Paul Buckmaster
Orchestral arranger of choice for pop stars seeking to add string-laden emotional heft to their songs
PAUL BUCKMASTER, who has died aged 71, was a Grammy award-winning orchestral arranger who provided atmospheric backing for, among others, Elton John, David Bowie, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen, the Bee Gees, Guns N’ Roses and the Rolling Stones; he was also responsible for the lush horn and string arrangements of Harry Nilsson’s cover of Pete Ham and Tom Evans’s Without You (1971) which became a massive hit worldwide, was covered by some 180 artists, and with its surging emotional charge, established itself as the ultimate “break-up” song.
A classically trained cellist who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music, Buckmaster began his career in pop in 1968 when he was asked to join an orchestral backing group to accompany the Bee Gees on a tour. He went on to work with the former Manfred Mann frontman Paul Jones and in 1969 was introduced to his future manager, Tony Hall, who asked whether he would be interested at “having a go” at the orchestral arrangements for Space Oddity, a new single about a space mission gone wrong, due to be released by a struggling would-be rock star named David Bowie.
Buckmaster had had no training in orchestration, recalling that when he got home, “the enormity of what I had taken on hit me, as I quickly realised that it wasn’t going to be all that easy. So I rushed out to the local public library and borrowed two symphony scores, Beethoven and Haydn, took them home, looked at them and asked myself just how the hell am I going to manage this.”
But he soon learnt and it was possibly his inexperience that freed him to try out new and unusual effects. On Space Oddity, as he recalled in a 2010 interview in the Guardian, “We did the basic track first, with David on jumbo guitar, together with the rest of the rhythm section and Rick Wakeman’s Mellotron, then David’s vocal and Stylophone, and finally, strings and flutes.”
Buckmaster’s arrangement gave the song the ominous, futuristic quality that Bowie wanted. Space Oddity was originally due to be released a few days before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, but Bowie’s record company, probably wisely, refused to release it in the US until the Apollo astronauts had returned safely to Earth, when it became a smash hit.
The following year, the producer Gus Dudgeon brought Buckmaster in to work on the second album of Elton John, then better known as a session musician than an artist in his own right. The eponymous album featuring the perennial favourite Your Song, featured a full orchestra and choir and marked the singer’s emergence as an international star. Buckmaster went on to collaborate with John on six albums, recalling that “on the first three [Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection, and Madman
Across the Water] Elton gave Gus Dudgeon and me total freedom; the only part which was never arranged was Elton’s piano … Gus and I sat in his office and went through each song, and worked out the type of orchestration which would suit each track.
We effectively designed each song as an individual piece, giving it its own character.”
A useful trick, he observed, was to “hold back as much as possible, to give the listener the chance to let the song grow and unfold, introducing new sonic elements … If you use everything from the beginning, you have nowhere to go.” Thus in Your Song, Buckmaster only introduced the rhythm section in the third verse, helping to “lift the piece into a more propulsive mood”.
Some critics found Buckmaster’s orchestrations for John overblown, yet he became the orchestral arranger of choice for dozens of stars who needed help in providing string-laden emotional depth to their songs. “I feel I’ve succeeded,” he explained, “when the goose-bump thrill factor kicks in.”
Paul John Buckmaster was born in London on June 13 1946, into an artistic family. His mother was an Italian-born concert pianist. He began studying cello at the age of four at the London Violoncello School, remaining there until he was 10, when he gained an Italian state scholarship to the Naples Conservatory. From 1958 to 1962 he attended the conservatory for eight months of every year, spending the other four at a London secondary school.
He won a cello scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, from which he graduated in 1967, having acquired a passion for the Baroque repertoire. He had just failed an audition to become a member of a French chamber orchestra when he was contacted by Vivian Joseph, his cello professor at the RAM, who asked him if he would like to earn a bit of pocket money playing the cello in a small backing orchestra touring with some pop and rock bands.
After his first collaboration with Elton John, it seemed that Buckmaster was everywhere. He teamed with the Leonard Cohen on his album Songs of Love and Hate and did orchestral arrangements for, among others, Harry Nilsson (Without You and Spaceman), Carly Simon (You’re So Vain and Haven’t Got Time for the Pain), The Rolling Stones (Moonlight Mile and Sway) The Grateful Dead (Terrapin Station), and worked with Miles Davis during the recording of On the Corner.
Buckmaster also wrote some instrumental tracks for the 1974 Harry Nilsson film Son of Dracula, and composed the original score for Terry Gilliam’s cult sci-fi film 12 Monkeys (1995). In 2002 he won a Grammy for his orchestral arrangement on Drops of Jupiter by the rock group Train.
Latterly he moved to America, becoming a US citizen in 2003. His marriage in 1970 to Diana Lewis ended in divorce and he is survived by a son from another relationship.
Paul Buckmaster, born June 13 1946, died November 7 2017