added new effects, forcing Howell to rethink sections of the score to match the new edit. Bonus tracks include the “cliffhangers” composed for syndicated versions of The Five Doctors that broke the story up into a traditional four-parter, as well as some Radiophonic Workshop sound effects.

4 out of 4It all adds up to a long, long overdue package. I know that there was a fairly comprehensive suite of highlights from the score of The Five Doctors on CD and, before that, on LP going back to 1984, and I know that the score was available on DVD as an isolated audio track…but it really has been a long wait for a properly remastered release of the original, pre-special-edition score as I remember hearing it back in 1983 when The Five Doctors blew my mind by finally showing me all of the Doctors and companions that I’d only read about in Starlog. It’s nice to finally have it, and even with all of the widescreen orchestral grandeur that has become the sound of Doctor Who since the turn of the century, The Five Doctors remains one of the show’s all-time great scores.

Order this CD

  1. Doctor Who – Opening Theme (0:36)
  2. New Console (0:24)
  3. The Eye Of Orion (0:57)
  4. Cosmic Angst (1:18)
  5. Melting Icebergs (0:40)
  6. Great Balls Of Fire (1:02)
  7. My Other Selves (0:38)
  8. No Coordinates (0:26)
  9. Bus Stop (0:23)
  10. No Where, No Time (0:31)
  11. Dalek Alley and The Death Zone (3:00)
  12. Hand In The Wall (0:21)
  13. Who Are You? (1:04)
  14. The Dark Tower / My Best Enemy (1:24)
  15. The Game Of Rassilon (0:18)
  16. Cybermen I (0:22)
  17. Below (0:29)
  18. Cybermen II (0:58)
  19. The Castellan Accused / Cybermen III (0:34)
  20. Raston Robot (0:24)
  21. Not The Mind Probe (0:10)
  22. Where There’s A Wind, There’s A Way (0:43)
  23. Cybermen vs. Raston Robot (2:02)
  24. Above And Between (1:41)
  25. As Easy As Pi (0:23)
  26. Phantoms (1:41)
  27. The Tomb Of Rassilon (0:24)
  28. Killing You Once Was Never Enough (0:39)
  29. Oh, Borusa (1:21)
  30. Mindlock (1:12)
  31. Immortality (1:18)
  32. Doctor Who Closing Theme – The Five Doctors Edit (1:19)
  33. Death Zone Atmosphere (3:51)
  34. End of Episode 1 (Sarah Falls) (0:11)
  35. End of Episode 2 (Cybermen III variation) (0:13)
  36. End of Episode 3 (Nothing to Fear) (0:09)
  37. The Five Doctors Special Edition: Prologue (Premix) (1:22)

    Special Edition

  38. Doctor Who – Opening Theme (0:35)
  39. Prologue (1:17)
  40. The Eye Of Orion / Cosmic Angst (2:22)
  41. Melting Icebergs (0:56)
  42. Great Balls Of Fire (0:56)
  43. My Other Selves (0:35)
  44. Nothing Can Go Wrong (0:35)
  45. Bus Stop (0:22)
  46. No Where, No Time (0:36)
  47. Enter Borusa (0:28)
  48. Enter The Master (0:14)
  49. Dalek Alley and The Death Zone (3:06)
  50. Hand In The Wall (0:20)
  51. Recall Signal (0:34)
  52. Who Are You? / Tell Me All About It (0:49)
  53. Thunderbolts (0:33)
  54. The Dark Tower (0:25)
  55. My Best Enemy (1:11)
  56. The Game Of Rassilon (0:17)
  57. Cybermen I (0:22)
  58. Below (0:43)
  59. Cybermen II (1:12)
  60. The Castellan Accused / Cybermen III (0:35)
  61. Raston Robot (0:24)
  62. Not The Mind Probe (0:32)
  63. Where There’s A Wind, There’s A Way (0:31)
  64. Cybermen vs. Raston Robot (2:04)
  65. Above And Between (1:41)
  66. The Fortress Of The Time Lords (1:04)
  67. As Easy As Pi (0:22)
  68. I Hope You’ve Got Your Sums Right / Phantoms (2:29)
  69. The Tomb Of Rassilon (0:29)
  70. Killing You Once Was Never Enough (1:26)
  71. Oh, Borusa (1:21)
  72. Mindlock (1:11)
  73. Immortality (1:17)
  74. Doctor Who Closing Theme – The Five Doctors Edit (1:16)
  75. The Eye Of Orion Atmosphere (3:07)
  76. Time Scoop (0:24)
  77. Transmat Operates (0:09)
  78. Rassilon Background (3:49)
  79. Borusa Ring Sequence (0:37)
  80. The Five Doctors Titles Zap (0:10)

Released by: Silva Screen
Release date: September 14, 2018
Total running time: 77:56

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