The radical decision to use entirely synthesised music is an important element in the mood and style of the television programme. The rousing, tragic overtures of the opening and closing titles, and the many atmospheric variations throughout -- ranging from the spookiness of a derelict Paris to a quiet autumn in the vineyards of central France -- have been much praised.
Ken Freeman (b. 1946) is one of the pioneers of electronic music. A band member in the 60s, he spent the early 70s building the Freeman String Machine, which can be heard in albums of the day from art rock (Pink Floyd) to soft pop (David Essex). A prolific session and touring musician, he has also worked with Francis Monkman, Mike Oldfield and the theatrical music composer George Fenton. The Tripods is probably his most important work of the 80s, but he contributed title music to several other programmes, most famously the enduring BBC drama series Casualty. He is married, has two children and now works in computing.
His companies, Freestyle Music and FM Software, share his Web page, and a wealth of music from the programme is available on compact disc from there. (It was originally released on the Gerry Forrester's GERCD label.) For further details of the compact disc releases, follow this link to the releases page.
Here are some pale imitations of his music:
When did you first want to become a musician, and when did you begin writing as well as playing music? Who were your heroes?
I started mucking about on an old upright piano when I was about five years old. My folks, like all Mums and Dads, saw a budding genius in the making, so they asked me if I wanted to take piano lessons. "Dunno" said I, mystified. I got sent anyway to be 'Fur Elised' and 'Minute Waltzed' by two handicapped sisters who lived in a bungalow down the road.At that time, Peter Katin was my hero, because he could play Listz's Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 in C-sharp minor. I stopped trying to be a concert pianist, convinced that my hands must be too small, after failing to master it.
I changed teachers when I was eleven to learn 'syncopation'! from Bernard Cutler, who taught me to play Around the World like Charlie Kunz. His rooms were a long way away on the bus and I didn't like him very much, so I skived off and went to the Science Museum instead. He did however teach me how jazz notation works. I knew all my scales from my classical training so it was easy to work out all the chords like C minor 9 and G7b5, etc. I practiced playing pop tunes in different keys, a discipline which has since proved invaluable.
I went to Bordesley Green Technical school, which was one of the government's less successful experimental schools, where I was forced to lie low for fear of being beaten up. Three guys had formed a group and were playing the local pubs and dance halls and asked me to play piano with them. I often think how lucky I was to be playing in a band during the 60's music revolution. We learned almost every record that made it into the top ten. Eventually we changed our name to The Unsquare Men (from Dave Brubeck's hit) and the lead guitarist's comedian brother-in-law joined the band. He was a lousy singer but his jokes were great. We packed a pub called The Vikings in Solihull three gigs a week for two years. Polly Brown sang with us for a while before she went on to have a hit with Pickety Witch.
How exactly did you manage to have a single banned by the BBC?
After changing our name to the Second City Sound and touring the northern club scene for a time we were spotted by and signed up with a manager called Harry Gun. He got us on to Opportunity Knocks, which we won six times! After doing a summer season with Ronnie Corbett in Brighton we were introduced to John and Malcolm Jackson, who ran a studio in Rickmansworth. It was here that Tchaikovsky One was recorded and to everybody's surprise entered the charts. The BBC reluctantly allowed it to be played but baulked when we followed it up with Grieg One.I'll never forget the time we were booked to appear on Granada TV. We travelled to their Manchester studios, set up, did all the sound checks and camera tests but just half an hour before transmission Mr Gandhi died and it was cancelled. What a let down!
You were a band member in the late 60s, and then a decade later you were a touring musician again. How do you feel about live performance? What were the best concerts you played in, for you?
I had the very good fortune to play synth on David Essex's number 1 hit Gonna Make You A Star and so got to tour the UK and USA with him and Jeff Wayne. The gigs were amazing. So much equipment. And to have my own roadie. The first gig I crept on stage and very professionally tuned the synths using headphones so that nobody would hear. I needn't have bothered because when the show started the girls screamed so loudly I couldn't hear a thing. I had a 200 watt amp a meter from my left ear and I couldn't hear it!You can't beat playing live if you can make a living out of it. You have to sacrifice perfection but in exchange you can get a magical interaction between players. You can capitalise on mistakes by building them into the music. Serendipity like this rarely happens in the studio. You also get immediate feedback from the audience. If something sounds crap, they don't clap. You may have to wait weeks to find out if your advertising demo is any good and by then you've completely forgotten the mood you were in when you wrote it.
I'd guess that, even in the 70s, being a keyboards player on stage meant being somewhere in the back row, and being a session musician must be mostly augmenting other people's work. Whereas your soundtrack work is just you -- you have complete control over the instruments. Have you ever wanted to be somewhere in between, and to collaborate on composing music for a group?
Co-writing can be fun if you find the right people to work with and a waste of time if you don't. A few advertising people are very clued up and then it's a pleasure but in a band it's different because of the number of people involved. Everybody wanting to do it their way leads to friction. It's fine if you're all easy going but then nothing gets done. What tends to happen is that two people do most of it, like Lennon and McCartney for example, and the others play a lesser role. The main difference is that the group can only do so much at once. Fancy arrangements aren't possible to play live, so what's there has to be so much better, which means the playing has to be really good. In my experience really good players tend to get bored with rock and pop and turn to jazz for enlightenment, like Charlie Watts for instance.
At the turn of the 60s, you were very excited by the new possibilities for synthesised music -- by 1971, you'd built the first strings synthesiser. How did all this come about?
I got the idea whilst using a Selmer Clavioline, which was an early monophonic synth, played through a Watkins Echo box. The Watkins had three playback heads so the Clavioline vibrato (LFO mod) was phase shifted. This gave a chorus effect when a long note was held. I could play chords by arpeggiating at the same speed as the echo. I reasoned that if every note of an organ had a different LFO speed the result would mimic a string quartet. The machine I eventually built had three tones all with different LFO mod and it sounded more like a 16 player string section.
What were the electronics of the day like, to work with?
The electronics of the day were very primitive indeed compared with today. I taught myself how to make RC oscillators and LFOs from Practical Electronics magazine's "building blocks" articles. I found out how to make frequency dividers by taking an organ apart to see how it worked. This was all going on well before Dr Moog appeared on the scene.
As a session musician, you played on a huge range of 70s tracks, from Pink Floyd to David Essex. What sort of music did you, yourself, actually like at the time? Did you ever find yourself laying down backing tracks for music you couldn't stand?
Orbison, Beatles, Stones, Yes, Supertramp, Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Stealers Wheel, Acker Bilk, Wagner, Holst, Dukas.I hated Beethoven, Bowie and Dylan.
I did lots of tedious sessions. The worst must have been doing Eurovision Song Contest demos. One producer even asked me to make what I was playing sound "more green", heaven knows what he meant.
But there were some great ones too, mostly when I was booked to play with a large orchestra for film or TV, especially with George Fenton. It was fun working with Jeff Wayne on the War of the Worlds, but it went on a bit too long.
At the end of the 70s, you were also putting together music for commercials. What sort of hardware were you using then? Did you find it frustrating to write in fifteen-second bits?
I had a Yamaha CS80, Prophet 2002, Rhodes Chroma, Yamaha TX816, Roland D50, Casio FZ1 and the ubiquitous Synclavier 11. Studio gear... Fostex B16, Studiomaster 400B, Quantec reverb, Video Interlock etc., all analogue.I was mostly commissioned to write 1 minute or 30 second tracks. The 15 second tracks were cut downs. There was usually such a lot going on in the film that the most difficult task was deciding where the hit points should be and making the music fit them. Before I bought the Synclavier I had to use a computer program that I wrote myself to help me work out the optimum tempo for a given list of hit points. Finding unusual sounds was and still is so time consuming. A new synth helps there, but they devalue so quickly. Writing the tune is the easy bit, the film director has already done most of it for you.
How did the commission for The Tripods come about? Were you briefed on the style that was wanted?
The Tripods producer Richard Bates was impressed by a TV commercial that I did for BMW called Dead Cars. I was called in to see part of the first episode and asked if I wanted the job. There was no brief really. I just went home and started writing incidental music to it. The opening titles film arrived some time later and it was this that prompted the unusual opening sound and the strident rhythmic style. I have to own up to being not a little influenced by The Quatermass Experiment and Mars from Holst's Planets Suite.
Were you given scripts or rough outlines to work from? Did you write sketches for the incidental music in advance, or not until you were actually given time-coded video tapes to work on?
I did nothing until the time coded tapes arrived.
How much do directors, or the producer, intervene in the process?
When the producer listens and smiles there's no problem. He did puzzle me a bit once when he said "I know where it comes from"! Some directors try to help more than others. Most of the time I was left to get on with it, but we sometimes had different views on which scenes should have music and which shouldn't. I had a feeling that they expected a more Doctor Who approach, but realized that what I was doing was better, especially when the themes began to take shape. Graham Theakston got involved the most but he helped a lot.
Most British television is made in a hurry. What was the time-scale like for The Tripods?
I had about three weeks per episode on the first series and two weeks for the second, which wasn't very long considering it all had to be done one track of up to fifteen at a time.
Did you use any acoustic instruments -- guitar, for instance?
Yes, Joe Partridge played guitar on The Journey Begins, bless him. Apart from that it was all sampled and synthesised.
I once saw an Open University programme which demonstrated how much the mood of a piece of film could be totally altered by giving it a different soundtrack. Were there scenes in The Tripods where you felt you were really putting your own ideas onto them?
The trick in writing for film is to try to augment what's there, but if the director gives you space you can be more adventurous. One of my favourite tracks where this happened is Paris 2089 where they were creeping about in Whiteleys department store. It had to be suspense and fun at the same time, which gave me a little more room to manoeuvre.
Did you begin any work on music for the third series, or would that not have happened until post-production?
No and yes. But it wouldn't have been difficult to elaborate on the already established themes. Perhaps somebody should produce a radio version of it?
In retrospect, how do you feel about synthesised incidental music? Nowadays it seems to be quite rare -- American sci-fi shows like the Star Trek spin-offs use light string orchestras which fade into the background.
I love the Star Trek and Voyager themes. I also love the X-Files music. It becomes more and more difficult to tell electronic from orchestral music every day and I really don't think it matters anyway, most important is that the music should complement the film, however it is made.
You went straight on from The Tripods to writing the main title music for Casualty, a show that's still using it today. Am I right in thinking that you then stopped working for television? Had you had enough, by 1986 or so?
You could say I was suffering from burnout. You are what you've heard and I wasn't listening enough. I think that was because I didn't like the pop music that was around then. I found most of it rather inane and vulgar. It's different now. I have always believed in nexialism, that's where art and science meet, and it's what gave me success. I was too much into art and I yearned for some more science, so I got involved in a love-hate relationship with computers for a while.
The Tripods CD is already a substantial rearrangement of the original series music, and with the two new remixed singles there are another 40 minutes of work. What has it been like to return to these pieces? Is it nostalgic, or do you blush in places to listen to the original?
I threw out a lot of the rubbish but most of whats there still sounds good to me. But nobodys perfect.
The remixes have a modern dance-music edge to them, but then the "symphony" version of Eloise sounds almost like a big-band slow dance number. Which is an interesting step away from the symphonic overtures and the upbeat chase music in the original soundtracks -- would you write the Tripods music differently, if you were doing it today?
I like it when my music is called interesting. I know what you mean though, the remix version of the Eloise theme is a bit Barry Manilow-ish. I experimented with upbeat rhythms but they killed it basically because it's too melodic to rock up. To put it simply, there are no short riffs to repeat ad-nauseum. The remixes are what I would call adult oriented dance. I deliberately stepped back from the more avant garde dance stuff because I don't think Tripods fans would identify with it. Of course I would write it differently now. That's progress.