Murray Gold’s amazing music for Doctor Who goes from strength to strength. His musical career spans cinema, TV, stage and radio, and his extensive list of achievements includes Queer as Folk, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Casanova, Alien Autopsy, The Devil’s Whore, Shameless and Torchwood. Six years of composing riveting music for Doctor Who have led to Gold’s work being performed at a special Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, a celebration of the music at the Millennium Centre Cardiff and a place in the Classic FM Hall of Fame. This is the seventh release of Gold’s thrilling Doctor Who music, a 66-track double album featuring lush performances from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Ben Foster...

This double album offers a more balanced selection of music than last year’s soundtrack to Series 5, in that it contains at least three tracks from each episode. Most instalments get four or five tracks to their name, though there is a slight bias towards Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song, which get eight and seven tracks respectively devoted to them.

That is fair enough, since The Wedding of River Song features the strident “5:02 PM”, while Let’s Kill Hitler yields such greats as “Growing Up Fast” and “When a River Forms”. “Growing Up Fast” is the jolly piece that accompanies the flashback to the childhoods of Amy, Melody and Rory. It is appropriately juvenile in its dinging echoes of the theme to Trumpton (and also The Archers!). “When a River Forms” is eccentric in a quite different way, a typically chaotic accompaniment to post-regenerative euphoria, in this case that of River Song. “I Am the Doctor in Utah”, which opens the album and heralds the reunion of the Doctor, Amy and Rory and their arrival in America during The Impossible Astronaut, is similarly attention-grabbing with its use of the electric guitar.

However, unlike Series 5, the soundtrack to which is dominated by music from The Eleventh Hour, The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang, Series 6 is less reliant on “arc” stories, allowing individual, episodic adventures to shine through, particularly during the second half of the season. This album follows suit, and many of its more memorable tunes come from “monster of the week” stories, especially The God Complex. The false jollity of “The Hotel Prison”, “Room of Your Dreams” and “Rita Praises” gives the impression of something dangerously unhinged, and brings to mind a sinister funhouse. Even the underrated The Curse of the Black Spot benefits from the memorably haunting vocals of “Deadly Siren”, which accompanies each visitation by the apparition.

Familiar recurring themes are less evident here than in previous compilations, though “I Am the Doctor” pops up fleetingly from time to time, in tracks such as “Locked On” (from the episode The Doctor’s Wife) and “Definitely Going” (Closing Time), and - most obviously - in “I Am the Doctor in Utah”. As you might expect, River’s themes are heard during her episodes, in music such as “Forgiven” (The Wedding of River Song).

Those are just my favourites. There’s plenty more to choose from on what is the longest Doctor Who soundtrack album to date. With 66 tracks and a total running time in excess of 2 hours and 20 minutes, that’s lots of music for your money. Silence will not fall for quite a while.

10

Richard McGinlay