MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Laurie Johnson died on January 16, 2024, at home in London after a short illness. He was 95.

Laurence Reginald Ward Johnson was born in London in February 1927. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music, where one of his tutors was Ralph Vaughan Williams. He undertook his national service, playing French horn with the Coldstream Guards, in the late 1940s, before moving to the entertainment industry in the 1950s.

He began his career as a composer and arranger in the West End theater, and he won an Ivor Novello Award in 1959 for his work on Lionel Bart’s Lock Up Your Daughters in 1959. He scored his first film, the British musical The Good Companions, in 1957, and went on to enjoy a long career in the British film music industry, writing for projects such as the swashbuckler The Moonraker (1958), the crime drama Tiger Bay (1959), Stanley Kubrick’s classic satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), the HG Wells science-fiction adaptation First Men in the Moon (1964), the cult Hammer horror Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1972), the nature drama The Belstone Fox (1973), and the literary drama Hedda (1975), as well as a series of 1980s TV movies based on the works of his long-time friend, novelist Dame Barbara Cartland.

However, it was on television that Johnson would enjoy the majority of his success, through his contributions to a series of beloved British TV action shows, including The Avengers (1965), Jason King (1971), The New Avengers (1976), and The Professionals (1977). Johnson also wrote extensively for the KPM Music Library – hundreds of hours of music – and many of the pieces he wrote went on to become iconic, including “Gala Performance” which was used as the theme for the long-running show This Is Your Life, and “Sucu Sucu” – used as the theme music for the spy series Top Secret – which became an unexpected hit on the UK Singles Chart in 1961. More recently, his library music was introduced to a whole new set of fans by being used in a number of episodes of animated shows, including SpongeBob SquarePants and Ren & Stimpy.

Johnson essentially retired from composing in the early 1990s. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen’s 2014 Birthday Honours for services to music. He is survived by his wife Doris, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a grandson.