howard’s way

Queen weren’t the only composers scoring for Flash…

Talk about the music of Flash Gordon and thoughts naturally turn to Queen, but rock isn’t the only genre blasting out of sound systems on Mongo. The movie also features sections of classical score by Howard Blake, the British composer who would secure national treasure status two years later by writing “Walking In The Air” for The Snowman.

Blake was something of a last-minute addition, however – drafted after the previous composer only managed to provide a minute of material.

“Dino De Laurentiis said, ‘Could you write a new score by next

Monday?’ and I said nobody could, it’ll take me probably two to three weeks if you want a really big orchestral score. By the time I was in a position to start scoring the film it was 10 days before the newly arranged day for an orchestra to come in. I just wrote like crazy and by some miracle finished it.”

However, working at such a pace, on very little sleep, took its toll once the scoring and recording sessions were over. “I’d gone to bed on a Wednesday evening,” Blake recalls. “My wife had left the house with the children to leave me to my own devices [while I was writing]. I told her, ‘It’s a good job you’ve come back because I’m flying to Paris today, aren’t I,’ thinking it was Thursday. She said,

‘It’s Saturday! You must have slept since Wednesday evening.’ That’s a very dangerous thing to do. She couldn’t wake me up – she’d tried to throw water over my head and it had no effect at all. She called the doctor who came around and injected me with Benzedrine to wake me up!”

While Blake wanted some scenes (such as Flash and Dale’s opening-act crash landing) to sound like “a ’30s score on a big scale”, he was also asked to incorporate elements of Queen’s tracks. “There’s a great mixture, a fusion of big rock sounds and big orchestral sounds in the film, which is pretty unusual actually,” he says. “I know that some commentators would see it as maybe the first and greatest collaboration of classical and rock, which I would be pleased to hear. I wrote a classical score based on some of the bits Queen wrote – in the football fight [in Ming’s palace], it’s a classical orchestra, but I’m using rock rhythms. You’ve got a very fine stew of stuff happening in that score.”