The Prisoner Music Archive

Prisoner Soundtrack Music - the first releases
article by Larry Hall

The Six Of One (Club) maxi-single

Prisoner appreciation started with the formation of Six Of One in the UK by Dave Barry and Judy Adamson in the early Seventies. The idea was to get together with like-minded people to discuss the concepts and ideas behind the series and it was thought that a only a very small number of people would be involved. Dave Barry managed to get his address and a short message transmitted after the last episode was aired (second run) and was bowled over by the letters, phone calls and actual people turning up on the doorstep.

With a couple of helpers, he attempted to run what turned into an appreciation society but was soon unable to cope with the work, particularly as his friend Judy Adamson died. One of the other helpers, Roger Goodman, stepped in and turned what was threatening to become a shambles into a properly organised society with regular mailouts, promotional material and merchandise. It was pretty basic stuff by today's standards but as other people joined as "co-ordinators" to share the work there were conventions, episode screenings and the material became more professional and collectable.

One of Goodman's ideas was to release some Prisoner music on a vinyl maxi-single and had managed to obtain a tape of the television version of the opening and closing credits (ie: with all the sound effects in place) plus two pieces from the Chappells' French catalogue "September Ballad" and "Rag March". These were to be transfered to an acetate master to be used for making the actual maxi-single and he asked Ron Grainer to supervise the transfer of the two Prisoner theme pieces to the master. On Friday the 6th October 1978 at Utopia Recording Studios on the outskirts of London, Goodman and several members of the society met with Grainer who applied some adjustments to the tonal balance and generally saw that the transfer would be as good as the mono tape would allow.

The four track 7" maxi single featured a colour sleeve with the assembled Penny Farthing bicycle emblem from the series' closing credits. The back was a photograph of Ron Grainer taken at a convention some months after the Utopia session. There were no sleeve notes. The record was initially included "free" as part of the annual membership package.
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  Prisoner Soundtrack Music - the first album
After Goodman's departure, the society went through a number of changes, I'd joined it during the "quiet time" and stuck with it for 10 years producing a number of projects.

One thing I wanted to do was to build on the maxi-single idea and release more tracks. At the time, it was going to be a modest affair on easily reproduced cassette tape. This was to change considerably!

The first problem was locating the music tapes. I'd built up a relationship with the ITC depository of all things Prisoner at their Denham offices but they were initially unable to find the tapes.
 They believed that all things musical were held at their music library facility in London, but this turned out to be a blind alley. After several anxious weeks of phone calls and generally running round the country I had a tip from an ex-ITC employee that some tapes which MIGHT be what I was looking for were actually at Denham after all but in another department.

Sure enough, a cardboard box full of dusty unmarked reel-to-reel tapes were found in a cupboard behind someones desk. The comment I got was "Oh, are these important? I was going to throw them away." Hmmmmm.

Now the good news/bad news and, later, more bad news routine! The good news was that the tapes were a veritable treasure trove for collectors and contained virtually all the pieces specifically written and recorded for the series.

All the Ron Grainer recording sessions were there, as were most of the sessions done by Albert Elms and Robert Farnon (including his "Western" version of the Prisoner Theme) plus tapes of sound effects experiments including attempts at producing the "Rover" sound. (As an aside, these sound nothing like the "threatening roar" version and were probably intended for the abortive mechanical Rover). The tapes included every take, including rehearsals and "fluffed" takes which make fascinating listening. There are twenty eight recorded attempts at the theme alone!

The bad news was that the tapes were safety copies, not the original recordings. This meant they were in mono and the sound quality was slightly lower than the originals would have been. However, it was all there was and so I went with what I'd got.

About this time I had contact with Phil Smee who was a graphic designer by trade, doing work for the BBC and designing record sleeves for bands such as "The Damned", but who ran a small specialist record label called Bamcaruso as a sideline. They specialised in re-mastering and re-releasing material by obscure and esoteric bands such as "The Grateful Dead" and "Velvet Underground".

Phil had joined Six Of One, heard about my on-going project and offered assistance. He was particularly keen on producing the music in the form of a properly presented LP and was willing to let me make use of his Bamcaruso facilities and do the design work. Too good to be true I thought - how innocent were the times back then!
Anyway, I'd played the tapes back a million times and selected the most representative tracks. They were scattered across twenty or so reel-to-reel tapes and needed to be transferred to a single high quality master tape which would then be used to make the master for the LP. We booked a session at CTS Recording Studios located at Wembley and devotees of James Bond will recognise this is where all the film music for that series (and indeed many other films) is recorded.

The second bit of bad news was that the TV version of the theme music (ie) with sound effects had not been on the Denham tapes. The entire Grainer session was there which included the music-only version, but the tracks which made up the 7" maxi-single mastered at Utopia Studios were missing and I was never able to find them. However, I felt that no soundtrack LP would be complete without that version of the theme, plus, if I didn't somehow get it on the album, it might disappear completely. The opening track of the LP is therefore actually a recording taken from a previously unplayed copy of the vinyl maxi-single. All other tracks were mastered from the source tapes but had to be re-recorded with a similar tonal mix to the maxi-single track.

The recording engineer was Bob Jones who did everything from cleaning the maxi-single to mastering the acetate. All the tracks which appear on the LP (and later both the bootleg and "official" CD's) were transferred from the Denham tapes to a single roll of tape recorded at 30 inches per second. Every track was individually assessed and copied with any necessary tonal adjustment. At the end of the session the whole thing was transferred to the acetate master to which the three of us ceremonially added our signatures in the run-out groove area. If you possess a vinyl copy of the album, get a magnifying glass and check. This is how you know if you've got an original. The final acetate was then carefully packaged and would be sent to France for pressing into finished albums.
For the album cover design, a previously unpublished production still from "Free For All" was selected for the front, with a second copy overlaid with prison bars. This was cut down the middle and arranged over the "plain" picture as a gatefold. Therefore, you got a front cover shot of The Village through bars from which you could "escape" by opening it up. Clever stuff.

The back of the LP had McGoohan in his "Checkmate" outfit and the inner sleeve (on the first 3000 run only) had black and white photos, plus sleeve notes by Eric Mival and myself. The source tapes had been undocumented and the tracks without titles (just identifying numbers announced just before the take) so I had to make titles up using a description taken from one significant scene where the music was used memorably.

Because of the limitations of vinyl, you can only get so much information on a disc before the wall between the grooves becomes too thin to maintain it's integrity. 26 tracks were therefore all we could sensibly cram onto the LP, leaving a quite a few other pieces unpublished to this day.

The original album catalogue number is WEBA 066 (as in Andrew Lloyd Webber) and the unofficial vinyl issue was KIRI (as in Kiri Takanawa). More of WEBA 066 later.


The Age Of Elegance - the floppy disc

At the recording session for the LP, we did another tape containing two tracks not destined for the LP. These were "The Age Of Elegance" and the piece which comes after the main titles in most episodes as The Prisoner wakes from his gas-induced unconciousness and which starts with a slow guitar segment, cranks up into a reprise of the main theme then fades out quickly. This piece was never used in it's entirity anywhere in the series, nor has it ever been released since.

"The Age Of Elegance" is a classical-style harpsichord version of the Prisoner theme. Nothing much is known about it and the popular belief is that it's Ron Grainer's "demo tape" which Patrick McGoohan liked but requested a more up-beat arrangement of. It has come to be known as 'The Age of Elegance' but this is probably just a convenient working title. It might even be an pre-Prisoner piece which he dusted off and upgraded for the series. This is extremely likely as Grainer was a prolific composer and undoubtedly had lots of material stockpiled for future use and it's a great way to beat deadlines. Another pointer is the title, why "Elegance", not "Prisoner"?

The only existing copy of "Elegance" was a poorly recorded domestic cassette, and rather than spoil the professionalism of the LP it was decided to release it seperately on a give-away flexidisc coupled with the unreleased "Awakening" track as a bonus. As with the LP, there were no official titles for the music so track two became "Arrival - The Awakening".

The flexi was produced without a sleeve and the "label", which was printed directly onto the plastic, featured a Penny Farthing bike emblem in silver. It was manufactured by Lyntone in London, serial number LYN18284 and is dated January 1987.

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The Prisoner Soundtrack Bootlegged!

Bamcaruso had got nothing for their efforts on the original LP pressing of 3000 copies apart from being reimbursed the origination costs and decided to quietly produce another 3000 in cut-down packaging, release them commercially and make something on it for their efforts (they were a small specialist label re-issuing "Grateful Dead" material and similar and, for them, 3000 copies was a reasonable sale). Six Of One indulged in some self-righteous chest beating and pointed out that this was against copyright. Bamcaruso feigned ignorance and gave them 1000 of the cut-down version as a sweetener and ostensibly called it quits.

After virtually all the 601 LP's had been sold and the Bamcaruso version disappeared, it was thought that the album had run its course. Then a CD appeared in 1990 which purported to be another soundtrack album from a foreign source. It looked similar to the LP in terms of cover art and the content was exactly the same. A close look at the small print around the inner rings on the disc revealed it was made in France, although the liner was marked "PRINTED IN GREECE". The disc title and spine label both have a misspelling of "PRISIONER", all of which might or might not be to persuade people that it originated in a non-English speaking country. Shock, horror - it was an unofficial pressing, a bootleg!

Mystery surrounded the CD for a while. It was sold openly around the world and because there were no real clues to it's origin it escaped any official repercussions. However, it was fairly obvious where it came from. Bamcaruso had retained the master tape from which the LP was originated and the CD appeared not long afterwards with exactly the same format and track content so the origin and reasons for it aren't too difficult to work out. The LP had been pressed in France as were all Bamcaruso releases and it comes as no surprise therefore to see "MFG IN FRANCE" stamped on the CD. And if you need any further proof, look VERY closely at the inner laser ring and - surprise, surprise - the magic number WEBA 66 is etched there in rainbow letters!

All subsequent CD's (official or not) are simply mastered from one of the bootlegs. We did the master tape just before digital equipment was available and the analogue source tapes were noisy to begin with, so the CD has noise gating applied to cut down the hiss.

The front cover of the CD uses the same "Free For All" artwork as the LP. The front liner piece unfolds into two black-and-white stills from the series itself. The left side photo is from "Free For All", the right side from "Living in Harmony". There are no liner notes. The inner-liner (facing the disc) and the back of the jewel case both have the same list of track titles with composers listed.

No track timing information is included on the CD. This is because there was no timing information (or indeed ANY information) with the source tapes. They were literally kept in a shoe box without even identifying labels. In all my dealings with ITC, I could never get used to the way they just shoved irreplacable material in any old drawer that was handy. Many items have simply disappeared over the years.

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Are there any other unreleased tracks?

Not every track used in The Prisoner has been released, although most of the readily identifiable ones have. Perhaps the richest remaining source of unreleased music is on the tapes I used for the first LP. There was only room for so many tracks on that album and a fair number of pieces had to be left un-transferred. The Robert Farnon version of the theme, for example, would make a real collectors item. Also, the tapes contain "alternate" takes, particularly of the main theme which, again, make fascinating listening. However, the tapes may not still exist. As I mention elsewhere, ITC were never that careful with the material and several years have passed with many changes within the organisation.

There's also a bit of music remaining from the Chappel's library, both full-length pieces and shorter "spot" effects. In this case the source material will almost certainly exist but whether anyone would have sufficient interest to generate a fourth album, and whether a record company would take the commercial risk, is debatable. Only time will tell.

One interesting fact came to light courtesy of Chris Cambell who writes :-

"A number of years ago you provided me with some information on the Chappell's music used in "The Prisoner". Just wanted to let you know that I tracked down a "missing" tune that never showed up on either of the last two Six of One CD's. The tune is called "Attente", by Camille Sauvage, and (as you probably know) showed up in three separate episodes. One of the notations in the music sheets that I got from you indicates that the wrong piece was supplied by Chappell's. I believe that the piece incorrectly supplied was called "Attente-Trans-Europ Express", also by Sauvage and also appearing on DMM 302. It looks like Chappell's packaged several tunes per disc in this series (from their French library), and probably the names were so close that they didn't look closely when they pulled that piece."

Chris has also come up with another unreleased track which appears in "Arrival". This is called "Industrial Vortex" by Robert Farnon. Like "Attente" it comes from the Chappell's catalogue.
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