At home with Ray Harmon..

ike many of his generation, Ray Harmon’s record collection has shifted in priority over years, moving from pride of place to fighting for space in his Bray home with the vestiges of family life. “It’s scattered all over the place”, he explains. “Some of it’s in the attic, some of it’s vinyl I’ve had from years back. You’ll find stuff from Abba to Derek & The Dominos, The Posies, Elvis Costello…”

So does he have a lot of vinyl?
“No I don’t. I have a smallish collection of vinyl that would be sort of be from the mid to late 80s, from when I was listening to the likes of Costello, Echo & The Bunnymen, R.E.M. Prior to that I would have had all the Led Zepplin albums and so on. There’s some peculiar stuff. Will Sergeant from the Bunnymen did a couple of bizarre instrumental albums, and Steve Nieve’s ‘Keyboard Jungle’… I’d have those on vinyl. I think I still have my mother’s copy of Abba’s Greatest Hits.”
The one with them sat on the park bench, staring in opposite directions?
“Yeah, it’s just unbelievable. My mother tried to take it off me at one point because I played it so much. I think I still have Kris Kristoffersen’s Silver Tongued Devil And I which was my dad’s favourite record. But I was a huge Abba fan at the time”.
Having come to prominence as guitarist with Something Happens, Ray, like his fellow band members, has moved into different fields. As well as working as an A&R man for BMG Records, he has made his name as a composer of film and TV scores – most recently the movie Timbuktu and the new RTE series The Big Bow Wow. These dual roles play a large part in influencing his current listening.
“A lot of the stuff I buy now would be to be reference stuff for work,” he admits, “ so I get a lot of classical and soundtrack albums. Because I work as a scout I get a lot of stuff from local bands. Most of my shelves are stuffed with bands that I’m listening too, or supposed to be listening to. I hang on to the ones I like, or bands that I want to keep in touch with”.
Pulling the soundtracks to 28 Days Later and Minority Report off the shelves, I ask Ray what he thinks makes a good soundtrack.
“I suppose the essential thing that a soundtrack or score for a film does is to emphasise any emotional or dramatic moments that are going on,” he says, “so if it does that well, it doesn’t necessarily have to have any great hooks or tunes. The ones that really stand out are the ones that can do both, that have great songs but still don’t draw you out of what you’re watching”.
How did he approach the process of scoring The Big Bow Wow?
“That was based very much around a bunch of 20-somethings living in Dublin, and the music was to be of that style – guitars, guys in garages. More than half of the music is unsigned bands so I had to keep it in that style. In one way it was easy because I was using instruments that were familiar to me from knocking around in bands, but in another way it was harder to use them in a dramatic sense. It was a challenge but it was great fun”.
Finally, I wonder if he has a complete Something Happens collection lurking anywhere?
“No I don’t actually,” he laughs. “I don’t have any Something Happens records at all. I give a lot of stuff away. People come in and they see stuff and I tend to let them have it. I’m not that peculiar about keeping CDs. There was one point in the mid-90s when I was very broke when I sold tons of CDs. I don’t tend to get attached to music. I’d be slower to sell books. When I was broke I used to spend a lot of time in Freebird offloading stuff. Some of it I replaced, stuff that you can’t do without. I made a point of getting some of it back”.

[photos: Roger Woolman]

The Big Bow Wow goes out on Tuesday nights on RTE 1. Timbuktu is showing at the Dublin Film Festival