Music from and inspired by the hit BBC television series

Doctor Who: Musical Interlude #5

As someone who despairs every time he sees The Bends or Revolver topping yet another of those pointless All Time Best Album lists, I’m disappointed to say my choice of favourite Who music is so crushingly populist you can probably get it at Asda. I mean, you only have to look at the title – The Doctor’s Theme – to see I could hardly have been more obvious if I'd chosen what I believe professional musicologists refer to as "the Woo Woo section” of the title music.

But anyway, The Doctor’s Theme it is. Performed by mezzo soprano Melanie Pappenheim, this beautifully ethereal siren song is like a soft sigh disturbing the dust of ages; a slowly unfurling curl of musical smoke caught and then scattered on the unforgiving winds of the time vortex…

Sorry, seem to have strayed into “sonic cathedral” territory for a moment there. It’s just it’s such a relief finally to have something to rhapsodise about after all those years of discordant clatter from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, whose scores tended to sound like a cross between a dial-up modem and Stephen Hawking falling down some concrete steps.

People can bellyache all they want about the music “telling us what to feel”, but you might as well complain about a scene being edited to make it look exciting – it’s the composer’s job to punch our emotional buttons just as much as the scriptwriter’s.

As our hero’s personal musical leitmotif, The Doctor’s Theme has inevitably been employed to underscore some of the series’ most emotionally resonant moments – particularly to emphasise the Doctor’s “lonely angel” status as a solitary traveller weighed down by the burden of those he’s left behind. Of these, my favourite is probably the sequence in The Satan Pit in which the Doctor contemplates what might be his parting words to Rose. It’s a fine scene whichever way you slice it, but it’s the music that really helps lift it from a standard ‘Doctor in peril’ scenario to a moment of transcendental beauty that wouldn’t disgrace the final moments before a regeneration. (And people can bellyache all they want about the music “telling us what to feel”, but you might as well complain about a scene being edited to make it look exciting – it’s the composer’s job to punch our emotional buttons just as much as the scriptwriter’s. So let’s have no more of that silly talk.)

Several weeks later, this haunting refrain was treated to the Who equivalent of the 12” remix to become the pulsing, throbbing heartbeat of raw emotion that soundtracked the Doctor and Rose’s story reaching it’s shattering conclusion. At which point, I’ll admit, I may have started to lose perspective.

Cos here’s the thing: A few years ago, a friend and I had knocked out a demo of some songs we’d been working on - unremarkable bedsit angst stuff, for the most part, plus a token political protest number that was so timidly afraid of sloganeering it was actually impossible to tell what it was supposed to be protesting about (and, as far as I’m aware, has thus far failed to lead to the downfall of any governments.)

Anyhow, the point is I’d written most of these songs as a poor, pathetic wretch reeling from a particularly bruising failed relationship. But by the time we got round to talking about doing some more songs, I was happily – some may even say smugly - married and looking forward to growing fat and old with my beautiful wife. Which is great for the soul, but not particularly conducive to heartfelt emotional outpourings.

In fact, preposterous as it sounds, the closest my lip had come to wobbling recently was while watching those final, throbbing moments of Doomsday, which had been simultaneously so heartbreaking and triumphant (I believe the Spanish word, which has no English equivalent, is duende - “exquisite sadness”) I couldn’t get it out of my head for days. And then there was that phrase the Doctor had used: “I’m burning up a sun, just to say goodbye” – a typically OTT piece of Russell T Davies nonsense, but a punch to the guts nonetheless – which sounded not unlike the title of a lost Muse album.

And so it was that, in the struggle for inspiration, I took the Doctor and Miss Tyler for my own muse and wrote a song about them. That’s right, a song – a bloody ballad - about Doctor Who.

This, I realised even at the time, was not cool. In fact, it couldn’t have been less cool if I’d been cooking chips on the sun in a 100% polyester gorilla suit. What’s more, I couldn’t help thinking of that old Smith and Jones sketch about the composer who keeps writing inappropriate music hall songs for Hollywood epics (“Where’s your Apocalypse Now, boys, where’s your Apocalypse Now?” etc) – not to mention the wailing ghosts of previous Who-inspired musical travesties from the likes of Frazer Hines, Roberta Tovey, Blood Donor and, lest we forget, Jon Pertwee.

So it was probably a lucky escape for everyone that that second demo never got made. But if a mawkish musical tribute to Doctor Who with just five chords and a defiantly unadventurous AAAA rhyming structure is what you feel your life has thus far been lacking, do feel free to play along - or at least wave your lighter - at home…

I’m burning up a sun, just to say goodbye

C                      Am     C          D         
I’ve been living out among the stars

C                   Am                   Em         
Seen death on Venus, life on Mars

C                   Am        C           D         
Fought with monsters, fought in bars

C      Am                G
I got bruises, battlescars
                           
Thought that I was so alone
’Til you showed me a place called home
Spirits healed and hearts re-grown
Now I’m back here on my own

D                                   C   
Took you out beyond the sky

      Am                          G
To distant stars and satellites

D                                                   C 
And though I can’t stand to see you cry

                         Am                          G
I’m burning up a sun, just to say goodbye

I touched the face of God and Jesus
Found that they were worked by levers
Pulled by liars and deceivers
Broke the hearts of true believers

But I have faith in all your people
Planet like a blue cathedral
When I thought I was destroyed by evil
You wrote my story such a sequel

Took you out beyond the sky
We watched the Earth break up and die
And though I can’t stand to see you cry
I’m burning up a sun, just to say goodbye