This originally appeared on the MoreSpace campaign website. Thanks to Jerry Scott for allowing it to be seen again.
This is the complete text sent by Derek Wadsworth to Jerry Scott on December 18th, 1997. The questions were provided by Jerry Scott and Kevin McCorry and sent to Derek by Jerry Scott. Derek Wadsworth took the time to patiently write his answers and send them back to Jerry via email. We wish to thank him for his ever so kind collaboration. So, without further delay, here's the interview.
1. How many versions of the opening title were composed before the standard one was chosen? What criteria was used to make the decision as to which one to use? Who made the decision?
There was only one recording session for the title theme but there were three hours in which to record it.
I was fiddling around with a few ideas but was unsure as to which one was working the best, so I did three scores and recorded them all with the band.
These were pure orchestral scores but it had always been my intention to 'doctor' the sound with electronics once I had recorded the instrumental basis. This however, takes studio time (and cost!) so, rather than putting electronics on all of them immediately, I opted to consult Gerry after the main session to establish which of the three he preferred before I 'doctored' it.
Gerry, of course, took all decisions but at that time he was working closely with Dave Lane, a technical director who had long worked in partnership with Gerry on 'Thunderbirds' Etc.
Gerry and Dave selected the version used in the series although Dave thought the repeated 7/4 section was a dead-spot, going nowhere. He was responsible for assembling images for a title sequence and thought there should be more going on for him to cut to. I explained that I intended to put an electronic 'swoop' in that passage and that was why I had 'left it blank' so to speak.
Synths were barely in common use at that time (especially in the film world) so they had to take my word that I could come up with something interesting to liven up the middle of the piece. When it was completed they were quite happy I think.
In the studio, our electronic resources were very limited by today's standards for the simple reason that the sophisticated hardware we know today had not been invented, built or marketed. If my memory serves me well, I think most of the stuff we did was achieved with the help of Dave Lawson's early Micro-Moog (which I still have today) and a Roland 'Space-Echo'. A device which used a tape loop to achieve recurring and diminishing repeats of the original. I seem to remember that Dave had an early string machine. I'm not sure, but I believe it was a PolyMoog. It had a nice velvety sound and I often had the stupid urge to use it, even when I had real strings available.
2. Was your opening title music really influenced by Gerry Anderson saying he wanted something with catchy drum beats like in Hawaii Five-0?
To a certain extent.
'Hawaii Five-O' was, and still is in my opinion, one of the great all-time TV themes. Of course, Gerry credited me with the intelligence not to try and recreate a Hollywood adventure theme as we were working on a science fantasy that required depth and mysticism. He was simply using that example to illustrate to me that he would be happy if I were able to inject a similar kind of energy to give the show an exciting kick start.
Ronnie Verrell the drummer did a terrific job, although there is a bit of a time delay still apparent in the track that has always bothered me. The engineer was the famous Keith Grant of Olympic Studios who, amongst many other fine credits, engineered 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' (he also recently did 'The English Patient').
Because we were in a pioneering mood when recording 'Space 1999', Keith joined in the fun by suggesting to me that we electronically 'phased' the whole track and indeed, this is how it went to tape. To this day I regret that decision as it irreparably woollied the whole sound and buried the fine orchestral playing that had taken place. On the other hand of course, others may be of the opinion that this helps with the mysticism bit.
3. Was the music at the start of Act 1 of "The Metamorph" one of the alternate themes? If not why did it never appear in any other episode?
This was not an alternate theme.....
There was an 'in-show credit' I think, in 'The Metamorph' that just needed another touch of the theme. I don't think a context for it's re-use ever came up again.
If I remember rightly, I think it was the tune simply played on a flugelhorn.
4. Were Gerry Anderson or Fred Freiberger involved in any way in the planning of the musical style of Year Two or were you given carte blanche to come up with the music yourself?
One of the great privileges of being taken on board a Gerry Anderson production was that you were bestowed with artistic freedom. Unlike other producers, Gerry does not suffer from megalomaniac impulses to mastermind and take credit for the work of others. Once he had made the decision to engage a creative writer, he would put his trust in that person to be assiduous in their endeavours to be creative and original. This is his great strength.
If only there were more like him.
These days it is not so easy. All decisions seem to be made by committees and everybody wants to:
A) Whistle the hit tune themselves....or;
B) Be the ones to discover the next Morricone and get the credit for doing so;
C) Participate in the composer's hard won earnings.
Apparently, John Barry backed out of the latest Bond film when the 'committee' decreed that they would only use his tune if they liked it when it was done.
No trust you see.
I have since pitched for subsequent Gerry Anderson productions without success, supplying demos for 'Terrahawks', 'G-Force' and 'Space Precinct' as even Gerry now expects to have a professional demo before a composer is engaged. I failed with each one alas, but Gerry has been a loyal enough friend to invite me to pitch in.
To fully answer your question, Fred Freiberger did not, to my knowledge, participate in musical decisions. I met him at the outset at Gerry's pre-production get-together and that was about the last we saw of each other. He seemed a nice man.
5. Was there ever any music recorded for any particular episode that was never used?
Not that I can remember. I think we squeezed every last drop out of it!
6. Did you write the music for the episodes before or after you viewed the rushes or saw the final shooting scripts or storyboards? Or were you given specific instructions as to how long any given piece of music must last?
I had scripts first and then I would go through each episode on the Movieola with the music editor Alan Willis. The amount of music I could write was dictated by the Musicians' Union rule that 'no more than 20 minutes of music can be recorded in a 3-hour TV session'. I had to score five episodes only, by which time we considered that there ought to be enough music to re-use in the rest of the series.This is how things are done.
If I were to do it again, I don't think I would have close-scored the first five episodes but simply would have provided 1hour and forty minutes worth of music entitled 'Chase music'.... 'Stealth...' 'Build up and release'.... 'Love theme..' Etc...Etc... Like library music. After all, this is how the remaining 19 episodes were put together.
The five episodes I scored were:
THE METAMORPH
TAYBOR
SPACE WARP
THE EXILES
ONE MOMENT OF HUMANITY
I Think.........! (Somebody will probably tell me I'm wrong!)
'One Moment in Humanity' was the odd one out in that Gerry required a section of the music before the action was shot, so that a dance sequence could be filmed to it. I went through a rather embarrassing dance routine in Gerry's office in which I played the part of Lionel Blair's partner (Helena) in order to understand the sequence. It's a good thing my kids weren't watching! Incidentally, this whole piece was shaped around a piece in an American album by a very good artist (Tony Genelli..? Tony Vanelli....? Gino Vanelli?...Strawberry Vanilla?..or someone....) it was a very good track that Lionel had found.
N.B.: The piece Derek was mentioning in this interview is Gino Vanelli's Storm At Sunup, released on an album of the same name in 1975. The 'dance song' Derek composed is eerily similar to Vanelli's song.
7. Did you have a say over where your music was situated in the episodes and which episodes in which your melodies were used? Do you approve of how your music, originally written for one episode, was reused in others?
Absolutely.
Although 'Space 1999' wasn't the only project I was involved with at the time as I was doing a lot of work with Cat Stevens.
Alan Willis, the music editor was, and still is, an editor of great taste and experience. He is (or was) a musician himself and we were 'two minds with but a single thought' (Shakespeare?) I would go into Pinewood Studios at least two or three days each week to see how Alan was getting on and we would talk through things together. Bearing in mind what I said in my answer to question 6, it was often very difficult for Alan to re-use a piece that had been written for a completely different set of events. A lot of splicing was called for and Alan was a great expert at that.
Incidentally, what a lot of record buyers don't appreciate when they listen to soundtrack albums is that if, sometimes when on it's own, a passage sounds repetitive or monotonous, it is most likely because that bit was left idle to make way for dialogue, effects, explosions and so on. The music was never intended for the record buying public. I would love one day to get my masters back, edit them and remix them with modern facilities.
8. The promo CD pamphlet says that music for the final third of the season was written for "Space Warp", but much of it is used in "The Beta Cloud", which was shot before "Space Warp". Was the music originally written for "The Beta Cloud" rather than for "Space Warp"?
It's probable that things were edited out of sequence. I can't really answer that one, but I hope my previous answers are helpful.
9. Did you do sound effects, too? Like the intercom sound on the Entra penal colony in "Devil's Planet", or the beeps and drones in the alien structure in "The Immunity Syndrome"?
No. This was the domain of Alan Killick, the dubbing editor (last seen editing 'London's Burning'!).
10. Did anything in particular inspire you when composing the "spooky music" in "Bringers of Wonder"?
If you mean the piece I am thinking of the answer is yes. The 'Space 1999' score I wrote comprised of all sorts of musical bits that I liked personally. We were fooling around, as I said before with a Roland 'Space Echo' and I liked to give it space to let a phrase repeat over and over (I was very influenced by Terry Riley's 'A Rainbow in Curved Air'). In addition to this, I have always thought that the low bass introduction to Schubert's Symphony No 8 is the most spine-chilling atmosphere in existence. Similarly, I wrote a unison arco Bass/Celli line which I thought was quite moody (although it would have been better with eight celli and six basses instead of three and one!) and combined it with random 'Space Echo' phrases. I don't know... there's nothing much to it but it is one of my favourites.
11. Did you compose music specifically for certain characters or situations, like, for instance, the piece that coincides with lost, youthful innocence and pathos, in "The Mark of Archanon" when young Etrec cries at the death of his father, and in "One Moment of Humanity" after Zarl collapses and is about to die after experiencing the emotion of love?
I did, but don't ask me to name them. We had a piece which we called 'Maya's Theme' and another one for Helena. Regarding 'Humanity'..... See question #6.
12. An intense single organ note used in the first season's "Dragon's Domain" and "Ring Around the Moon" is heard in Act 3 of "One Moment of Humanity" just before Zamara tells Zarl what he must do to Helena to provoke Koenig to violence. Could you shed some light on why that one particular piece of music from Season One was reused?
Not really. This is news to me.
You see, in cutting rooms odd things happen. We closed down early one weekend at Pinewood to make way for an editing crew who were cutting a film called 'The Squeeze'. Some time later I was watching the film reviews on TV and heard some of my music in a sequence. It was simply that we had not cleared out the cutting room waste bins when we retired and the next crew, stuck for something to put in a short scene, found one of our off-cuts in the bin and simply wound it in. We were able to chase them up and supply them with an invoice but there was no harm done.
Regarding the piece from season one.......... It was just one of those things. Perhaps Alan needed something that wasn't in existence in our 'library'.............. more funds to the Gray millions!
13. Were some of your scores inspired in part by the work of other musicians of the time? If so, who?
Yes.
Terry Riley and a whole host of musician's I was working with personally at the time on the rock scene. Those were adventurous times before the 'Business Committees' started muscling in.
People kindly write to me to say that my work was innovative. I suppose if you compare it to other TV scores of the period then it may seem to be distinctively different. If it was, and that would be a nice thing to know, then it was because, as a jazz/rock trombone player who also did orchestral arrangements in the 60's and 70's, I was surrounded by a host of talented player's who passed ideas around. There were so many, but if you push me for names, I could say Chris Spedding, Geoff Castle, Dave Lawson, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Brian Auger, Mick Waller, Alex Harvey, Mike Oldfield, Manfred Mann, Barbara Thompson, Francis Monkman, Herbie Flowers and many many more.
14. Were you involved in the selection of Beethoven's 5th and 9th Symphonies that are heard briefly in, respectively, "Bringers of Wonder" and "One Moment of Humanity"?
No......! Who is this Beethoven creep, muscling in on my territory? Wait until I see Alan Willis!!! :-)
(This was probably library music)
15. Did you hand pick the musicians for the year two scores yourself or were they assigned to you?
I managed to get a couple of my favourites on board.... Geoff Castle the organist and Dave Lawson the synth player, but at the time the Jack Parnell Orchestra were the staff band for ATV so it was expected of me to use them. On the whole this was fine and I am always delighted to have the drummer Ronnie Verrell ('Animal' of the Muppets!) on a session, but the general mood of that band was Jazzy rather than rock which was the genre in which I was creating music at that moment. I am a Jazz trombonist myself so I should have been happy, but I have to say that I would have preferred to have had say, a strong rock guitarist around rather than the Jazz players who were booked. I couldn't quite achieve the 'dirtiness' I was looking for.
16. Did these same musicians also play on the Into Infinity scores?
Some of them.
I have always used the same violin leader Pat Halling. Pat can be seen leading the string quartet in the famous filmed recording of the Beatle's 'All you need is love'. He is the one wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses. We still work together today, although curiously his eye sight has got better as he gets older!
In the main though, the 'Infinity' orchestra are musicians of my own choice. Even so, at that time there was a great deal of recording going on in London so, even if you knew who you would prefer, there was no guarantee that they would be available. On that particular day I was hoping to get on guitar Alan Parker (now a successful film-composer) Chris Spedding, Colin Green, Ray Russell, Miller Anderson or Big Jim Sullivan. All were working elsewhere. I had to settle for someone unknown to me at the time, Paul Keogh. I needn't have worried. Paul did a good job and has since always been busy as one of London's top guitarists. He played recently on 'The Cult Files Reopened'.
17. Did the musical style of your "Into Infinity" scores have any bearing on the music you later composed for Year Two as they are very similar in style?
This is, or at least was, my own way of writing. If I were given the opportunity again then it would probably still sound the same.
If anyone told me my music had a distinctive sound then of course I would be very pleased, as all the famous writers have a recognizable touch. Just think of Glenn Miller, Henry Mancini, Ray Conniff, Nelson Riddle, Duke Ellington, etc....etc....etc.... oh, to join that kind of company! I have always felt very insecure about what I have worked on and feel that it is feeble. I suppose that to judge my Gerry Anderson scores best, it would be fairer to play it alongside other TV scores of 1975. If it was different then that probably would be down to the fact that I was using some players who were not the normal film session musicians of the day. Also of course, electronics were becoming prevalent on the pop scene but had not then made much inroad into the film world. Today of course it is rather different. Try to spot the score that doesn't have a synth in it!
Incidentally......... Many people discuss 'Into Infinity' as if it were solely my score. This was a joint score between myself and writer Stephen Coe. 'Panache Music' put us together for that project in the belief that we might be another Lennon and McCartney.
Writing songs is one thing of course but film scores are another. It was someone else's idea to put Barry Gray together with a rock musician Vic Elms in 'Space 1999' series 1. It seems to me that Barry did his bit and then Vic Elms had his turn.
Stephen and I sat down for a while to work out ideas but very quickly came to the conclusion that we should split up the cues and share them out. My things are the orchestral cues (and the titles) and some electronic pieces that have strings on them. Stephen worked purely in electronics and covered the area mainly where the ship is being drawn into the imminently exploding star.
18. If Year Three were to have gone into production,would you have stayed on with the show? If so, was any music ever written by you with Year Three in mind?
Yes sure....
It seemed quite strong at one point that we were to continue and 'Into Infinity' was showing signs of being taken up also, although no further music was developed for either. When it became clear that neither were to materialize, Alan Willis recommended me to the film composer Laurie Johnson to write for 'The Professionals' as Laurie was too busy to tackle it but this came to nothing also. Since then I have had no major film or TV commission as composer. I have done a number of smaller television series but these were in contexts where the directors themselves dictated what the style should be, usually in a small and unfeatured way ('Seven Wonders of the World'....or 'The Fame and Shame of Salvador Dali' for instance).
I am versatile as a musician, so I have managed to keep busy arranging, producing pop albums, playing my trombone and writing children's' stories. I have not lost faith and continue to try and improve my craft. I study orchestration continuously and have now developed my own electronic home studio in which I am currently writing my own album.
Maybe 'Space' was my only big opportunity. I was lucky to get it. I know of many brilliant writers who are still awaiting just one chance.
To me, someone like Klaus Dollinger, who wrote the score for the German series 'Das Boot' ('The Boat') is a similar case to mine. I thought his score was brilliant. I have tried to find a record without success, although I believe one was released. I have since heard no more of his work.
19. Were you aware that an album of your year two scores came out in Japan, as a picture of the cover of the album is shown in the Japanese Town Mook visual guide book?
I didn't know this and I would be interested to hear more.
20. How do you feel about the mixing of your music with Barry Gray's for Cosmic Princess?
Honoured of course, to share screen space with Barry. This video and the other, 'Destination Moonbase Alpha', were put together by Roy..... (somebody?... I've forgotten his name) to cash in on the emergent video market of the day. There is also the work of other writers in them I understand (Oliver Onions for one). It would have been respectful to me to have used my 'Space' throughout, score since all the film footage was taken from series 2, but I expect Roy was looking to give the videos a separate feel from the series itself.
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