MATT BERRY
Musical polymath and actor details his collaborative album with KPM and happy conversations with Jean-Michel Jarre and Keith Mansfield.
Words: Jo Kendall
Portrait: Ben Meadows
An initial obvious link between library music and the progressive rock world is when Van der Graaf Generator covered Sir George Martin’s Theme One –an epic psychedelic fanfare allied to BBC Radio 1 –as a single in 1972, notably used by the late Tommy Vance for the Friday Rock Show’s Friday Night Connection slot. Over the last decade, Matt Berry has regularly referenced the composition and production of 60s and 70s theme songs and sound beds in his own work, such as on 2018’s Television Themes. Finally he’s made a record, Simplicity, in collaboration with the British library label KPM –and he couldn’t be happier.
How did you get into library music?
Through watching television as a kid in the mid-70s. Library music was used for sport, current affairs, everything, because apart from the Radiophonic Workshop, there wasn’t a BBC outfit for coming up with TV themes. Library music was used quite creatively sometimes and quite bizarrely in other cases. But the library material was always excellent quality and really well put together with great influences, whether it was big band, jazz, soul, funk, rock, pop… you can hear it in all of those 60s, 70s and early 80s records on labels such as KPM, Bruton and De Wolfe.