JAMES BERNARD

James Bernard composed many of Hammer's most impressive musical scores, including Horror of Dracula, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Dracula--Prince of Darkness, The Devil Rides Out, Kiss of the Vampire, The Damned, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Quatermass II, The Curse of Frankenstein, X--The Unknown and She .   Mr. Bernard was a delightful guest, charming and warm and so appreciative of his American fans.   He died this past summer, July 12, 2001.   This question and answer was conducted by Bill Littman.

Start at the beginning.   When did you first become interested in music ?

I first became interested in music from when I can remember I was a little tiny boy and I would play about in my nursery.   I can remember there was an old upright and I used to play about on it and made terrible noises on it and [I] begged my parents for music lessons.   When I was at school I     studied the piano.   I thought I was going to be a concert pianist because I was the best pianist in school.   Of course, as soon as you leave school you find there are lots of other players who are infinitely better than you are.

      At the same time I was getting very attracted by the idea of composing and at my--what we call a public school, but really a private school--it was the same school at which Christopher Lee was educated.   It's called Wellington College and it was really founded by--I'm digressing but to let you know a little of its background--it was founded by Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, for the sons of Army officers.   My father was an army officer and I imagine Christopher's was too.   He was there just before I was.  

      At that school, although we were all supposed to be military, there was a very strong interest in music and theatre and drama and I used to act in school plays.

      Benjamin Britten [1913-1976, famous British composer whose work includes many compositions for the BBC] happened to come to the school, that was in my last year of school before I went into the Air Force.   He'd just written his great first opera Peter Grimes .   Well, our art master, was simply teaching at the school during the course of WWII.   He was a brilliant set designer.   He used to design sets for the opera before the war.   So, Ben Britten came to the school to talk to him and, naturally, he wanted to meet the boys who were considered promising in the line of music.   So, I was brought to meet him.  

      I struck up a good friendship with him, I loved his music and still do.   That's what really sort of got me going.   That was how I started.

      I gave him a couple of pieces I'd written for an inter-house music competition and I composed a piece for two pianos and an odd array of percussion.   He helped me with this.   I had a lot of boys in my house who wanted to take part.   None of them could really play, so we had an array of percussion.   That was my first interest in percussion because we use a lot in my film scores.

      I do remember we invented a percussion instrument because we had one more boy than instrument.   So Ben Britten said, "Well, we have to invent something.   Let's have a little walk along the drive through the woods."   So, we were looking to find anything that would make a noise that we could bang against something.   He picked up two stones and he hit them together and they made a sort of flash of light and one of them broke.   So, he thought that's not going to be the instrument.   Then he saw a bit of drainpipe lying in the gutter.   So, he picked that up and he tried it [with the stone] and it made a very nice clanging sound.   So, we invented an instrument called stone and drainpipe.   I still have my score to that, which is signed as composed by me, edited by Benjamin Britten.   So, that's a much treasured possession of mine.

      I spent four years in the Air Force doing intelligence work, all top secret at the time.   It's not so secret now.   Oddly enough, Chris Lee was also in intelligence.   I didn't know him at the time.   So, during that time I wanted to be a composer [and] I wanted to be an actor.   Finally. I thought there are lots of actors, but not so many composers, so, I better go into that [composing].  

      I was always in touch with Ben Britten and I used to go see him and write him.   I said, what is the first thing I do when I come out of the Air Force?   He said the first thing you must do is to go and get a basic grounding in the rudiments of music.   You must go to the Academy of Music or the College of Music--one of the best ones.   And, that's what I did.   I came out of four years in the Air Force and went to the College of Music.   There I studied with a very eminent composer, who would be a hundred if he were still alive, called Herbert Howells [1892-1983], who was a wonderful English composer.   He wasn't doing a lot at that time, but he was very celebrated in England.  

      After I'd done my study there, he was a very gentle teacher, I simply learned the kind of rules of composing there, which are found to be broken.   After I left him I went to work for Ben Britten as an assistant for a year, and that's when I really learned the kind of hard work that happens in composing.   You think of your notes or tune or whatever, then putting it all down, and, that's where the hard work comes in.   It's lovely when you have the inspiration or the flash or something, but then you have all that work.

Your credits list Seven Days to Noon .

I didn't do the music.   I think the film came out in 1951 and we got an Oscar for it.   Well, I shared a house with writer Paul Dehn, now alas, dead.   He died in the 1970s [Sept. 30, 1976].   He became a very eminent screen writer.   His last screenplay was Murder on the Orient Express [1974] for which he was nominated for an Oscar, although he didn't actually win.   Robert Towne won the award for Chinatown . Anyway, Paul and I shared a house and we were crossing over Waterloo Bridge in London on a beautiful evening, in a taxi on our way to the railway station at Waterloo.   It looked like a Caillebotte painting.   Everything was beautiful, there were no clouds in the sky, the buildings were lovely.   So, suddenly we turned to each other and said wouldn't it be terrible if this lovely London were blown up by an atom bomb?   So, we had this idea for a story for a film and it turned into Seven Days to Noon .   We sold it, the original screen story.   Paul, at that time, was a actor rather than a writer.   Later he became a screen writer and we sold it as a screen story.   And, we won, to our amazement, an Oscar that year.   We each got one for the Best Original Screenplay of that year.

      The first thing we knew about it was when we bought the Evening Standard and we saw this headline about it.   We had no idea.   Nobody had told us.   Everybody says to me, did you go over for the ceremony and all that.   But, in those days, back in the '50s, they didn't have such a big thing.   All that happened with our Oscar ceremony was that a member of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy rang us up and said, "I have your Oscars for you.   Can I come over and deliver them?"   We said, "Yes, please come tomorrow night and have a drink."   So, he arrived in a London taxi with a big cardboard box and came in and said, "How do you do?"   We gave him a large gin and tonic and gave ourselves each one and took out these two Oscars and that was our Oscar ceremony.

How did you begin with Hammer?

My first commercial work as a composer was writing music for radio plays, which was the thing much more than the television, because this was in the late '40s, early '50s and television hadn't really got started in England after the war.   Radio was the big thing that was the equivalent of television today, and everybody listened.   In those days we had a--we still do--have a channel, it's now called Radio Three, which specialized in classical plays like Shakespeare and Marlowe and newly written plays.   So, I got into doing music for their plays.   The head of drama for the BBC in those days, which was interesting, was Val Gielgud who was the elder brother of the eminent Sir John Gielgud, who, incidentally, is a friend of mine.   And, Val was his brother and head of drama and I did a play for them.   I did the music for a play--to show how long ago it was, we played the music during the actual broadcast of this radio play.   It wasn't prerecorded or anything, so we couldn't do any of that timing.  

      That was my first work with John Hollingsworth, who, of course, became music director of Hammer Films.   So, I continued to do various scores for radio and John knew I was longing to get into film.   He rang me up one day and said, "Jimmy, Hammer is doing a film called The Quatermass Experiment ." [US title: The Creeping Unknown , 1956] And, it was going to have a score by a composer called John Hotchkiss--I never knew him but he was doing quite a lot at that time but he'd been taken ill and Hammer rang up John and said, "John, have you anybody who can do a score?   We need somebody quickly, John Hotchkiss can't do it."   And, John, who'd just done a play with me and luckily still had tapes of it, said, "I think I have somebody who might be able to do the job."   The play we had just done was a kind of restoration.   It was written by John Webster in the late 17th-Century, early 18th-Century, I don't quite know the dates, after Shakespeare.   But, it was a wonderful play, The Duchess of Malfi , which is a sort of horror play and it had an all-star radio cast.   I can remember The Duchess of Malfi was played by Peggy Ashcroft, who was one of our great stage stars.   And, one of the other main parts was played by Paul Scofield.   So, it was an all-star cast and it needed a kind of horror score because it's a horror play and everybody ends up dead--they get stabbed or poisoned or the Duchess gets tortured.   It's an appalling story.  

      So, I'd done this score for strings and percussion and John hurried down to see Tony Hinds at Bray presumably, and Tony said, "Yes, try him."   So, I was to try and do it for £100, take it or leave it.   I said, "Yes, I'd do it for nothing" and that's how I started.

The use of strings is really nerve-wracking in Quatermass Experiment .   The end comes to a wonderful build.

It's called "Face the Unknown" I think, and, when the monster is up in the rafters or whatever in Westminster Abbey and they electrocute him, I was trying to think of an effect to use because Hammer never used an electronic instrument.   Indeed, in those days they liked to have symphony sounds, symphony orchestra and, actually, that was strings and percussion.   I was trying to think of a noise to go with this slaughter of this poor creature in the roof of the abbey and I suddenly sort of thought of the idea which had been used before and probably been used a great deal since, of asking all the strings to draw their bows up and down on the wrong side of the bow, on the very short bit.   And it makes the most extraordinary noise.   It's not musical at all, I suppose... as a sort of sound effect.   This is on the other side of the bridge and it doesn't make any actual music notes, it makes all kinds of sort of squealing and extraordinary noises from the basses, sort of weird squealing.   So, that's what they did and I simply wrote in the score.   I put some sort of up and down across the stave and I said draw the bows across the wrong side of the strings and they did it.   And, that's what made that kind of noise.

I had no idea that was made by the orchestra at all .

Well, I think it's a mixture, there were other sound effects.

Most of your scores seem to be toward the creatures instead of the humans.

I think so, yes.

Did you find science fiction gave you leave to experiment with different sounds ?

In those first three films I did for Hammer which were Quatermass Experiment, X--The Unknown and Quatermass II , I was only allowed to use strings because John Hollingsworth knew I could use them effectively, and percussion, because I had done those on the radio.   I was fairly limited, but it did seem a very suitable medium, the strings and percussion, to use for that type of film, science fiction.   It was only when we got to The Curse of Frankenstein that I said to John Hollingsworth, "John, can't I now be allowed to, could you trust me, could I be allowed to use trombones or something else or some woodwinds?"   He said, "Okay go ahead," and so I did.   But I think these first three films didn't lend themselves to lyrical music, or I didn't think so at the time.   There was no strong romantic interest, was there?   It was very, very down-to-earth science fiction and brilliantly done by Val Guest.   So, that's why the scores had to be like that, without much human feeling, I guess.

The first lyrical piece is in The Curse of Frankenstein .   There's a section when Frankenstein and his assistant try to cut the man down.   There is an incredible string sound.   It wasn't electronic?

You know, I can't remember.   I'll have to look at the score and see what I did.   It was probably string harmonies where you can go much higher.   I guess it was probably that.   It obviously needed to be a bit like classical music, so I think I was modeling myself on Schubert.   I was thinking of a sort of tune that Schubert might have written.  

      The man who rang Anvil Studios and was the recording engineer, Ken Cameron, was a charming man and now long dead and he loved that tune.   And, ever afterward whenever I worked with him, the last time was Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell , he'd always greet me by singing dee da da dum da da dee and he loved that little tune.   So, one day now that we're doing some records of it, I might be able to redo it.   That was the story of that little tune.

I have you down for Pacific Destiny [1956] and Across the Bridge [1957] for Rank.

Across the Bridge , I don't know if anyone's seen it, it was directed by Ken Annakin, who went on to direct some very big films, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines [ The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, Call of the Wild ] and he went on to direct a lot of films for Disney.  

      This was a film [ Across the Bridge ] that starred Rod Steiger   as a criminal on the run and it was a very good film, a very good script written by an English writer named Denis Freeman.   I remember it had quite a moving score in that, because this criminal, who was on the run, Rod Steiger, was deserted by everybody because he's such an unpleasant man.   He goes straight to Mexico.   There is a bridge, I don't know where it would be because it is a rail bridge from the US into Mexico and the borderline was halfway across the bridge.   The only one that Rod Steiger had left who loved him was his beloved dog, and so they managed to catch the dog and tied the dog halfway across the bridge.   So, it was the dog who lured him from Mexico where they caught him when he rescued the dog.

      In those days Julian Bream, the great guitarist, was willing to do film scores, and he was quite a friend of mine.   So, he played the guitar in that.   We had a guitar tune which was turned into a theme tune called Across the Bridge and was recorded by a well-known English singer called Vera Lynn, who was known as the Forces Sweetheart in WWII.   She's still going strong.   She's in her middle to late 70s.

      The other one, Pacific Destiny , that was an independent production.   It wasn't a Rank.   Then I had Julian Bream again.   It was set in the South Seas and we had to have South Seas-type music.

Tell us about Quatermass II [US title Enemy from Space , 1957], the tune Vera Day dances to.

It was just a scene in a pub, so, we had to have some pub music and an Irish jig.   I looked at it the other day and I thought it was quite convincing.

Dracula [US title: Horror of Dracula ], probably your most famous score.   Were you under contract at that time?

No, there was no contract to Hammer.   They always liked to just ask one for an individual film.   John Hollingsworth was the boss on the music side.   He was a very good friend of mine. I used to think, "Why didn't John ask me to do this one?" but I suppose he had to vary it a bit.

Can you tell us about your schedule?

About four weeks, if I was lucky enough, I might get four and a half or five, and sometimes only three and a half.   It was real hell when doing it, because I always did my own orchestration, because to me orchestrations are very much a part of the composing.   Only you can know the sort of sound you're after.   There've been a few times in my movie scores when I have used an orchestration like in the rock tune in The Damned [US Title: These Are the Damned , 1965], because I don't know how to score rock music.   On the whole, I did all my own scoring.   It was really a hard, a hard task because, okay, you'd seen the film. You had your music breakdown. You went down to the studio.   You saw the film reel by reel.   I'd probably seen it through about twice before, that when they were just showing it and getting it together.   But, you can't really start on the music until the film is pretty well into its final cut, because of all the measuring and talking for the actor on the screen.   So, then you had a music breakdown.  

      The director would be there if he were interested.   Terry Fisher was never interested.   He was so nice and charming and gentle.   I used to worry that he didn't come to these, but he said, "Oh, well, my dear boy, we're happy with what you do.   I don't know anything about music, so you go ahead and do it."   Tony Hinds always came.   He would see reel one and we would say now where in that reel do we need music.   And we'd argue about it and we'd come to a conclusion and the task of the assistant editor [was] to write notes down everywhere in each reel.   Here, there was to be music--exactly when it started, exactly when it ended--everything that happened during that sequence, when dialogue happened, when it stopped.   So that you could bring the music down or hold it static.   Then they would send me these lists of times and you went ahead from there.   Sometimes I couldn't remember what happened in a particular sequence then I would ring up the editor, and they were very helpful.   They would say, "Oh don't you remember, he gets up and walks across the room," or whatever.   So, you could always ring them up and ask for help.

      Then, you were just at it.   There you were, in my case, with my piano and blank page of manuscript and a terrible feeling of panic because you'd think, "Oh my God, three and a half, four weeks, I've got to write the stuff and tailor it to the actor and orchestrate it and have it all ready."   So, in my case, it was working round the clock.   I cut out all social events, everything, and I just worked round the clock.   Sometimes, I'd only have three or four hours sleep in a night.   Sometimes I did only finish one the morning of the recording.   The copyist would be down there at the studio copying the bits which we were going to do in the afternoon.   In those days, there wasn't photocopying which there now is.   The copyist had to really do every [page].   If you had six rows of violins he had to do all six.   So, everybody was working flat out.

Where did you write?

I wrote at home.   I used to live in this house with my friend Paul Dehn in a little house in Chelsea.   Which, I still pass often after moving back to Chelsea after living in Jamaica.

      It was quite cozy, one could work at home.   I had very kind neighbors who didn't mind the noises emanating and one of them was a very eminent musician himself.   He was called Dr. Thornton Lovehouse and he was a expert on Bach and he played the harpsichord and was a professor at the Royal College of Music.   He must have hated the noise that he heard coming out, but he was terribly nice about it.   I'm just digressing for a moment but he was this sweet elderly man, just like you think a sort of charming music professor of Bach might be, and he had this wife called Irene who was charming but she was very anti-booze.   She didn't allow any drinking in the house.   Dear old Thornton Lovehouse was dying for a drink all the time.   So, if ever Paul and I saw him walking, we'd say, "Like to come in for a drink?" and he'd say, "Oh, yes, please," and rush in and we'd pour him a triple dry martini.

Your score of Horror of Dracula has a full orchestra and wonderful musicians.

We always had top musicians. That was a luxury.   In the early scores, the ones with strings only, John Hollingsworth, at the time, was chief conductor, or one of two, of the Royal Ballet.   So, he used the string section of the Royal Ballet orchestra and then later on he branched out and we would always have players from all the symphony orchestras. I was in awe of them.   I used to be terrified because, I'd never been taught orchestration, I sort of had to pick it up.   I was terrified that what I'd written was going to be absolute nonsense to the players and that they were going to laugh at the score.   I'd sigh with relief when they actually played it and it would sound all right.   Especially when we got to Horror of Dracula and the fuller orchestra and brass and I thought, "Oh, God, is it all going to be awful?"   They were such wonderful players they could play anything in any case, but they were all so nice and charming and encouraging.   But, I was always kind of frightened of them.   I really was.   We did those early scores at some lovely sound studios.   They were called Anvil.   They were where all the early Hammer scores were recorded and they had wonderful sound there.   I'm not sure if they exist anymore or not.

"Lucy at Rest" is a lovely piece of music, are you going to record it?

Well, I'm about to do that if can do some more recording of Horror of Dracula including those few quiet bits in the later Dracula films.   I did get more of a chance to bring in the element of romance, which, is really what I love doing.   I'm just sort of an old soft romantic at heart and I really love to write a romantic score.   But, in these early scores they seemed to think I could do all the sort of horror stuff and the tension.   So, it's like being an actor--you get so excited at times, and that's why I think I loved doing the score to She , which had a lot of horror and a strong romantic and fantasy element.   That was one of my favorite scores.   Any chance I get today to indulge in romance, I grasp happily.

She , the main title seems to split between romance and native music.   That's annoying.

I must say that was not my doing, that was the powers that be who did that.   When you've written your score you don't know what they're going to do and they can play around with it.   I agree with you, I think it's a bit irritating to keep cutting between.

Tell us about Nor the Moon by Night [US title: Elephant Gun , 1959].

That was a Rank picture.   They were latching on to the idea we should have a theme song, which went with the title of the film. So, we were told to do a song called Nor the Moon by Night .   There's not really much story to tell about it.   I did a sort of African feel, a simple little tune.

The Stranglers of Bombay 's [1960] main title, is it based on Indian music?

I imagine it must be.   I haven't seen that movie for ages.   They don't seem to show it on television.   I suppose I took some Indian music and listened to it, but it was my own idea. I left myself be influenced.   When I did Elephant Gun I had to have African sounding music.   So, you have to be able to turn yourself into different nationalities.   I think in The Stranglers of Bombay , that's what I did.   In She in that opening in the nightclub there again they didn't want to use existing music.   So, I had to listen to belly dance music.   Phil Martell said you should use some kind of wind instrument.   It was sort of related to an oboe.   It was a kind of high clanging sort of oboe, so I used that.   I did go down on the set to see how it was fitting.   I thought, "Did I really write this? It sounds sort of authentic belly dance music."

Did you know the actors?

I would loved to have known the actors much more, because I've always loved actors.   I have quite a few friends who are actors.   As the composer on the films, I was called in rather late because the music is the last thing to go on to the films.   It has to be, because the film has to be in a finished state so the music can be exactly tailored.   They would only ask me down on the set for a particular reason.   People are amazed that last night was the first time I'd ever met Veronica Carlson, whom I wrote music for.   It happened like that.   I did work briefly with Christopher Lee when we worked on the chant in She .   I wrote the music and Christopher wrote the words.   These were the times I might be on the set.   Also [when] with Kiss of the Vampire [1963], the sort of convention of vampires at the masked ball had to be choreographed.   It was choreographed by Leslie Edwards, who was a senior dancer at the Royal Ballet, who was a friend of John Hollingsworth.   So, again, we had to have the music for the waltz scene on the piano.   But, normally I wouldn't go down when they were shooting a film.

Who played the piano; did you coach the actor ?

The person who played the piano was a wonderful pianist, a composer and musician himself, Douglas Gamley.   He did several scores for Amicus.   He did the piano for me.   [Who coached] the actor--Barry Warren, I imagine Phil Martell, or was it John Hollingsworth?   It was the last film John did and then he died, he had TB.   I wasn't there.   He played my piece.   I should have been there.   I don't know how it was done.

Frankenstein Created Woman [1965] has a very end of life theme.   Was that recently recorded?

No.   We hoped to put it on a subsequent record album, which Silva Screen is planning to make.   I have done quite an extended orchestral version.   I call it "Christina's Theme" because that was the character's name.   One of the frustrating things that would happen during a film score--you think of the theme, I thought of Christina's theme, but then you come to a point where you have the middle section before you come back to the main theme. I thought of a middle section which goes into a major key and it's much more comforting, and there was no time for that in the actual score of Frankenstein Created Woman .   So, now in the version which I've done for Silva Screen, I hope it will have that middle section.

One of the secondary themes of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is supposed to be based on a black mass.

Yes, I think Dracula Has Risen from the Grave , at the end where some of the bells ring out and it's come to a sort of more or less happy conclusion for the time being.   It comes in earlier in the film.   It's a kind of plainchant tune which I thought I had written, but somebody told me about the use of the traditional [chant] which has been used in film a lot and classical music.   Rachmaninoff used to use it in his variation for piano and orchestra, and I'm told I used that theme at the end of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave .   I didn't do it consciously and I'm not trying to hide that.   I'd like to see [the film again] and compare it and see.

Your last film was The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires [ AKA Dracula and the Seven Golden Vampires , 1973].

The score of Seven Golden Vampires was one of those odd things.   As you know, it was shot in Hong Kong by Roy Ward Baker, who I saw the other day.   He's still going strong, charming.   When they came back to England a score had been attached to it by the Shaw Brothers, the Chinese side of that production, and they'd used apparently--I never heard it--a lot of library music that they possessed.   Phil Martell heard it and said, "We can't possibly use this, it would be all wrong."   And then, by then there was only two and a half weeks to do something before the deadline date and he rang me and said, "Do you think you can do something?"   He said, "What we can really do on this occasion is use some bits out of previous scores because we really haven't got time to do an entire score."   So, we did.   We took part of previous Dracula scores, but I did about 25 or 30 minutes [of] original music including a chime theme which is part of my pretty music.

What was your favorite score?

I was pleased with She because it gave me a script for a wider range of feeling and I have to be pleased with the Horror of Dracula, because I think it was one of these times [that] when we were doing it, nobody knew we were making a film which was going to become such a classic, but the muse of cinema if there was such a lady, shown upon us all and it just all worked out wonderfully.   [But ] I'll say She overall.

What makes The Damned so different?

I think the subject was completely different.   It was more in line with the very early science fiction ones wasn't it?   But, I always tried to do a score which would fit what was needed.   I suppose the score had to come out like that because it's what I thought that [that] was what the film demanded.   I was slightly in awe of Joseph Losey, as, everybody was.   People say he was very difficult to work with.   Actually, I had a very good relationship with him, but we worked together extremely happily.   I have one little story about working on that.   There was one particular section, I can't remember what exactly, but I think it was one of those scenes with the children in their underground place by the sea where they were kept and we were doing the music which was required for that particular bit.   At the end of it, Joe said, "No, I don't think that's quite right.   I don't know how to describe it."   Directors can never describe what they want because they're not composers or musicians.   So, I said, "Okay, Joe, let me think about it."   So I went to John Hollingsworth and said, "Whatever can we do?"   He said, "I'll tell you what, go to the grand piano"--I wasn't a performer, so I was rather frightened--"and stand by it with your hand near the actual interior working strings of the piano, and when I give you the sign, go plink on one of the strings, any of the strings you like."   So, we did that and we did exactly the same music that we'd done before and John did that [sign] and I went plink and at the end we said, "Joe, how's that?" "Perfect, exactly what I want."

Did any film composers influence you?

Well, I have certain composers that I love--I'm really eclectic, if that's the word.   I love music from all periods and all composers, but I've always loved the romantic composers and I suppose Liszt.   I love the music of Liszt, which is highly dramatic and romantic and I love the work of Ben Britten.   I love Chopin, I love Mozart, although my music is hardly Mozartian, but I have a wide range.

Are you retired?

Well I'm not really retired.   What happened was Hammer was doing very little.   When was the Seven Golden Vampires , about 74?   Well, just to put it briefly, what happened was my great friend Paul Dehn had written what turned out to be his last screenplay, which was Murder on the Orient Express .   And, just before the premiere of that, it was a very wonderful Royal Garden premiere, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the lung.   He always said, "I'm going to die quite early from cancer of the lung, but quite well off because, if I can smoke, I can write.   Otherwise, I shall be quite old but I shall be a pauper because I can't write anything."   So, he opted for the first option and, it was as he said, he didn't hang on for long.   It took two years until it actually climaxed when he did come to an end, because the cancer--they'd kill it in one place and then he'd have deep ray, the chemotherapy hadn't come in, but he'd have deep ray and they did an operation, but the cancer was always one jump ahead.   So, if there'd been any work during those two years, it would have been really hard for me to do it.   I was really looking after Paul and then he died in '76.   And then I started going off to the West Indies.   It had been a great strain at the time and I had a very great friend, Ken McGregor, who was in a few of the Hammer films.   There was a close-up of him in The Devil Rides Out .   He was an extra in films but he was a very good dancer.   In the black mass scene/orgy scene there is a scene where you see him pouring a chalice of blood into the mouth of the unwilling Tanith.   Whenever I see that film I think of Ken.   Anyway, we used to go to the West Indies a lot, and finally, we bought a house in Jamaica, but that's a whole other story.   To cut it short, Ken was murdered in the garden of our house, it was robbery.   Jamaica, which I love, has a great drug problem, terrible poverty and terrible things; they happen everywhere.   I was in England in '92 and I couldn't get through on the telephone at our house to speak to Ken.   He was rather exclusive in those days and didn't like to have anybody up at the house, and I thought, "Is our phone down?"   In the tropics things often would go wrong with the lines above ground.   I suddenly had the kind of feeling that something had happened to him and I rang up a very good friend of ours.   I said, "Have you seen Ken recently?"   He said, "No, I haven't.   I saw him about three days ago, he should have been down, shouldn't he?   Should I go up and see if he's okay?"   I said, "Yes, oh please do, Trevor."   Trevor went up and he found Ken dead.   Slashed to death with machetes.   So, I thought, "Hammer horrors, this has caught up with me now."   I had to go out to Jamaica, it was August '92, almost exactly two years ago.   It was all horrific and shattering and it was purely for robbery.   But that was the end of the Jamaica chapter for me.   I thought, "Well, Jamaica was finished."   It's funny how things can have a good outcome as well as Ken himself used to say to me, "Jimmy, what are you doing spending all your time out lying in Jamaica? You ought to be back in England writing your music.   You're wasting your time out here."   I think perhaps he was right.   Anyway, I got over that tropical half.   I always longed to live in the tropics and I lived there for 10 years and I lived it until it all turned sour at the end.   So, now to bring you right up to track, I'm back in London, I'm back in Chelsea, very near my last house in Chelsea.   I have a lovely apartment in old Chelsea very near the Thames.   I've got my beloved grand Steinway piano back, which had been living in Jersey in the Channel Islands with my brother while I was in Jamaica, and I'm working on stuff for Silva Screen and I'm right here.   I've seen Roy Skeggs and I've alive and kicking.   I was in Hollywood last year, I went to the new Hammer offices and I'm meant to go again later this year, and if they want to use an elderly [composer], I'm here to be used.