Barry Gray – Stand By For Adverts – Trumk – JBH039CD - ****

Barry Gray's best known for his bombastic Thunderbirds score, but Trunk records offers the incidental music aficionados that deify him the Holy Grail with this previously unissued trove of eighty-one of Gray's advertising jingles. The inclusion of five different attempts to summon the spirit of Hoover's Keymatic washing machine with oscillating electronica suddenly reveals him as one of those weird nylon era visionaries. Like Raymond Scott or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop boffins, it might seem Gray was pursuing a quietly experimental agenda under the sheltering umbrella of commercial commissions.

(5/6/11)