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PRODUCTION MUSIC
RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE
This track was inspired by the Charles Mingus tune Moaning - not that it sounds anything like it - but I wanted to create something in the studio that sounded big bandish but not too sophisticated, almost as if the musicians had only just finished rehearsing it and there are still a few rough edges (which I believe was Mingus’ intention as he took the musicians’ music away before the session). The drum track combines real drums - Roy Dodds of Fairground Attraction fame who has a miniature kit with skin heads - and a jazz brushes loop from another session. Apart from the drum loop, it’s all live, although there is one note of Ashley Slater’s trombone solo which I elongated and reversed part of to make a very weird growl into the beginning of the solo. I also concentrated on making my own baritone solo as rough and unsophisticated as I felt I could get away with. (Yes, the saxophone is a bit out of tune in places - I liked it like that)
There is a strange story around this track. Just after I moved to Southampton I advertised a compressor for sale (as you do). I got a call from a composer called Guy Meredith and when he turned up to collect, I had the video of Monkey Business on my computer screen as I was editing a video showreel. He was a bit gobsmacked, as it turned out that he was a composer and had been commissioned by Meridian to write all the underscore, and had been asked to write it in the same style as the theme tune. The ironic thing is that I now lived about two miles away from Meridian TV, they could have asked me if they had known. We had quite a laugh about that and we are now good friends.
This track was also used on a Playstation Croc2 commercial: