Go-to guy when rock stars wanted stringed magic on their records
Paul Buckmaster, musician: b London, June 13, 1946; m Diana Lewis; 1s; d November 7, 2017, aged 71.
When Paul Buckmaster was asked to orchestrate David Bowie’s Space Oddity, he went to the library and borrowed two symphonic scores by Beethoven and Haydn. As a 23-year-old virtuoso cellist who had recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, it was his first foray into pop arranging and his immediate reaction was to turn to the classical masters for guidance.
‘‘I quickly realised it wasn’t going to be all that easy,’’ he said. ‘‘I could write notation and had studied harmony, but I didn’t know anything about arranging.’’
The method he worked out proved to be a spectacular success. His atmospheric orchestration helped to launch Space Oddity into the Top Ten and set Bowie on the road to superstardom.
Elton John described Buckmaster’s approach as ‘‘revolutionary’’ and Rolling Stone wrote that his influence on rock orchestration was as great as that of Elvis Presley on singing and of Jimi Hendrix on the electric guitar.
The key to Buckmaster’s success was that his strings eschewed saccharine sentimentality. They were romantic, as on Elton John’s Your Song, or epic as on Nilsson’s Without You. The orchestration could be dark and brooding, as on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers; or subtle and understated, as on Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Love and Hate. On Carly’s Simon’s You’re So Vain, his arrangement was exuberant and playful and when he worked with Miles Davis his style was avant-garde and experimental.
As the rock world’s first-choice string arranger Buckmaster’s style was soon being widely imitated. ‘‘He’s influenced so many string writers,’’ said Elton John, who employed his skills on nine of his albums. ‘‘Everybody pinches off Paul Buckmaster. Nobody really used strings until he came along and showed them how to do it without being sugary.’’
After leaving London for Los Angeles in the late 1980s, Buckmaster never returned and he became a US citizen in 2003.
In his professional life he was both meticulous and determined; in private he was gentle. He had a passion for science and space travel, and was often photographed wearing a Nasa T-shirt. He suffered from insomnia and loved cats.
Buckmaster’s American successes included working with Guns N’ Roses, scoring Train’s huge hit single Drops of Jupiter, for which he won a Grammy for best arrangement, and the uplifting orchestration on Taylor Swift’s Back To December.
Yet he could become frustrated by working with American producers, who invariably referred to the process of adding a string section to a song as ‘‘sweetening’’. The description infuriated Buckmaster, who felt it was a dumbingdown of his skill, and he sought to offer a loftier expectation of what he was seeking to achieve.
‘‘It’s being able to enhance the emotive quality and bring out the intent of the lyric and the artist’s performance. Adding orchestral passages and textures should give depth and dimensionality.’’ He knew he had succeeded ‘‘when the goose-bump thrill factor kicks in’’.
Paul John Buckmaster was born in 1946 in London. His mother, Ermenegilda Maltese, was an Italian concert pianist, taught him piano and he began playing the cello at the age of four. Within a year he had won first prize at a Youth Music Festival in Bromley, southeast London.
At the age of 12 he secured a scholarship to the Naples Conservatory of Music, his mother’s alma mater. For the next four years he spent half of his time in Naples studying under Willy La Volpe and the other half at the Henry Compton school in Fulham, London, where he studied for his O levels.
Displaying his youthful virtuosity by playing Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suites in bravura style, Buckmaster won a scholarship to the Royal Academy at the age of 17.
When he graduated in 1967, Buckmaster’s ambitions lay entirely in the classical realm. Having failed an audition for a French baroque ensemble, he was in need of a job and joined an ad hoc orchestra backing the singer Paul Jones, who was on a pop package tour with the Hollies.
Another tour as part of the Bee Gees’ backing orchestra led to a meeting with the pop producer Gus Dudgeon. It was in Dudgeon’s office that Buckmaster met David Bowie, who was still relatively unknown in 1969. ‘‘I hung out with David a lot,’’ Buckmaster said. ‘‘We shared a great enthusiasm for the classic sciencefiction authors, which we spent hours talking about. The recording session for Space Oddity went smoothly and the rest is history.’’
His long association with Elton John also began in 1969. They met at a Miles Davis gig at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho, London. The next day, John sent him a demo tape of three songs, including Your Song, and gave him carte blanche to rearrange them.
‘‘Elton told us, ‘You do what you like; I trust you completely.’ That was fantastic, because it gave me as arranger the freedom to be creative and to make our visions and ideas come true.’’ John in turn credited him with helping to ‘‘make me the artist that I am’’.
At the Miles Davis gig, Buckmaster was also introduced backstage to the great jazz trumpeter, which led to an invitation to work with him.
He spent two months as Davis’s house guest while they recorded the album On the Corner. ‘‘Buckmaster, you’re a son-ofa-gun,’’ Davis told him.
He was also able to cite a number of successful film credits, including several incidental pieces for the soundtrack of the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. ‘‘You have no right in the music industry to call yourself a film composer,’’ he joked, ‘‘until you’ve been fired.’’