In the 1960s and 1970s, Barbara Moore worked as a composer, arranger and singer for film, television and advertising – and much else besides. Her 1981 album Bright And Shining feels like a vast appendix to the golden age of British library music, which by then was already drawing to a close. Smooth jazz, Beach Boys harmonies, understated soulful grooves and ba-ba-ba vocals create a surface beauty into which the English musician slyly inserts the occasional eccentricity. Memories of Esquivel, Horst Jankowski, Ennio Morricone and the Deutsches Fernsehballett drift by on a gentle balearic breeze.
By the time Bright And Shining was released, this music – with its perfectly reconstructed sunny sixties vibe – was already hopelessly out of date. If pop looked to the past at that moment, it did so only to sweep the last traces of seventies mustiness from its synapses. But as we know, the signs under which music is received shift over the decades. Today, musicians in house, hip-hop and yacht pop value Barbara Moore both as a source of samples and as an inspiration.
