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I annoyed a school friend once when I went to stay at his house, by spending the whole afternoon playing one of his LPs again and again. He had a copy of Star Wars and Other Space Themes (1978) arranged and performed by Geoff Love & his Orchestra. The arrangements of sci-fi TV and film music on there were 'funked'-up and disco-ified in the fashion of the time, but by a man who knew exactly what he was doing. I wanted to produce a sound as exciting as this. Geoff Love was a talented arranger who knew how to respect a piece of music and bring sparkle to it. Often in film and TV, a composer gets little time to compose a piece of music. Love knew how to take that tune and turn it into something bigger, which could stand up on its own as a complete LP track. |
Orchestral disco music fell out of fashion fairly quickly. On the back of Meco Monardo, Love produced something that has stood the test of time. The Star Wars and Other Space Themes LP is available on CD now, but they left out track 5 on side B of the LP, a gorgeous arrangement of Leith Stevens's theme from the 1951 film When Worlds Collide. It's worth getting the LP to hear this track. Also on the CD is Love's follow-up LP Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Other Disco Galactic Themes which includes a wonderful arrangement of Russell Garcia's Theme from The Time Machine (1960). Heaven! Before going to study composition at university, I studied Geoff Love's techniques closely. They still occasionally inform my musical arrangement today. |
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