Library music is much fawned-over by serious types these days. All those breaks and beats, all those swooshy synths, all those wonderful in-the-pocket musicians. What I love about it doesn't seem to be what most people love at all. The original purpose of the music, after all, was to be used as a substitute for actual pop music or commissioned soundtracks, which would have been too expensive. I get my kicks when someone like the venerable Jonny Trunk (and that someone is usually Jonny Trunk) comes up with a clip of library music being correctly applied. A few weeks ago, he posted a clip from an episode of Minder during which a siege in a launderette was accompanied by Basil Kirchin's Abstractions Of The Industrial North. I hadn't been so excited by a re-run of Minder since the sequence where Arthur and Terry got off a train at Bradford Forster Square in all its long-gone 80s B&Q architectural glory.
So, most library music is instrumental it's designed as background music for train journeys to Bradford and launderette shootouts. But, of course, if you want to use something that sounds like contemporary pop music then it should have vocals. What was the last instrumental Top 5 hit? Crockett's Theme?
This story is from the April 2023 edition of Record Collector.
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This story is from the April 2023 edition of Record Collector.
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