How I Found a Lost Treasure - “Soldier Blue” Production
Roy Budd wrote his first film score in 1970. For 54 years, his “Soldier Blue” composition was unreleased, audible only in the film itself.
I rectified that situation.
Roy’s “Soldier Blue” music is now available on CD via my label Caldera Records.
How come it took so long? The tapes were presumed lost for half a century. Roy’s widow Sylvia had mentioned to me she had put a large part of her archive into storage. The material was now with a friend in North Yorkshire.
Sylvia and I were close. I worked as her assistant for five years and became her confidante. Following her death I try to establish some order. Papers, tapes, other paraphernalia must be sorted.
Thus I decide to travel to North Yorkshire and establish contact with Paul, the guardian of the mysterious storage container.
I arrive in Guiseborough. The town has two hotels – a lavish wellness retreat and a modest pub hotel, which is where I decide to stay for four nights. As soon as I enter my room, I receive a text message from Paul. He is waiting for me in his car outside. He had been a close friend of both Roy’s and Sylvia’s.
Paul is a gaunt, cheerful man in his seventies, warm and energetic, curious and restless. There is a good reason for his restlessness: his daughter is supposed to be in labour. During our earlier conversation via phone, he had asked me to come in the middle of June as opposed to be the beginning of the month since he was expecting to welcome his third grandson on the 9th. I am surprised then that he keeps glancing at his phone every five minutes. It is the middle of June.
“How is your daughter,” I ask as I get in his car.
“Well, we are all waiting,” he chuckles. “She can go into labour any minute now.” Still, he has taken the time to take me to the storage container he has watched for ten years.
Around 2010, Sylvia cleaned out her storage space in London and asked him to take the various boxes that had collected dust and were too bulky to be put in her small basement flat. Paul obliged. And so, several boxes of Sylvia’s possessions ended up in a storage container in Guisborough.
My excitement builds as we drive up the asphalt road, as Paul unlocks the gate, as we leave the car, as we open the blue, airless container.
As we carry out two dozen boxes, Paul starts to wheeze and I’m afraid he will suffer a heart attack.
“Nothing is lost,” Sylvia proudly exclaimed when in 2014 I had asked whether Roy’s recordings had survived on tape.
They had. Here they were. Everything, apparently in pristine condition.
Paul checks his phone regularly still. No news.
Over the course of the next hour, as we go through the tapes, we determine which ones to have transferred first, which ones are most urgent and in delicate condition.
Paul drives me back to my hotel as we agree to meet for dinner and beer while I’m in Guisborough. A day later, a healthy grandson is born.
And so the story concludes of how the “Soldier Blue” tapes were found. We had them transferred and mastered. They are now available for everybody to hear. The score is an astonishing achievement, especially considering it was composed by a then 22-year old.
You can listen to sound clips and read more information here: