John Barry’s Beat Girl
Poster for the film Beat Girl
Rhythm riff:
e|--------------------------| B|--------------------------| G|--------------------------| D|--------------------------| A|----------------3h4--3----| E|-1-1-1-1--1-1----------4--|
Check out the full tablature.
While not a movie about secret agents, 1959′s Beat Girl is an important film in the history of the spy genre because of its composer, John Barry. Barry was then the leader of the John Barry Seven, a group put together in reaction to the growing popularity of early rock n’ roll. As Barry told Royal S. Brown in the latter’s Overtones and Undertones:
…So I formed what became The John Barry Seven, which in its final form had an alto sax, two guitars, bass guitar, piano, drums, and me on trumpet. We were all either classically or jazz trained, but we were desperate to start a professional life in music, and so we started off by just mimicking people like Bill Haley. We bought ourselves three or four amplifiers, and I think I bought the first bass guitar in England, a Hoffman, made in Germany. And so we were a seven-piece group that made more noise than anybody! (p. 325)
Barry hooked up with a young singer named Adam Faith, who scored a role in Beat Girl, the story of a young woman hanging out in dance halls and strip clubs, using her stepmother’s sordid past to break up her father’s marriage. Barry’s connections with Faith led him to being hired as the film’s composer. Again, from the interview with Brown:
The producer asked me whether I would consider writing the music, not knowing that that’s exactly what I wanted to do! It was all twangy guitars and saxes, a cross between rock-and-roll and jazz. I used my group and augmented it to about sixteen, seventeen musicians. But there were two or three moments in the movie where I could show off that I probably had an understanding of dramatic music. (p. 326)
Barry’s theme from Beat Girl was later played during the infamous lawsuit against the Sunday Times by Monty Norman, who claimed authorship of the James Bond Theme. Regardless of the outcome of that lawsuit, one can’t deny the influence that Barry had on the James Bond franchise, and the genre of spy music in general. One can hear the future of secret agent themes in this 1958 composition.
Here are the opening credits to Beat Girl, featuring Barry’s theme. Note a very young Oliver Reed flopping around in his plaid shirt and nodding his scary noggin to the rhythm:
