Score - Pieces for the advertising and TV industries - (1972-1975)

I met Simon Jeffes at the end of the sixties, when he was one of 10 acoustic guitarists in The Omega Players, a contemporary classical ensemble led by guitarist Gilbert Biberian. Simon became closely involved in the making of my first album Pick Up a Bone. At this time, I was mainly playing guitar myself and all the songs on that album were written on acoustic guitar. However, I was no "guitarist". Simon was classically trained, yet he was more interested in adventurous "pop". He already had an urge to arrange and orchestrate too. The songs on Pick Up a Bone were arranged by Paul Buckmaster, known for his work on the early Elton John albums of that time. Simon's turn, arrangement-wise, was to come 18 months later on Unfinished Picture, my second album for Purple Records. Songs like "Orange Song", "Doubtfully Grey" / "Don't be Alarmed" and the almost Mahlerian and melodramatic "Anvils in Five." Though neither album was a commercial success, Unfinished Picture kick-started my production career and Simon wrote a delicious string arrangement for the song "Love's Bringing Me Down" on Yvonne Elliman's album Food of Love - my first "outside" production. To enable us to work on projects that satisfied our "creative content requirements", both Simon and I decided to separate our "artistic" and "commercial" endeavours. Paying the rent from production and arrangement work at that time was a little challenging, whereas the contacts I had made with the advertising industry whilst representing illustrators in 1969 served us well in obtaining commissions for jingle-writing and background music for broadcasting and commercials. Thus Score was born. Under that banner Simon and I wrote, arranged, recorded and produced some 40 pieces for the advertising and television industries from 1972-75. After 1975, Simon became more and more immersed in his ensemble The Penguin Café Orchestra. I continued to do occasional advertising work but more and more the collision of the two worlds became harder to reconcile. By the end of the seventies, my production work was starting to "pay the rent" and my only two excursions into that field in the eighties were for two relatively artistically-oriented projects... a Chrysler cinema commercial for Brian Grant (director of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" video and Dalbello's videos) and Aiwa (a "Samsara"-inspired collection of pieces for worldwide radio broadcast).