1971’s Walkabout is an unusual film, though not necessarily unlikely. Australia has a track record of not seeing itself until a foreigner does. In this sense Walkabout is not unlike Wake in Fright, a quintessential Australian tale told by a foreigner. In this case it’s UK auteur Nicholas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth) who actually manages in the main to eschew his affinity from abrupt Freudian jump cuts and approach proceedings with one of his most narratively structured assemblages – aside from a few moments of abrupt audiovisual genius. He’s also brought with him a compatriot, UK composer John Barry (James Bond), who offers a truly unique perspective of the outback – though perhaps that’s not necessarily accurate.
Whilst Barry is of course renowned for deep twanging guitar embedded with big band orchestral strings, his arrangements on Walkabout rarely approach the bombastic heights of Bond, rather his music builds and retreats, more spare, often paring a couple of instruments before building and swelling.
For Barry this is fish out of water music, a couple of English children wandering in the Australian bush, which enables him to indulge in gorgeous melodic flourishes, representing the old world, the English, lost and out of place in the harsh unforgiving new world of outback Australia.
The strings are at the forefront, they’re wrought and melancholic, incredibly expressive, heartbreakingly beautiful, expressing the inner turmoil and vulnerability in the characters that they themselves are unable to express due to language and cultural divides. To some extent this gives Barry free license to infuse his often solo string arrangements with remarkable pathos. If you’re looking for emotion in music, it’s right here. In fact these are some of his best string arrangements.
There are also some truly unexpected, totally disparate pop tracks too, such as the 60’s California MOR folk rock of ‘Los Angeles’ by Warren Marley, which inexplicably appears on the transistor as they wander through the bush and works well to create montages of the trio’s frivolity. Then there’s what Roundtable are also releasing as a single, the experimental 60’s psychedelia of New York singer songwriter Billy Mitchell’s ‘Electronic Dance’, which with Sitar and tape experiments again features on the transistor – an audio representation of colonisation.
The orchestration and the arrangements here are endlessly fascinating, quite experimental at times, with arrangements often descending into duos, then building into orchestral crescendos, yet it’s always in service to the film. In Barry’s hands a feeling of stasis can be created via about 10 instruments, all carefully arranged and following each other, and it’s these moments that reinforce his unique ability to create complexity out of seemingly simple arrangements and vice versa. This is his art, and its why his discography features so many iconic scores from over four decades, from Born Free to Dances with Wolves, from Midnight Cowboy to Body Heat. His score to Walkabout has remained forgotten for too long.
This score is sourced from the original stereo master tapes and includes the aforementioned pop songs for the first time.
