The Wadsworth Promo CD Files
For those of you that have been puzzled as to the origins of the Derek
Wadsworth promo CD, here is a recent letter that Derek sent to Fanderson. It was printed in
Issue 31 of FAB. Derek has kindly given us permission to reprint it on our website.
Derek Wadsworth, Barnes, London
After Barry Gray finished recording each of his many works for the Gerry
Anderson production
team, he wisely took all the master recordings, including the multi-track
masters, back home with
him. Thankfully, since Barry's death, these masters have been passed on by
the Gray family to
Ralph Titterton of Fanderson with whom i trust they will be cherished and
kept safely in store.
Unlike Barry, I did not keep the masters of my work on Space:1999. For one
thing, the 24 track
masters are very bulky and I also was aware that they were note my property
when ITC/ATV
Music were the commissioning owners. What is more, I could not imagine
that there would be
any further life for the tracks now that they had already been incorporated
into the films.
Similarly, I returned the 24 track master of the score of The Day After
Tomorrow : Into Infinity
to the publisher Panache Music who went into liquidation some time later
when the company's
chief Bill Fahilly crashed his private plane into a Scottish Mountainside.
The assets of Panache
and its appropriately named parent company, Mountain Music and Management,
went into the
hands of an accounting company called Newmand and Co. of Camden Road. I
have
since spoken to Malcolm Forrester of the demised Panache and he can give me
no clue as to
where that master may be today.
The reason why I mention The Day After Tomorrow will soon become apparent.
I did not have any tapes of the Tomorrow score except for a two-track copy
of the opening theme
itself. As time has gone by, I have been surprised and delighted to find
that quite a number of
fans have been in touch with me about the music to say how much they
appreciated it. Among
these are two people with whom I have kept in touch on a fairly regular
basis : Ford Thaxton,
who is now chief of operations for Silva Screen Records in Los Angeles, and
David Hirsch, who
is features editor for Starlog magazine in New York.
For a number of years, David has expressed his frustration at being unable
to buy any recordings
of the Space: 1999 Year Two soundtrack, but he was able to put together a
few audio cassettes
into a kind of album shape from some rough copies that I was able to send
him. This was just for
fun. Although I have no master copies of the Space tapes in my possession,
I do have the entire
score on a series of seven-and-a-half inch tapes which had kindly been made
up for me by the
dubbing engineer at Pinewood Studios in 1976. These tapes are still in my
top drawer, although
seven-and-a-half inch is a domestic standard and is considered unsuitable
technically for
professional use.
When David came on a visit to London, he came to see me and expressed great
interest in the
one recorded tape I had of The Day After Tomorrow. He begged me to let him
borrow this as
Ford, apparently, now had access to the kind of sophisticated computer
recording devices that
are in use today that will radically enhance old recordings and remove all
noise, blips, hiss and
so on. David took this back to the States with him and I was looking
forward to a pristine digital
copy being returned to me.
Regrettably, when Ford picked up the tape at the airport in Los Angeles, he
put it in his briefcase
and, for a moment when he left his car unattended, the briefcase was
stolen. The Day After
Tomorrow disappeared into infinity!
The upshot of all this business was that David and Ford felt terribly bad
about what had
happened and, by way of reparation, got in touch to say that if I sent them
the entire Space
tapes, they would treat all of the recordings digitally, put together for
me a whole CD of the
Space music and they would send me 100 copies which I could use to promote
my work. Of
course, this time I didn't send my only tape copies, but transferred the
lot to DAT tapes which I
eventually posted off to them.
True to their word, the CD's were made and I still have around 80 copies
left here now. They are
useful as, for instance, I have recently been approached about a
forthcoming series for which I
was able to send off a CD to the director as a work sample. I understood
that in the States a
number of fans wanted to hear the music, so Ford and David may have let
them have some
copies for cost, I don't know.
Where the commercially-released versions are coming from I have no idea. I
am utterly amazed
at the prices charged that I hear about, but I get no profit from these
sales whatsoever. The
rights of the recordings belong currently, I understand, to Polygram,
although the rights of
musical performance belong to Michael Jackson who bought out the rights
from Lew Grade's
ATV Music along with all the Beatles'songs.
It's all a mystery to me... Perhaps Commander Koenig could sort it out!
Never mind, I'm starting my own album soon and I'll own the tapes.
Here is Fanderson's response to this letter following immediately Derek's letter in
FAB 31
The plot thickens. I should mention, incidentally, that the Barry Gray
tapes, which were
temporarily in Ralph's possession while the material was being catalogued,
have now been
returned to the PolyGram archive following an agreement with the Barry Gray
estate. However,
the original 24 track stereo masters of Barry Gray's Space: 1999 music have
been sitting
untouched in the ITC/Polygram archive for the last 27 years along with the
multi-track masters of
Derek's Year Two music - and they're still there if any enterprising record
company executive is
reading this. Thousands of Space: 1999 fans around the world have been
crying out for a proper
album of the music from the series ever since that crappy RCA album
(complete with disco
tracks from Return Of The Saint) came out in the late Seventies. Isn't it
about time someone did
something about it?
Back to Main Mission!
