Laurie Johnson: Cult TV Themes and More... [2024] (2 x CDs)

K SPECIAL - LAURIE JOHNSON

Laurie Johnson: Cult TV Themes and More... [2024] (2 x CDs)

In memory of the late, great television and film composer, Laurie Johnson.

Former BBC DJ Danny Baker has hailed the late ‘Avengers’ composer Laurie Johnson a “brave maestro”.

The broadcaster’s tribute was one of a flood of tributes to the British-born musician - best known for scoring the 1960s spy show as well as films including Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ - who passed away in his sleep aged 96 on Tuesday, 16 January 2024 in North London.

Ex-BBC presenter Danny, 66, said on X: “The magnificent Laurie Johnson has passed. Bravo maestro. He takes to the tomb the secret of whatever instrument it was leading on this.”

Steve Rosenberg, an editor for BBC News, posted a musical tribute on piano for Laurie, which he captioned: “Sad to hear that Laurie Johnson has died. Here’s my musical tribute to the man who composed some of the greatest themes in British TV: from ‘Animal Magic’ to ‘The Avengers’.”

Floods of fans also posted tributes to the late composer, whose other film scores included ‘Tiger Bay’ from 1959, the Werner von Braun biopic ‘I Aim at the Stars’ and sci-fi and fantasy films ‘First Men in the Moon’ and 1972’s ‘Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter’.

His music for ‘The Avengers’, which starred John Steed and Emma Peel as Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, gave him star status.

He came aboard for the fourth season of the British-made series, which aired in America starting in 1966, and remained with the show after Diana’s departure and the arrival of Linda Thorson as Tara King in the series’ sixth season.

He said scoring nearly every episode was “an unheard-of extravagance”, and added about the work: “Sometimes there would be as much as 30 minutes of music to be recorded and synchronized every week. Over the whole series I must have composed around 50 hours of music.”

Laurie reprised the opening bars of his original ‘Avengers’ theme - but wove it into a new piece - when the same production team launched ‘The New Avengers’ in 1976, which starred Joanna Lumley.

The series aired in a late-night time slot in America in 1978, a year after Laurie went on to score popular UK crime drama ‘The Professionals’.

His music for four TV movies, all based on Barbara Cartland romance novels - ‘A Hazard of Hearts’, ‘The Lady and the Highwayman’, ‘A Ghost in Monte Carlo’ and ‘Duel of Hearts’ - have been hailed as orchestral masterpieces.

Born 7 February, 1927, in Hampstead, England, Laurie studied at the Royal College of Music and spent four years in the Coldstream Guards.

He became an acclaimed big-band music arranger, with some of the music he contributed to the KPM music library being heard decades later in the cartoons ‘Ren and Stimpy’ and ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’.

He is survived by his wife Dot, a daughter, son-in-law and grandson.

His family’s statement on his death said: “Laurie’s music touched the lives of millions around the world".

“Throughout his illustrious career, he composed numerous iconic scores, themes and soundtracks that graced our lives across film, TV, theatre and radio. In this time of mourning, we draw strength from the beautiful memories we shared with him.

“We remember Laurie as an extraordinary individual who embraced life with passion and brought joy to so many. His kindness, compassion and infectious sense of fun and laughter will be profoundly missed by all that knew him.”

Away from music the composer had a passion for dogs and for the work of Charles Dickens, and collected first editions and memorabilia associated with the writer.

He saw similarities in their work, once saying: “Like me, Dickens was writing for a commercial end and under pressure. It doesn’t mean your work is going to be any less good.”

Laurence Reginald Ward Johnson MBE (7 February 1927 - 16 January 2024) was an English composer and bandleader who wrote scores for dozens of film and television series, described as "one of the most highly regarded arrangers of big-band swing and pop music" in England. Much of Johnson's music was written for the KPM music library, for which he composed and conducted between 1960 and 1965.

Johnson was born in Hampstead, England on 7 February 1927. He studied at the Royal College of Music, where his tutors included Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He spent four years in the Coldstream Guards (playing French horn) before moving to the entertainment industry in the 1950s, arranging for Ted Heath, Jack Parnell and others. One of his first major projects was as composer and music director in a musical adaptation of Henry Fielding's Rape Upon Rape, entitled Lock Up Your Daughters (1959). The score, with lyrics by Lionel Bart, won an Ivor Novello Award.

Johnson began writing and recording for the KPM Music Library in 1960, holding orchestral sessions at the Friends House on Euston Road and at Denis Preston's Lansdowne Studios, where he was aided by engineer Adrian Kerridge. At the sessions Johnson produced two styles of music: light orchestral and big band jazz. He was also house conductor for KPM in the 1960s. Some of the library music pieces were also issued as commercial recordings - The New Big Sound of the Laurie Johnson Orchestra (1963) and The Big New Sound Strikes Again (1965) on Denis Preston's Record Supervision label, and the Two Cities Suite (1966), which was licensed to Pye Records. His library music has been used more recently in a number of animation series, including SpongeBob SquarePants and Ren and Stimpy.

In 1961, Johnson entered the UK Singles Chart with "Sucu Sucu", the theme music from the UK television series Top Secret. It was in this area of television scoring that he was to be most prolific, and in 1965 he left KPM to work directly for various television companies. From the 1960s to the 1980s he composed over fifty themes and scores, including the theme used on This Is Your Life (entitled "Gala Performance"), The Avengers (from 1965), Animal Magic (entitled "Las Vegas"), Freewheelers (entitled "Private Eye"), Jason King (1971-1972), Thriller (1973-1976), The New Avengers and The Professionals. He was one of the founders, with Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens, of Mark One Productions, the television production company responsible for The New Avengers and The Professionals. Later in his career Johnson provided DVD commentaries on several of the series in which he was involved. For radio he provided the theme music to the BBC Radio 1 series Sounds of Jazz, introduced by Peter Clayton and broadcast on Sunday evenings from October 1973 onwards.

Johnson's film scores included The Good Companions, The Moonraker (1958), Tiger Bay, Dr. Strangelove, First Men in the Moon, You Must Be Joking!, And Soon the Darkness, Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter and Diagnosis: Murder (the 1975 Christopher Lee film). The 1970 television film Mister Jerico involved many of the original Avengers team, including Patrick Macnee.

For the theatre Johnson wrote the musical Lock Up Your Daughters, with Lionel Bart and Bernard Miles, which opened the new Mermaid Theatre in 1959. It was later revived at the Mermaid in 1962 and transferred to the West End in 1963. Johnson's other stage work included music for the Peter Cook revue, Pieces of Eight (1959), and The Four Musketeers (1967), starring Harry Secombe.

Thriller is a British television series, originally broadcast in the UK from 1973 to 1976. It is an anthology series: each episode has a self-contained story and its own cast. As the title suggests, each story is a thriller of some variety, from tales of the supernatural to down-to-earth whodunits.

The series was created by Brian Clemens, who also scripted the majority of the episodes and story-lined every installment. It was produced by John Sichel (the first three series), John Cooper (series 4) and Ian Fordyce (the final two series) for Associated Television (ATV) at its Elstree studios north of London. The series evolved from Clemens' previous work, in particular two films in a similar style: And Soon the Darkness (1970) and Blind Terror (aka See No Evil, 1971); the latter shares plot similarities with the Thriller episodes "The Eyes Have It" and "The Next Voice You See".

Original music, including the theme tune, was supplied by Clemens' regular collaborator Laurie Johnson.

The original UK title sequence featured still shots of locations in the story, devoid of people, shot through a fisheye lens, bordered in bright red and set to Johnson's eerie, discordant theme music. With an eye to the American re-broadcast market, most episodes, especially from the second season onwards, featured at least one American principal character, portrayed by an American actor. After originally being screened late at night in the U.S. under the ABC Wide World of Entertainment billing from 1973, some episodes were retitled for U.S. syndication in 1978, and all had additional opening sequences shot with new titles and credits but without the original cast and, for this reason, often only featuring menacing figures seen from the neck down. These title sequences were used in Britain when the series was repeated on regional ITV stations in the 1980s, and are also included as extras on the Complete Series box set. When the series was re-broadcast as part of The CBS Late Movie however, the original title sequences and music were restored.

The stories were often set in the London commuter belt. A particular trademark of the series' storytelling was to hook the viewer with a simple yet totally baffling situation, of the kind seen in films such as Les Diaboliques (1955). "Come Out Come Out, Wherever You Are" takes place at a creaky country house hotel: a female guest begins asking about her missing travelling companion whom the owner claims was not with her upon arrival the previous evening and whom none of the other guests initially recall seeing. One episode, "Screamer", concerns a rape victim who murders her attacker, only to then see the man stalking her everywhere. Perhaps the most ingenious episode is the Dial M for Murder-style "The Double Kill", in which a man hires a hitman to kill his wife, but makes a fatal error in his otherwise meticulous planning.

Other memorable episodes include: "Someone at the Top of the Stairs", one of a handful of forays into the supernatural, in which two female students move into a boarding house and begin to notice that none of the other residents ever go out or receive any mail; and "I'm The Girl He Wants to Kill", in which a witness to a murder finds herself trapped in a deserted office block overnight with the killer, and is forced to play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with him to survive (there is barely any dialogue throughout its second half). Brian Clemens' own favourite episode, "A Coffin for the Bride" (US: Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill), featured a performance from a young Helen Mirren.

Following a worldwide audit during 2003-04 by the then copyright-holders Carlton, almost all the original UK PAL fisheye-titled 2" videotapes of Thriller were located and transferred onto modern digital tape by the British Film Institute, with subsequent restoration work by BBC Resources. One exception was the story "Nurse Will Make It Better"; however, this too exists in PAL/original format on the later 1" videotape format as a dub from the original master tape (this version was broadcast on the satellite channel Bravo in 1996).

In 2008 a DVD box set containing all six series was released by Network in the UK to widespread critical acclaim.

Laurie Johnson, ‘The Avengers’ Composer, Dies at 96:

https://variety.com/2024/artisans/news/laurie-johnson-dead-the-avengers-composer-1235881855/amp/

https://artandhue.com/laurie-johnson/

Here is my own compilation of Laurie's very best work from television and film, a superb 70 track collection, which includes many rare and hard to find pieces, some of which (inc. Thriller), have never been officially released on any music format.

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Track lists

CD01

01 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Avengers 2:18

02 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - No Hiding Place 2:04

03 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Echo Four-Two 2:12

04 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Top Secret (Sucu Sucu) 2:05

05 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Riviera Police (Latin Quarter) 2:13

06 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Animal Magic (Las Vegas) 2:23

07 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Whicker's World (West End) 2:33

08 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Thriller (Opening and Closing Themes) 1:13

09 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Freewheelers (Private Eye) 2:53

10 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Theme from The Deputy 2:06

11 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Mein Liebling, Mein Rose 2:53

12 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - This Is Your Life (Gala Performance) 1:44

13 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Jason King Theme 2:03

14 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Shirley's World (Shirley's Theme) 1:55

15 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The New Avengers 2:14

16 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Professionals 1:52

17 Laurie Johnson and the London Studio Symphony Orchestra - The Lady and the Highwayman 2:33

18 Laurie Johnson and the London Studio Symphony Orchestra - A Hazard of Hearts 2:39

19 Laurie Johnson and The London Studio Symphony Orchestra - A Duel of Hearts 2:35

20 Laurie Johnson and The London Studio Symphony Orchestra - A Ghost in Monte Carlo 2:12

21 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Limehouse 2:46

22 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Chase That Car 2:24

23 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - High Tension 2:47

24 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Driving Force 2:56

25 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Hot Millions (Caeser Smith) 2:13

26 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: The Bomb Run (from "Dr. Strangelove") 2:35

27 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - First Men in the Moon: Main Title (from "First Men in the Moon") 2:35

28 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - I Aim at the Stars (Theme) 2:43

29 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Tiger Bay (Theme) 2:12

30 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter: Main Title (From "Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter") 2:35

31 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - And Soon the Darkness (Theme) 2:17

32 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - A Flavour of The New Avengers 7:02

CD02

01 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Avengers (Main Titles Take 4) 1:04

02 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Dead Man's Treasure 1:25

03 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Escape in Time 2:21

04 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - What the Butler Saw 3:12

05 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Honey for the Prince 1:21

06 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Invasion of the Earth Men (Section A) 2:19

07 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Invasion of the Earth Men (Section B) 2:32

08 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Joker 3:28

09 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Joker 0:57

10 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Return of the Cybernauts 1:41

11 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Quick Quick Slow Death (Section A) 1:10

12 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Quick Quick Slow Death (Section B) 5:32

13 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Station 2:19

14 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Superlative Seven (Section A) 0:51

15 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Superlative Seven (Section B) 2:53

16 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Superlative Seven (Section C) 3:37

17 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Superlative Seven (Section D) 2:17

18 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Murdersville (Section A) 2:18

19 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Murdersville (Section B) 0:49

20 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Murdersville (Section C) 2:06

21 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Mission Highly Improbable 1:24

22 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Mission Highly Improbable 2:51

23 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - From Venus with Love 2:12

24 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - From Venus with Love 2:26

25 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - From Venus with Love 1:40

26 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The See-Through Man 1:10

27 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The See-Through Man 1:04

28 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The See-Through Man 1:12

29 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The See-Through Man 1:13

30 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The See-Through Man 2:27

31 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Hidden Tiger 1:42

32 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Hidden Tiger 1:00

33 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Living Dead (Episode Title Music) 3:25

34 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Thorson Theme 0:55

35 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Shake 2:18

36 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Avengers (End Tag Scene) 1:58

37 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - Tag Scene (Take 4) 1:32

38 The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Avengers (End Titles Take 3) 1:12

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