Upcoming Spy CDs: Johnny Dankworth's Fathom Score And Prisoner Remake Soundtrack

The fabulous spy music website Spy Bop Royale has alerted me to the news I've wanted to hear for years: Johnny Dankworth's score for the hugely enjoyable 1967 Raquel Welch spy movie Fathom will finally be available on CD from Harkit... next week! I can't even recall how long ago this was first announced, never to come to fruition at that time. I think it was when Harkit first released the Modesty Blaise score on CD. That has to have been at least five years ago, right? Loving Fathom and its score, and also loving Dankworth's other work, like his elusive theme for the Cathy Gale era Avengers, I couldn't wait to have this score on CD. But, as it turned out, I did wait, like everyone else. For years. Fathom became one of my spy music Holy Grails. (Not quite up there with Ken Thorne's Persuaders! music, though.) Well, now, apparently, the waiting is over, and we should all be able to possess this wonderful score on November 17! In fact, it can be pre-ordered from Amazon right now. (I'm not sure why they opted for that cover, though, instead of using one of the many more iconic and sexy poster images from the film. Oh well.)

I also learned from the "What's New" page at Spy Bop Royale that Varese Sarabande will release a soundtrack for AMC's new version of The Prisoner on that same day. (It's also available for pre-order.) No longer dreading this remake and encouraged by the footage that I saw at Comic-Con, I'm still approaching it with a lot of trepidation. That said, you can never have too many Prisoner CDs, as Network proved when they managed to dig up another three discs' worth of material from the original series on top of the three CDs (some of them now out of print) put out by Silva several years ago. I don't expect Rupert Gregson-Williams' music for the new version to be anything like that, but it's new spy music nonetheless, and I'm certainly curious about it.