Gray, Barry

Space: 1999 [VINYL]

Label: RCA Country: USA

"Barry Gray was born into a musical family and was greatly encouraged to pursue a musical career from a very early age. Starting at the age of five - with piano lessons - he studied diligently and became a student at the Manchester Royal College of Music and at Blackburn Cathedral. He studied composition under the Hungarian teacher, Matyas Seiber.

Gray's first professional job was in London for B.Feldman & Co., where he gained valuable experience in scoring for theatre and variety orchestras. From there, he joined Radio Normandy as a composer-arranger. After serving six years with the RAF during World War II he returned to the music industry to work with such worthies as Vera Lynn and Hoagy Carmichael.

In 1956 he joined Gerry Anderson's AP Films, where he first scored the puppet show, The Adventures of Twizzle. This was followed by Torchy The Battery Boy and then the famed Four Feather Falls, a puppet Western based on a concept suggested by Gray.

Gray's association with Gerry Anderson lasted well in to the 1970s. Perhaps most famous for his score to Thunderbirds and its theme "March of the Thunderbirds", Gray composed the themes to the other Supermarionation shows such as Stingray, Fireball XL5, Joe 90, and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Additionally, Gray is also known as the composer for the Anderson live-action shows, such as UFO and Space: 1999, as well as the Thunderbirds films and the live action feature Doppelgänger (aka Journey to The Far Side Of The Sun, 1969). Gray's professional association with Anderson ended after the first season of Space: 1999 when Anderson decided to replace Gray's original theme with one by another composer."-Wikipedia