August 13

Music by Neil Brand

Neil Brand has been accompanying silent films for over 25 years, regularly at the NFT on London's south bank, throughout the UK and film festivals and special events throughout the world, including the Bologna, Bergamo and Pordenone festivals where he has inaugurated the School of Music and Image.

Training originally as an actor, he has made his name as a writer/performer/composer, scoring BFI video releases of such films as South (Shackleton's Journey to the South Pole), The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock, the premiere of the great lost film The Life and Times of David Lloyd George and Early Cinema, avant-garde cinema and Russian pre-Soviet cinema. He has recently scored new DVD releases for the Danish Film Institute and Lobster Films, Paris as well as a highly acclaimed jazz score for the 1927 Anna Mae Wong movie Piccadilly (BFI video) which premiered live in September 2003 at the Lincoln Centre, New York and the Barbican concert hall in March 2004. His most recent scores are for The Cat and the Canary (1927) and the Laurel and Hardy short ‘You’re Darn Tootin’, commissioned by Paul Merton with sound effects provided by the audience.

He has appeared live with Paul Merton in Bristol Silents ‘Slapstick’ weekend, in Edinburgh, Brighton, on Room 101 and at the Comedy Store in London and toured UK and US universities with his own show, ‘Where Does the Music Come From?’ Last year he appeared in Ken Loach’s ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ and this year he will be touring for the first time to Finland’s ‘Midnight Sun’ Festival, Padua Opera House, Kilkenny comedy festival and nationally in the UK with ‘Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns’. Also this year he will take his one-man show ‘Neil Brand – the Silent Pianist Speaks’ to the Edinburgh fringe.

He has written the title music and many scores for TV documentaries including Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, Silent Britain, Great Britons, The Real Stephen Hawking, The Crimean War, In The Wild : Pandas with Debra Winger, Great Railway Journeys and Comic Relief: Balls to Africa and scores for over 60 Radio 4 dramas including War and Peace, the Box of Delights, Brideshead Revisited, The Midnight Folk, three of the BBC audio Shakespeare Collection plays and Sony award winner A Town Like Alice.

His book, Dramatic Notes (published by Arts Council Publications/University of Luton Press) is an introduction to the world of scoring music to drama with a series of interviews with distinguished practitioners. He also co-devised the Backtracks CD-ROM for Channel 4/BFI.

He writes music for theatre, has written two award-winning musicals and eight radio plays including the Sony-nominated ‘Stan’ (which he subsequently adapted to great acclaim for BBC4 TV) and the Tinniswood prize-nominated ‘Getting the Joke’. Neil has twice presented the Radio 2 arts programme, is a visiting professor of the Royal College of Music, plays the role of Ted the garage owner in the BBC2’s soap opera for the deaf ‘Switch’, and is considered one of the finest exponents of improvised silent film accompaniment in the world.

more info at www.neilbrand.com

Music by Neil Brand

Safety Last (USA, 1923)
produced by Hal Roach for Hal Roach Studios; directors: Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor; writers: Hal Roach, Sam Taylor, Tim Whelan; photography: Walter Lundin; artistic direction: Fred Guiol; with: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott B. Clarke; release date : 1 April 1923.

Country boy (Lloyd) heads to the big city to seek success. While working as a clerk in a department store, he talks the manager into offering $1000 to anyone who can bring more customers to the store. He then arranges for a friend, a "human fly," (Strothers) to climb the face of the store building as a publicity stunt. Unfortunatly the "human fly" is a wanted man, and when "The Law" (Young) shows, our hero must make the climb, himself. At each ledge he encounters new difficulties, climaxing in the famous 'clock scene.' Written by Herman Seifer

35mm copy from “The Harold Lloyd Trust” Los Angeles, U.S.A.
acknowledgements to Suzanne Lloyd and Bonnie Marshall