COLIN TOWNS: Behind The Mask

A deeply private man, ex‑Gillan keyboard player turned film music composer Colin Towns recently made a rare appearance to promote his latest project, Colin Towns' Mask Orchestra. Sam Molineaux discovers the true story behind his varied musical career.

Colin Towns is the brains behind Ian Gillan's seminal rock album Mr Universe, keyboard player on 10 Gillan albums and composer of everything from TV dramas, animations and documentaries to feature‑length films, not to mention over 100 commercial and television idents.

Now living a somewhat isolated existence in a tranquil village on the outskirts of Canterbury, Towns rarely strays from his beautiful 16th‑century hall, where he's built his own studio in a room adjoining the kitchen and the lounge, as a centre for his composing and recording activities. Towns turned his back entirely on the rock music scene some years ago, and these days is more inclined to spend his working hours composing at the piano and his leisure time listening to a Benjamin Britten opera on CD than to concern himself with the vagaries of today's popular music scene. At 50 years of age, Colin Towns is finally in a position to pick and choose his film and TV commissions, and this success has at last afforded him the freedom to pursue his pet project, the jazz‑inspired Mask Orchestra, unimpeded by the constraints of a commercial record deal. A million miles away from the jazz‑rock venture one might expect from a musician of his background, the result teeters on the divide between contemporary classical music and jazz. Not surprisingly for someone who's crossed over into more areas of music than most crossover artists knew existed, he's not too keen on categorisation.

"How do you put music into words?" he challenges when I ask how he would describe the music of his latest album Nowhere And Heaven. "I'm using jazz musicians, and we've got some solos in it... I think that might make it jazz. The trouble is that most people can only handle retro jazz these days, and I find that strange because jazz was always up‑to‑date — that's what made it exciting. It was frightening and outrageous but that's something that's disappeared, in many respects. People want things so easy and I can't quite relate to that."

But before discussing his most recent work, let's flash back to the '60s, when this musical entrepreneur was laying the foundations on London's live scene that would subsequently lead to a career as a successful songwriter and later a serious composer.

First Steps

It was an uncle who played honky‑tonk piano that first sparked off Towns' interest in music, and a keen ear meant that it wasn't long before the teenage Colin was in demand.

"By the time I was 13 I was playing in a dance band. One weekend the drummer's dad knocked at my door and asked me if I'd play in his pub with the regular quartet, so I did that. Then someone put me on to this piano player who was fantastic. He was 10 years older than me and all his friends were jazz musicians. I was just a young kid but I was learning off all these people."

On leaving school, Towns got a day job as a shipping clerk and supplemented his income by forming a hippy jazz outfit and playing at artistic gatherings. Eventually, with a young family to support, he decided to adopt a more mainstream approach and started touring the American air bases with pop groups and country and western acts.

"I got a Fender Rhodes first. It was one of the few things I ever got on HP. And I also got a little Roland monophonic thing — I can't remember what the model was, but it had a really beefy sound. I used it on everything: in the studio, the pop group thing I used to do, I even used it on the country stuff."

Even though he was working all hours gigging and recording, he still kept up the office work.

"I was desperately trying to get out of this day job which I did for about 10 years. But my employers were really good; they knew I could do the job quite well and they didn't insist I get my hair cut or wear a suit — and when I needed a few months off they would let me go."

Clearly not averse to the hard graft of a working musician, Colin Towns was not so much in the right place at the right time as in many places at once when he got the major career break that led to his five‑year songwriting partnership with Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan.

"I was involved at one point with the drummer in Dave Greenslade's band and he shared a house with Greenslade's keyboard player, Dave Lawson. Lawson had agreed to do a tour of America with Ian but backed out at the last minute. A week before the tour Ian rang me up, and that's how I got involved in Gillan."

Post Purple Rock

Ian Gillan's new backing band consisted entirely of session musicians, most of whom were from a jazz/blues background. But even though they worked well together, they were perhaps too far removed from the sound of Deep Purple for the fans. After three albums, commercial success still eluded them and the band split up. Meanwhile Colin had been polishing up his songwriting skills and, influenced by Led Zeppelin's winning formula, he channelled his musical ideas towards rock. Suggesting to Ian Gillan that they give it one more shot, he set to work on sketching out songs for a new album.

Beginning life as an album exclusively for the Japanese market and featuring a combination of Towns and Gillan/Towns credits, it was subsequently released in the UK in 1979 as Mr Universe and became Ian Gillan's most successful album since Deep Purple's Storm Bringer five years earlier. A massively successful appearance at Reading Rock Festival debuted the new band, and from then on they couldn't put a foot wrong with the fans.

"In the middle of the punk era we were doing three or four nights at the Marquee to audiences of over a thousand — you couldn't breathe, it was only supposed to have a capacity of 600," Colin recalls.

Along with fellow rock veterans Motörhead, Gillan became spearheads for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (a label first coined in the rock music journal Sounds) influencing such younger bands as Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard, and Diamond Head, not to mention hundreds of other less successful hopefuls. Gillan's sound, unlike many of their contemporaries, was very much flavoured by a powerful keyboard section, courtesy of Towns.

"I didn't want to sound like Jon Lord and I couldn't stand all that Rick Wakeman crap so I was looking for something other than a Hammond. I settled on a Yamaha organ which I used to put through a rotary cabinet. It was a dual keyboard thing and it looked a bit like a Hammond. I also had an ARP 2600 which I got some interesting sounds out of, although I was terrified to move any knobs or pull any plugs out in case I lost my sounds. And I used a Clavinet, the Fender Rhodes, and a Sequential Pro One. Round the front I had a Yamaha electric piano, the CP70. That was my favourite instrument — it was the electric grand, the big heavy one that was made like a piano with strings in. I had to tune it myself before every gig and I was always breaking strings on it, but it was my absolutely favourite instrument because when I played it I was around the front near the audience and not hidden behind a load of keyboards!"

Despite their success, the Gillan/Towns partnership wasn't to last: by 1982 rumours had begun about a Deep Purple reformation and, after six successful studio albums together, the band split up and Ian Gillan and Colin Towns went their separate ways. Both have different stories to tell of the less than amicable break‑up, but 14 years on Towns remains politely reserved on the subject. An innocent question about royalties breaks his silence.

"Turn it off!" he laughs, ordering me to pause my tape recorder so he can voice his true feelings on the matter, before allowing me to record again for his rather more tactful answer: "That was part of the problem — no‑one had any paperwork; we just didn't do it properly. I do see a bit now, years after the event. But I was living in a council house almost right up until the end and we'd had five albums in the Top 20! People didn't believe that we were still skint, but we were. It wasn't well‑managed, let's say. It was all a great experience but you've got to move on, move into more challenging musical areas."

A New Direction

Despite offers from various bands, most notably an invitation to join Gary Moore's band, Towns decided it was time to jack in the rock scene altogether. Spurred on by the desire to write music for the big screen, he'd taught himself how to write for an orchestra during breaks in the last Gillan tour.

"I bought all these books on orchestration and I taught myself while everyone else was laying about in bed all day doing nothing. I had a publishing deal with CBS and I was always asking them to find me a film to do. And one day they phoned up and said this guy had been in the office with a script and was looking for a composer. It turned out he'd worked with Alan Parker and he was trying to get something of his own off the ground. So I spent a couple of hours in the studio and I did this demo for him. They used the demo to get Mia Farrow and we did the film."

The result was the film Full Circle and a soundtrack album of the same name.

"When we did this film everybody thought I'd been doing it for years. They hired a 60‑piece group and I had to go with the flow. That was a real turning point. And then, of course, I had something to build on... and the phone started ringing."

To begin with, Towns concentrated on writing music for television commercials, which he recorded in Ian Gillan's Kingsway Studios during down time.

"The first TV commercial I ever did was the Zanussi one — you know, 'the appliance of science'. I used the ARP 2600 for the bottom end stuff, but all the voices were me. The idea of the commercial was that the washing machine had come from outer space, so I did these spacey sounds by multitracking my voice loads of times and varispeeding the tape. I did that at Kingsway, but after I left the band I had to set up my own studio."

Starting off with a modest setup of a secondhand Soundtracs desk, a Soundtracs 16‑track recorder, a pair of Tannoy Little Red monitors, a Roland echo unit, a cheap Lexicon reverb unit, and a PPG Wave sampling system, Colin began crafting a portfolio of TV commercials. Brands such as Nescafé Gold Blend, Crosse & Blackwell, Budweiser, Harvey's Bristol Cream, Cadbury's Milk Tray, Dulux Paint, Silkience shampoo, Renault, Rover, Vauxhall... they've all received the Towns treatment over the years. Even American companies (General Motors, Dodge Cars, Fendi, Elizabeth Taylor perfume...) were approaching him for music, which came as something of a surprise.

"There's a lot of competition, so I thought it ironic that I got offered American commercials. I wondered why they were ringing me up, because I never go there and America's full of composers. But I suppose I was able to offer them something they couldn't get anywhere else."

Which is?

"There's a trick, really. You have to be able to deal with people and understand the brief perfectly even when the brief isn't very precise, and then you have to come up with the goods immediately," he explains. "I did one recently for a perfume, and the brief was to make it sound South American, huge mountains and all that. So I went that route to start with but they weren't happy, they wanted something more modern. It was a process of elimination; that's the way some of them work out."

Another area which Towns has become involved in is television station idents, and he's worked with Channel 4, BBC, BSB and various European stations in recent years. One of his most challenging commissions was to provide the music for Carlton's range of logo animations, working with the production company who were responsible for the wacky BBC2 idents.

"They wanted to move away from having ridiculous corporate tunes, like they do in America. So we were working on some quite fun ideas, using a lot of sound effects. For instance, on the last lot of Carlton things we did there was this one for a comedy theme and they treated the word like two feet which walk backwards and forwards and bump into the screen — it's quite silly, so we had all this bassoon stuff going on and there was this tune which sort of came out of the original tune for the ident — which I did as a Les Dawson piano thing — and that gave it an identity.

"I write with them in the room usually — they come up with a theme and the main guy has various ideas for noises which I have to interpret. I use an awful lot of samples, mostly from my CD‑ROM collection, special effects and that sort of thing."

I wondered how long it took to get these idents together.

"Well, we got caught out, actually. We thought we were going to be doing 30 idents, which we had planned to do in three bashes — each one takes two or three hours. But they ended up multiplying each one by five or so for all the different versions, so we had to get 160 idents together and where I was expecting it to take just three days, it took a fortnight. You'd think it was dead simple, you'd knock it off in two minutes, but it's actually really complicated."

But those few seconds of music earn him royalties every single time they're played on television... nice work if you can get it!

Big‑Screen Entertainment

The bulk of Towns' time, however, is taken up with more substantial projects. Since his first film in the early '80s he's written music for more than 70 films, television dramas and documentaries, and provided soundtracks for a handful of animations including the prize‑winning The Sandman and the Emmy nominated Beatrix Potter Stories. The last couple of years have seen the release of albums of his music for the Disney film The Puppetmasters, the BBC drama series The Buccaneers and a compilation of music from Central TV's Brother Cadfael Mysteries. His most recent projects include the feature film Space Truckers (starring Dennis Hopper and Charles Dance), an adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse for Anglia TV, BBC's mini‑series The Crow Road, two six‑part drama series, The Locksmith and Ivanhoe, an adaptation of Catherine Cookson's The Wingless Bird for ITV, a feature‑length animation, The Willows In Winter, and a fourth series of Pie In The Sky. With so much material flowing from his pen, it's hard to believe that the music he provides for his TV and film commissions is always instinctively his own. But Towns insists that every bit comes from him, which usually means cutting himself off from other people's music for fear of absorbing outside influences.

"If I'm working on something I'm finding difficult, I won't listen to anything," he says. "Everything I come up with is my own, although occasionally I'll do something in the style of someone else. In Space Truckers, for instance, which is a science fiction sort of thing, featuring cowboy truckers with spaceships moving cargo from one place to another, I came up with this Aaron‑Copland‑on‑speed idea, which sort of worked. Sometimes you have to have something that people can relate to, so I'll lean on other people's approaches to music occasionally."

Due for UK release in April, Space Truckers was unusual in that Colin was having to work to an incredibly tight budget.

"They didn't have the sort of budget they needed to do it properly, so what I had to do was concentrate on the big scenes where I thought the music would be heard — there are a lot of sound effects in the film. We recorded those bits at the Bavarian Music Studio in Munich with the Munich Symphony Orchestra — in Germany you can get it done a lot cheaper. The rest of it I did at the studio in my house, and that's where I mixed it all as well," he explains. "For the non‑orchestral bits I just used a lot of CD‑ROMs because I needed all kinds of noises — lots of mad sounds, things you can't really put names to. The interesting bit was making the orchestral‑sounding bits I did at the house work with the real orchestra, using samples and playing them how an orchestra would play, not how a keyboard player would — playing from a score is very different to playing a load of chords on a piano."

Personal Statement

Every artist needs a platform for their own expression, and the music Colin writes for his Mask Orchestra is his personal statement. The group was formed two years ago, and encouraging reviews of their self‑titled debut album and its follow‑up live dates set the wheels in motion for their second album, Nowhere And Heaven, released last Autumn. But why the two‑year gap?

"When I started the band I was determined to get something interesting and challenging going but it's taken a long time. And we're releasing it ourselves, which involves a lot of investment if you want to get it right."

Colin has strong feelings on the state of the British record industry, and it was the reaction of some of the majors which led to his decision to go it alone and form his own label, Provocateur Records, for this new album. A double CD, Nowhere And Heaven was recorded in one day at London's Angel Studios, and subsequently mixed in Colin's home studio.

"It was all live, although I did actually put some sampled instruments into a couple of tracks, but everything is played because that's how those albums are made. What was crucial in doing the jazz album approach was a lot of time to mix it and getting the sounds absolutely right. The idea was to make it feel very dynamic and to get an interesting sound on Maria's [singer Maria Pia De Vito] voice. We used loads of different reverb settings from the [TC Electronic] M5000, trying to get exactly the right sound. I didn't want it to sound as if it was a cheap day out."

The Mask Orchestra line‑up features a brass‑heavy 17‑piece band comprising some of this country's best‑known jazz musicians — such as trumpet players Guy Barker and Gerard Presencer, and sax players Alan Skidmore, Julian Arguelles and Peter King; the Italian singer Maria Pia De Vito also appears on a number of tracks, and Colin himself, as well as writing all the material (save one cover — Duke Ellington's 'It Don't Mean A Thing'), adds piano backing.

"Because I'm not playing jazz all the time I'm not a great soloist. I can be myself, but I don't push myself in the band because that's not where my strengths lie," Colin explains. "My skill is to put people in a situation where they're responding and coming up with ideas. And that way I think the album is forging an interesting path forward."

Working Methods

Colin Towns: "I'm not one of these people who ploughs everything through the computer and sees what comes out. You've got to know about the instruments, you can't just get a computer to play it all back for you."

In fact, the only computer in Colin Towns' studio is an old Atari which he uses mainly for convenience rather than necessity, although sometimes he'll bypass it altogether.

"I've got two basic routes when writing for film. Firstly I'll write the music out on manuscript paper, and if I'm writing for an orchestra I'll sit at the piano with the score up on the easel. When I've finished, the guy who's doing the copying for me will put it into the computer and check to make sure I haven't made any daft mistakes. He usually plays it back through one of the Emu Proteus sound modules, and then we'll do a print‑out of the parts when we know we've checked everything.

"The other method is for when there's a low budget or if they want to hear electronics. I'll start with sketches and sometimes I'll put a click down while looking at the scene and just write as I go. With this method I might do the whole soundtrack in the studio at my house."

In one corner of the studio is a video setup. A large monitor provides the picture and Colin uses this as a guide when he's writing the music.

"If it's a feature film or other action stuff it has to be absolutely spot on. You've really got to hit it right on the nose," he explains. "I can do it using the video monitor and the timecode which will tell me the speed of certain parts, or the other way I do it is with this book of numbers which I've got: I refer to that and mark into the score where certain things in the film happen. By marking off the first number and taking that as zero I can then work out that at two seconds and five frames, say, Jim stands up and hits his head, for example. I go to the score and mark in everything that happens so that I can see where the music is going to rise and fall. At the same time I have to keep an eye on all the sound effects.

"If I'm working on something like, say, a Beatrix Potter animation, it's not always necessary to work right on the actual movement — you don't have to go from cut to cut, it's more a case of creating an atmosphere. I'll generally work between the start and the end points and if it's electronic then I fill it up with sounds from my CD‑ROM collection. And that'll be the final version."