“Gone” (1971) – Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw * Written and produced by Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw * LP: Alternatives * Label: Music De Wolfe
If you can afford a slot on your classic album list for library music, consider Alternatives by the British composers Alan Parker (guitarist) and Alan Hawkshaw (keyboardist). They loaded up the master shelves at KPM with recordings done together, individually, and with others, and did much in the way of shaping that genre’s curiously evocative sound. Alternatives was one of the few projects Parker and Hawkshaw did for De Wolfe instead of for KPM, but it seemed to overachieve in media placements during the seventies. “Jolly Thomas” is possibly the record’s most recognizable one, classified for prospective sync-ers as “bouncy” and “childlike,” but “Woodworm” (“heavy, comic…”) also made the rounds.
The track called “Gone” appeared as a “desolate, lonely” needle-drop in a well-circulated educational short produced by Brigham Young University called Cipher in the Snow (1974). Its flute and guitar blew chilly winds as Cliff, a neglected grade schooler, used his lunch money to craft a melancholy snowman’s face. For its closer, the film made use of the album’s “The Difference” (“dark, moody, mellow”), wherein the flute, raven-like, reappears. The film’s uninformative music credits have likely frustrated viewers who couldn’t shake the distinctive music from their minds.
Where did Cipher in the Snow‘s joyous frog sequence music, though, reminiscent of Sagittarius’s “Song to the Magic Frog” (1968), come from?