Britain is no longer a country for and says "Farewell" to George Fenton its master composer of film and TV music

George Fenton who has died at the age of seventy-seven was born in the autumn of 1949 as George Richard Howe in Bromley, Kent and a Second World War baby boomer, four years after the end of the War had ended. He was one of a family of seven, alongside his five brothers and sisters and with the family kept afloat by the wages of his father, Dick, who was a mechanical engineer. 

George, who as a composer, went on to create music for many different worlds as an adult, recalled that : "At school and things I was kind of slightly vacant. In fact in my very little school, when I first went to school they sent me off to the doctors because they thought I was deaf. But I wasn't deaf. I just wasn't listening. I just wanted a sort of another world. I wanted to belong to another world." (link)

His father, 'Dick' was a remarkable man and something of a war hero and four years before George was born, was still a prisoner war in Germany in Colditz Castle where he helped to organise many escapes including eight successful home runs of British officers. Lt. Col. Moran of the Colditz Association described him as : "An outstanding chap, the soul of Colditz. In a crisis he was the most calm individual and he had enormous reserves of will power". All of which has earned him place in Wikipedia. It is highly plausible that George inherited the same traits from his father in his own career in music with his own form of quiet brilliance and immense dedication to his craft. 

Both his parents musical, without being musicians, with Dick on the drums and Gwenda on the piano. In fact, his mother had been a dancer and dance teacher before becoming a nurse during the War. The musical talent in the family probably dated back to George's great grandfather on his father’s side, who was a conductor and apparently, as a child, had been a chorister and had sung at the funeral of the first Duke of Wellington. 

In the family tradition, George sang in church choirs as a boy, but it was the electric guitar, a Rosetti Lucky 7, that first won his heart at the age of 7 in 1956. He later recalled : “I had my first guitar lessons from someone called Brian Rudd. He came into our lives as a chimney sweep, which he clearly wasn’t. My mother went mad at him because he filled the house with soot. As he left he said, “I’m really sorry – but I tuned the boy’s guitar for you.” She suggested that as compensation for the mess he could give me a lesson, which he did and then carried on doing. He also taught my brother the drums and regaled us with eye-popping stories of playing in clubs in Bermondsey, and the fights that followed every Saturday night.”

Having moved with the family to Oxford where, at the age of 14, George became a pupil at the private, fee paying St Edward’s School for Boys, known as 'Teddies', where he served as a prefect an was Head of Field House. He also played in the school choir and the first XV rugby team. 

It was here that George began to study the church organ and the genesis of the musical genius of George Fenton, the composer, began. It was a crucial part of his musical upbringing, not because of the organ itself (although church music was to be a lasting influence on his writing), but because it was at this point that he was fortunate enough to encounter two exceptionally gifted musicians who would have a lasting influence on him. They were both former cathedral organists and worked at the school, namely, David Pettit who was the Director of Music and Peter Whitehouse the assistant director. 

George later said that Peter Whitehouse was the most important person in his musical life, as a teacher and, ultimately, as a colleague who continued to act as a mentor and work with George until his death in 1992. George said : “Peter Whitehouse was a consummate musician. He taught me so much about music in general, and about attitude to music. He demystified the mysterious in an effortless and self-deprecating way.” In these early years, where George was loosely serving his musical apprenticeship, directors frequently noticed his  musical talents and kept casting him in roles that required him to play instruments.

With his 18th year approaching in 1967 George  having turned down the opportunity to go to university saying : “I had no appetite for university or, in fact, music college". Having left school he played in various bands and did a string of odd jobs until, at the age of 19, he auditioned for and was cast in Alan Bennett’s play 'Forty Years On' in Oxford. In order to appear onstage he had to join the actors union, Equity and because the rules prohibited two people having the same name, George ditched his 'Howe' surname and adopted his mother’s maiden name, 'Fenton'. While playing the character 'Tredgold' he also understudied the musical director of the show, Carl Davis. 

George said that after the play "I was offered a place at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, but I turned that down too – mostly out of an aversion to institutions. I don’t know where that came from.” Perhaps another reason was that in 1969 at the age of twenty he had been offered a record deal and as a result under the name of George Howe his version of the Beatles’ song 'Maxwell’s Silver Hammer' became a Top 10 hit in Sweden. (link)

These were clearly George's busy formative years because, while was in 'Forty Years On', he signed a record contract at MCA as a recording artist, and then one with his band at Decca. In addition he worked as a session musician for some pop artists, including B. A. Robertson who when he was putting a live band together to promote his 1976 album, Shadow Of A Thin Man, he recruited a remarkably talented group of backing musicians including George  who was acting as a multi-instrumentalist / sideman.  

He also did some arranging for Carl Davis and others in theatre and television and became increasingly interested in Middle and Far Eastern music. In this he met and started to work with the musician and ethnomusicologist John Leach.

George later said : “John was the person that taught me the ins and outs of the world of commercial music: film music, library music, how to run a session, how to prepare, what musicians expect. He had so much experience: he’d been principal flute with both the Hallé and the Philharmonia orchestras; principal of the Conservatoire Libanais in Beirut; a BBC music librarian; and played the cimbalom for everyone from Kodály and Stravinsky to Maurice Jarre and John Barry.”

In 1974, when he was 25, George was asked by the director Peter Gill to write the music for 'Twelfth Night' for the RSC in Stratford. Since then he wrote extensively for theatre, television, and film. Reflecting his new role, he was one of the original group that founded the Association of Professional Composers in 1976, which later amalgamated with two other organisations to become the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters. 

George's work in theatre composition encompassed work in all of Peter Gill’s productions at Riverside Studios in the twentieth century. In 2020, when he was 71, he wrote the music for the BBC’s 2020 'Talking Heads', both for television and at London’s Bridge Theatre. (link) This was followed swiftly by ‘Beat The Devil’ with Ralph Fiennes, ‘Bach & Sons’ and two yesr later ‘Straight Line Crazy’, also at The Bridge.

In the world of film, as an indirect result of studying with John Leach, and as a direct result of his work at Riverside Studios, George was asked by the director, Richard Attenborough, to co-write the score to the 1982 biopic 'Gandhi' with Ravi Shankar. (link) He went on to score four more of Richard's films. In addition to that his other scores were the result have of long-lasting relationships with the directors, Stephen Frears, Nora Ephron and, in particular, with Ken Loach in a series of nineteen collaborations over 24 years form 1995 to 2019. 

Some of the ninety-nine films scored by George (with links) : 

Note : His brilliant ability to find the musical forms and instrumentation that best suited the project in hand. So for 'Cry Freedom', he mixed African instruments with a western orchestra, and for 'The Madness of King George', directed by Hytner, he incorporated arrangements of baroque pieces by Handel. 

* The History Man (1986)

* Cry Freedom (1987) 

• Dangerous Liaisons (1988) 

• Memphis Belle (1990) 

• The Fisher King (1991) 

• Groundhog Day (1993)  

• Shadowlands (1993) 

* The Madness of King George (1995)

• The Crucible (1996) 

• Ever After : A Cinderella Story (1998)

• You've Got Mail (1999) 

• Anna and the King (1999) 

• Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

• Fool's Gold (2008) 

• Looking for Eric  (2009) 

• Hitch (2005)

• The Lady in the Van  (2015) Alan Bennett commented of George that “his music, and the placing of the music, makes the film”.

• Cold Pursuit (2019) 

• The Duke (2022) 

• The Old Oak (2023)

• The Choral (2025)  : George described his role in the making of the film.

And a compilation of his film compositions from 1982-2015

Back in 1976 George started writing scores for television productions whilst working in theatre, George began to write scores for television with Stephen Poliakoff’s 'Hitting Town' the first of many. in the 1980s came the BAFTA-winning, 'The Jewel in the Crown', 'The Monocled Mutineer' and Alan Bennett’s 'Talking Heads'. He has also wrote many well-known themes for television and recognisable to millions of viewers : 

'BBC’s One O’Clock News' 

'Six O’Clock News'

'Nine O’Clock News' 

'The Money Programme' 

'Newsnight' : His prog rock-esque theme for Newsnight has survived from its 1980 inauguration to the present day. George described its genesis : (link)

Perhaps, most memorably, because the programmes and his scores reached a global audience his work used in 1990 in David Attenborough’s first natural history documentary series, 'The Trials of Life' which was followed it up with his next series, 'Life in the Freezer'. This led to the producer Alastair Fothergill asking George to compose the music for 'The Blue Planet' in 2001, which in turn began a 10-year period of writing for natural history television programmes, including 'Planet Earth', 'Frozen Planet' and 'Life'. In 2022 George partnered up with Alastair and David again, this time for BBC One’s 'Wild Isles' series In this clip George explained the nature of composing music for wildlife tv programmes:(link)   

George reflected on his life as a composer in a short documentary in 2013 (link) In a BBC 'Newsnight' in 2019 George provided an insightful studio session ahead of the programme's 40th anniversary in which he broke down the unique mechanics of writing a television theme tune for a news broadcast whose tone changes every day. (link)

Some of the one hundred and eleven TV programmes scored by George : 

Note :  How he created sweeping symphonic textures for David Attenborough’s nature films.

2006  BBC Planet Earth 

2003  Blue Planet (link) 

1999  Shanghai Vice and George talks about the series 

1998  BBC Talking Heads 2

1986 The Monocled Mutineer 

BBC Bergerac 1986

The Jewel in the Crown 1984  

Saigon-Year of the Cat 1983

BBC The History Man    

BBC Shoestring 

George said : 

"If I was sitting on a desert island and thinking about what a good time I'd had writing music, which I have, I want just one thing to remind me about the best part - which is the fact that you write something and then you're so surprised and thrilled at the way it's played. For a composer, that's the biggest kick you can get."