September 19, 2018
Silva Screen Presents The Invasion and The Five Doctors
Two new soundtracks albums from vintage DOCTOR WHO episodes have been released in digital format from Silva Screen Records.
The first is Don Harper’s soundtrack to “The Invasion,” an eight-part DOCTOR WHO story made and transmitted in 1968 starring Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor. Featuring the Brigadier, UNIT, and the Cybermen, this “modern Earth invasion” DOCTOR WHO story was a hugely influential series. Directed by Douglas Camfield, the music was composed by Don Harper, the third Australian émigré composer (after Ron Grainer and Dudley Simpson) to work on the program.
Don Harper’s music for The Invasion may have been influenced by John Barry’s score for THE IPCRESS FILE(1965), as he used a cimbalom in the score, and the artist was most likely John Leach (who also worked under the name Janos Lehar), who played on Barry’s THE IPCRESS FILE, KING RAT and THE PERSUADERS.
In addition to the cimbalom, the instruments used on this score included the organ, percussion, clarinet (doubling clarinets in A and Bb, bass clarinet and oboe), bass guitar, contra-bass clarinet, and cor anglais. The percussion consisted of bim bams and temple blocks, timpanis including piccolo timp and hand timp, as well as cymbal and vibraphone. The organ was a Hammond M100 with Leslie speaker.
The score was augmented by the use of electronic sounds created by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There was also “Muzak” by John Baker (referred to as such in the cue sheets for episodes 1 and 2), which had its first outing in an OUT OF THE UNKNOWN episode.
For this album, DOCTOR WHO composer and BBC Radiophonic Workshop archivist Mark Ayres has sequenced the album with the orchestral score kept together, followed by unused cues and the electronic score.
The second album features Peter Howell’s score to BBC TV’s 1983 DOCTOR WHO special, The Five Doctors. Howell’s bracing, spine-chilling and atmospheric music was composed by Howell at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The special effects were created by Dick Mills. The Five Doctors album features both the original score and the 1995 BBC Video special edition version which was produced, reworked, and extended by Howell. The BBC video featured updated visual effects, so to match that the score was mixed in Dolby Surround.
Peter Howell comments: “Listening again to the score for The Five Doctors, it seems to represent a very particular period in time when the variety of sounds at our disposal was becoming extensive, yet the ability to memorize them was yet to come; when the quality of taped sound was impressive but the equipment was large and the use of it sometimes clumsy and mechanical. In those days, you really did need a studio full of gear and you really did need to play it all.”
The Five Doctors (1983) was a 90 minute TV special made by the BBC to celebrate 20 years of DOCTOR WHO. In this extraordinary story The Doctor and his previous incarnations are brought to the Death Zone on Gallifrey as part of a renegade Time Lord’s scheme. Here, Peter Davison joins previous Doctor Who incarnations – Richard Hurndall (standing in for the deceased William Hartnell), Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, and Tom Baker. Famously, Baker declined to appear so some footage from “lost” story ‘Shada’ was used instead.
-Via Silva Screen. Both albums are available in CD, vinyl, and download. For more details, including full tracklists, see: https://silvascreenmusic.greedbag.com/buy/doctor-who-the-invasion-original/ and/or https://silvascreenmusic.greedbag.com/buy/doctor-who-the-five-doctors-orig-0/
