64: JOHN BARRY
A Man Alone/ Barbra's Theme
(CBS, 1965)

I'VE always been drawn to peculiar chord voicings and odd arrangements. Brian Wilson is largely to blame, but before I was properly aware of him I'm sure I absorbed a great deal of influence by osmosis from the work of John Barry.

The ritual of being taken to see the latest Bond movie was one of my keenest childhood pleasures, but seeing the films again in later life led me to realise that it was John Barry's music that made the experience so vivid.

Those exceptional scores conveyed everything from the loneliness and terror of deep space to the slow weight of the oceans - let alone the rarefied romance of pre-budget airline travel - and I remain convinced that it was Barry's music as much as Sean Connery's stolid presence which made a whole generation of schoolboys grow up wanting to be secret agents.

However, for me it was the film music which Barry was composing in the 1960s away from the Bond franchise which constitutes his finest work: the light, dreamy score for The Knack, the sad, creepy and inescapably claustrophobic shroud he cast over Seance On A Wet Afternoon and, above all, the downbeat and cynical motifs he brought to The Ipcress File.

In 1965, while the whole world was gripped with spy fervour, Harry Palmer of The Ipcress File was a world away from the glamourous, gadget-fixated globetrotting of James Bond.

Palmer was, it seemed, primarily a pen-pusher, albeit one entrusted with state secrets and thankless covert surveillance operations, and Michael Caine played him to sarky, grudging perfection.

John Barry's theme for the film, A Man Alone, is a brilliant evocation of Palmer's weary, grimy and rainy lot, underscored with intimations of glowering dread.

A stoical, buttoned-up rhythm section provides a dutiful trudge, over which the skeletal, Cold War melody line is picked out on a cimbalom - a Hungarian hammered dulcimer.

Barry would use this instrument again for the unforgettable theme of ITV's The Persuaders in 1971, but in this context its alien texture, and the discomfiting twists of Barry's wandering chord sequence, brilliantly suggest a chilly environment in which nothing and no one is to be trusted.