Mister 8

Roy Budd

Holy Moses! Two posts in one week! Before we get started, let me congratulate Tanner of Double O Section on celebrating his fifth anniversary as a blogger! Double O Section continues to be a fantastic source of spy fiction news, reviews, and observation, and I’m sure it will be well into the future.

Today’s guitar tablature is from what I think might be the best realistic spy television show ever made, The Sandbaggers, composed by Roy Budd.

e|----0---0---0------|
B|------3---1---0-1--|
G|--2----------------|
D|-------------------|
A|-------------------|
E|-------------------|

[See the full tablature]

In a show that features little other incidental music, Budd’s theme stands out. Budd was a British jazz musician perhaps best known for his amazing soundtrack for the original Get Carter. His theme for Sandbaggers features a repeating rhythm pattern played on the cimbalom, the Hungarian instrument popularized as part of the spy sound by John Barry. Like the show itself, the theme does not satisfactorily resolve at the end.

Instead of going on about Budd and his work here, I’ll direct you to the excellent Sandbaggers fan site, Ops Room, where Paul Lagasse has a descriptive write-up of Budd and his work on the theme. In it, he asks Budd expert Doug Payne to describe the music, without Payne having seen the show. Payne writes:

The percussion symbolizes what I would consider a very militaristic cadence, matching the Cold War overtones in the show. A small string section carries the melody and, to my ears, suggests the adventure of the show. Budd sticks to the lower end of the scale, which suggests to me the slow tension of the protagonists’ effort(s) and ends it with a harp and a glissando that sort of symbolizes, at least to me, something suddenly ‘getting caught.’

As Legasse notes, the images the music evokes are a testament to Budd’s abilities as a composer.

As far as I know, the Sandbaggers theme was never officially released as a single. Much more on Roy Budd can be found at the website of Doug Payne.