That's right, Barry Gray was the house composer for Gerry Anderson, a producer of British adventure TV shows in the sixties which mostly starred marionettes. If you're not of a certain age, the movie TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE looked just like the Gerry Anderson ouvre. Imagine it played straight with a cast of English voice actors, half of whom approximated American accents, and you got the picture.
Gray's work is lush and derivative and shameless, and he's a man who has no qualms about slotting in a harp glissando where a saner composer would just back off. In fact, much of the Gray aesthetic is borne of the necessity of doing the heavy emotional lifting on shows where the actors are expressionless puppets. Later, on the live-action UFO and SPACE: 1999, his music performed largely the same function for the same reasons.
In the sixties, the wedge that divided us all was rock and roll: you were either for it or against it. Gray doesn't seem to have any problem with it. The album includes both THE SUPERCAR TWIST and THIS IS THE TWIST from FIREBALL XL5. Incidentally, another hallmark of Anderson's ouvre is that the lead characters of many of his shows were vehicles. Cars, submarines, the moon blasted out of orbit, stuff like that. Grey steals plenty from popular music at the time, (check out the JOE 90 THEME) just as he rips off Brubeck's TAKE FIVE for a sequence. Is it corny? Oh hell yes. Some of these music cues sound like they come out of romantic comedies from the thirties. But the sheer lading of element on top of crazy element produces a very listenable stew. You can call it overproduced, I call it muscular. It's background music that stands up on its own. In fact it stands up and saves the world.
(To hear the themes to SUPERCAR and STINGRAY, may I cross plug here and suggest you download this week's episode of Dark Meat: Music For Depressives? Yes I may.)
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