RONAN HARDIMAN: “Waterways” (Hummingbird)

WHEN you’re the writer of theme music for an award-winning TV series on our rejuvenated inland waterways, a series of series, in fact, that were not so much transmitted as floated across our screens over the last three years, you can be full sure that you’ve hit the bullseye.

The music and image were woven together so seamlessly that at times it looked and sounded like Hardiman had toddled along in the hold and allowed each incidental piece onto his synthesiser (by some curious process of osmosis) on the run, so to speak.

And so ‘Hare Island’ reconjures images of Dick Warner skippering towards land with one eye on the rudder and the other firmly planted in the nether world that he allowed us a peep into every now and again.

So too with ‘Spiritual Land’, ‘Schollevar Theme’ and ‘Frog Ballet’; each carries a vivid scent of its visual counterpart as clearly as any polaroid would, and sometimes even more so (as with ‘Frog Ballet’ where every jerky movement is echoed and amplified by Hardiman’s spot-on auditory twin sets).

So far so good – if and only if you’ve seen the TV masterpieces it draped so handsomely. On the other hand if you’ve been remiss enough to miss those classics, the likelihood is that you’ll find yourself at a loss to put a shape or substance on Waterways.

It’s akin to hearing the soundtrack of Betty Blue without sitting through the visuals; Dick Warner’s sleevenotes liken the idea of Waterways (the telly version) without Waterways (the music) to watching Deliverance without ‘Duelling Banjos’. An apt comparison – the images, audio and visual exist symbiotically and draw nourishment from one another. The focus is adjusted and the images are complete. It’s a partnership that works impeccably but sundered, its components somehow seem a tad bewildered, even a tad bare.

• Siobhán Long