Brian Eno -Top Boy (Score From the Original Series)
To coincide with the final season of the seminal British TV show, Top Boy coming to our screens on September 7th, Netflix are releasing a selection of Brian Eno’s recordings from his soundtrack to the show. ‘Top Boy (Score From the Original Series)’ will be released on vinyl, CD and digital formats. Aside from two tracks included on Eno’s album, “Film Music 1976 – 2020”, this will be the first time any of this material from the entire five seasons has been made available publicly.
A new track is also released to celebrate – ‘Cutting Room 1’, a completely unheard track, especially as it is one of two tracks on the album that Brian selected for inclusion on the soundtrack album, even though they were never used in any episodes of the series. Both were written for Top Boy, hence their ‘Cutting Room’ titles.
“From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer,” says Brian, “making music and atmospheres and then giving it to the film makers to use as they saw fit. I try to absorb the idea of what a piece is about and from that I produce a lot of music, and say, ‘Here it is. Use it as you wish.’
“If you’d been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor, all the time. But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children, not just what’s happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up.” – Brian Eno
“From the moment Brian started delivering his initial selections of music for the very first Top Boy season in 2011 we understood what a rare gift to the show his score would be. Because of the way Brian scores, he offers up music that is informed by his sense of what the show is about rather than being governed by specific scenes. Therefore, the music is able to occupy places, feelings and moods that exist behind the literal images that appear on screen. Based on his understanding of the show and his feel for the people that inhabit the world in which the show is set, Brian has continued to serve up a selection of music across five seasons, always taking the audience far beyond the plot. Like Dushane and Sully, and like the streets of London, Brian’s music has become a core foundation of what Top Boy is.” Charles Steel & Alasdair Flind – Cowboy Films.
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