An Interview with Peter Clarke

It would have been around 1982 and I bought it first & foremost as a games machine. I also knew you could program these new-fangled things. So, there was a bit of interest in doing that as well. To answer the question that would logically follow this answer… No! I had no idea about the SID chip or it’s capabilities and no ambitions to write music on it.

I grew up listening to a really wide range of music. I loved pop music from the age of about 5 or 6. At 11 years plus, I used to do my homework to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & Mozart but also listened to David Bowie, T-Rex & Status Quo. I got into more ‘rocky’ stuff with Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and by the time I hit 18, I was loving The Eagles, The Doobie Brothers, Albert Lee & a raft of country-rock music. I learned to play at 20, (quite a bit later than the average musician) and guitar was the first instrument I learned. Although, I taught myself to play Bass and that was the 1^st instrument I actually played in a band. I learned to sing harmonies and somewhere along the way I picked up an unwanted, upright piano from a club that we played. Four of us, man-handled this humungous thing up an outside set of stairs and through a 90 degree angle, into the flat I had at the time. With the piano installed, I taught myself to play keyboards. I started playing in bands in 1978. When my own band wasn’t playing, I would go and play bass for other solo-guitar-vocalists that I knew or ‘step in’ to cover with other local bands if needed and I’ve never really stopped playing since.

It was the very, very early C64 games. I thought the music was really poor on a lot of those early titles. Sometimes it was a badly transcribed rendition of a classical or traditional piece of music or a series of beeps and squeaks that added nothing to the experience. At that point, (around late ’83) I started buying music software. I bought lots of titles and the advertising on the box got me every time. I accumulated a collection of very basic music programs which all promised to unlock the synthesizer in your C64. None did!

During my quest to find the ‘Holy Grail’, (the one piece of music software that I could use to write music on my C64), I had a favourite shop in Wigan town centre. I was an avid gamer too and this was before we had ‘Zzap 64’ to give us the ‘low-down’ on the latest gaming titles. The guys who worked in this shop, (Blue Chip Computers) were gamers too, and knowledgeable on the latest stuff. So, one particular Saturday, I get talking to a member of staff; a young guy who says he’s starting to write games for the C64. I tell him I’m keen to write music for C64 games. He says that he’s heard good things about a program called ‘Electrosound 64’. He was, (and still is) Paul Hughes and we became friends. Electrosound turns out to be the ‘Holy Grail’. It looks just like a Roland TR 606 drum-machine but with notes instead of drumbeats. It uses 16 note lengths per pattern and you can apply pitch-bends and basic effects to the sounds.

Fast forward about 6 months and Paul has ported a game called ‘Repton 3’ from BBC Micro to C64, for superior software and he needs music. I wrote the in-game tune at home and turned up at Paul’s house triumphantly clutching my Electrosound, source disks, only to be told it needed a title-screen tune too. So, I wrote that in around 3 hours flat at Paul’s house. My 1^st two Pieces of music actually in a C64 game. Neither of the pieces were SID-busting masterpieces but they suited the overall atmosphere of the game.

As a couple of young guys with absolutely no clue about working in the computer games industry, Paul Hughes and I used to talk and laugh about how brilliant it would be to work for one of the big software companies, like ‘Ocean’. So, a little while after ‘Repton 3’, Paul does some work on ‘Scooby Doo’ for Elite and also agrees to provide the title-music for it. I produce a straight forward rendition of the ‘Scooby Doo’ theme and Paul submits the work to Elite. They insist that the agreement was for us to also provide all sound FX for the game and promptly refused to pay, (and they still owe us the measly £200 they offered). Off the back of ‘Scooby Doo’ though, Paul gets hired by Ocean in Manchester. He knows another programmer, (also from Wigan) called Steve Ruddy who’s working for Richard Kay at a fairly new company called Software Creations, just down the road from Ocean. Being fairly new & small, they didn’t have a resident SID musician, like Ocean. So, Paul introduced me to Software Creations. After ‘Scooby Doo’, Paul created a demo-disk featuring a few of my tunes and some clever programming by him which we both carried around. Richard Kay gives me a brief on a game called ‘Mission of Mercy’ and I tell him I already have just the right piece of title music and play him one of my tunes from the demo-disk. We agree terms for the entire project and I scuttle off to compose the remaining music & FX.

Quite quickly after Paul gets the job with Ocean, he’s working on a game called ‘Double Take’. It doesn’t have any music and Martin Galway is snowed-under with existing work. So, Paul whips out the demo-disk and plays one of my tunes from it. Ocean love it and agree to use it in ‘Double Take’. Paul tells me and I’m chuffed to bits. The Master Plan was always for both of us to get into Ocean and now it looked a big step closer. I knew that I’d have to do some damage control with Richard at Software Creations and produce another title-piece for ‘Mission of Mercy’.

Two weeks later, ‘Double Take’ is released and I see it playing on multiple 14-inch TV’s in the games department of a store but the credit reads ‘Music by Paul Hughes’. Now, I’m gutted, heartbroken, angry and stunned. I ‘stewed’ for a couple of days, considering how I should respond. I made my mind up to go to Manchester and confront ‘Ocean’. If Paul had betrayed me, it would create a situation where he had to answer to Ocean for putting them in a compromising situation. If that wasn’t the case then the truth could be revealed. So, in what seemed like an instant, I’m stood in the office of Colin Stokes, (Head of Operations, Ocean Software). I had my source disks in my hand and I’m ‘beasting’ the guy for using my music, without my permission or even a credit. I explained that the music was already promised to Software Creations for ‘Mission of Mercy’ and I had lost those earnings. He initially tried to ‘tough it out’ but he realised I wasn’t going to back down. So…. He offered me a job, in-house at Ocean.. Oh! And he offered to pay me for the lost earnings. This wasn’t the way that either Paul or I envisaged me getting into Ocean; and Paul got into serious ‘hot-water’ at the time but we’ll re-visit this subject and tell a little more of the story later.

I played ‘Ocean’ games prior to working there and read magazine reviews so, yes! Of course I knew of Martin Galway and also that he was very highly regarded amongst the C64 fan-base. I don’t remember ‘Day 1’ that much apart from meeting Martin and politely telling him, I was a fan, (even though I wasn’t really, but it seemed the right thing to say at the time). That day was my first glimpse of the ‘Ocean Development System’ and Martin Galway’s music driver. I kind of knew what to expect because Paul had talked about the system he worked on but seeing it there, for the 1^st time, it just looked like hieroglyphics on the screen. It was a 6502 assembly language environment in a Commodore 128 computer. This, in turn was linked to a C64 with a sync/transfer cable. Essentially, you did all of your assembly language programming on the C128 and at assembly-time, the resulting machine code was transferred down the cable, to the attached C64. If the code that you had written then crashed; no problem! Your precious source code was safe in the C128. That 1^st day / week was a bit overwhelming. The size of the learning curve that I was facing dawned on me. It was a mountain and I realised that I had to climb fast.

Once I had been at Ocean a short while, I got to hear some of the stuff that wasn’t made public. Martin Galway had wanted to leave for some time and it was common knowledge to most people at Ocean including the management team. So, in offering me a job, Colin Stokes did 2 things. He hired a ready replacement for Martin Galway’s departure and he also created a situation where he would see if Martin really wanted to go. If he was serious about leaving, Martin simply needed to train me on the music driver and then leave. I saw the politics in action and I think it annoyed Martin that they would just hire this random ‘guy’ from the street to replace ‘Martin Galway’. He was a couple spaces short of being hostile towards me but he was openly critical of my music and very reluctant to teach me anything about the music driver. It was almost as if he were a magician being forced to reveal his tricks. I really wanted to establish a good relationship with Martin but he was fairly cold and unwelcoming. My brief going into Ocean was to get ‘up to speed’ on the ODS as fast as possible and then take up the overflow on Martin’s projects. It took just a little under 2 months to become proficient with little or no guidance from Martin.

Paul Hughes & I hadn’t resolved our differences over ‘Double Take’ properly at this point so, I couldn’t really ask him for guidance on the more general rules of the ODS. Colin Stokes had agreed to pay me for the loss of earnings with Software Creations. What I didn’t find out, until much later was that he deducted that money from Paul’s wages. So, Paul was understandably angry at me too. It turns out that Ocean knew exactly whose music it was. My name was scrolling across the screen while they listened to the music on Paul’s demo-disk. The game was released fast and somewhere in the speed and confusion, Paul’s name was added as the music credit. Both he & Colin Porch raised the issue when they saw it on the released game but Ocean ignored it. I guess they felt it wasn’t that big of a problem and a lot of hassle to change the game, after release.

A couple of months later, my 1^st in-house, music project was released. ‘Head over Heels’ got a Gold-Star award in Zzap-64 and I felt as though I’d finally joined Ocean. With regard to taking pressure off Martin; it reduced the number of games he worked on and seemed to give him more time with each game.

Electrosound 64 worked by using ‘patterns’, 16-notes/beats in length. Each pattern could use it’s own set of 3 sounds, but only that set of sounds for that pattern. Anybody who has written music with any of the early ‘Sound-Tracker’ programs on the Amiga will know this limitation. Martin Galway’s music driver was just streets ahead of anything you could buy off the shelf. To be realistic, you were programming music in exactly the same way that programmers were programming games. A raw assembly language module that had subroutines for just about everything you could do to a SID chip. You created your own preset waveform/sounds & ADSR envelopes and called down any sound and any effect, on any note, at anytime, anywhere within your musical arrangement.

As far as the SID chip was concerned, it was the entire toy-box. The process of writing music was slower than Electrosound but that was due to writing presets, notes & FX into three separate sections, (one for each SID channel) of the driver and it needed to be re-assembled each time you added or changed something.

In addition, you had a whole host of small sections underneath this, (one for each of the game’s sound effects).

Nobody ever told me to write a 3^rd Ocean Loader piece. I was a ‘gigging’ musician that had worked as a ‘session man’ in small, semi-pro recording studios, playing bass, guitar & keyboards on backing tracks and albums for local artists. I could write decent, solid arrangements, (a skill I felt Martin was weaker at). I was getting a bit fed up of his constant criticism and I wanted to find a way of just saying Be Quiet! without using words. So, I decided to take the piece of music that he was probably best known for, (at that time, anyway) and write the best new version that I could. Maybe even get a compliment from him, (nah! Like that was ever going to happen). So, I wrote Ocean Dries Up! in secret, at home, on Electrosound. If I hadn’t thought it was good enough, it would never have seen the light of day. But, when it was complete, I knew it was pretty good and at that point, I rewrote it in the ODS & Martin’s driver.

Based on my answer to the previous question, you can guess that I didn’t consult or collaborate with anyone, (except Paul Hughes, as a 2^nd set of ears, once it was complete. By this time, we’d made up a little with one another and were having lunch together and occasionally popping down the road to Software Creations to see Steve Ruddy & Richard Kay). I decided that it needed to begin as the ‘known’ Ocean Loader tune. Yes, to trick the listener but also partly to make it sell itself to the people at Ocean by being familiar in that first few seconds. Once the transition takes place though, all hell breaks loose and it’s no longer Galway’s piece. The reaction from the people at Ocean was dramatic. It immediately replaced Ocean Loader 2 on all releases and was used for about 12 months; right up until Jon Dunn created Ocean Loader 4. By all accounts, Martin was more than a little ‘miffed’ about it. He never said that to me but the criticism did stop.

It was around 10 or 11 months in total if I’m remembering correctly and my reasons for leaving were fairly simple. Monday to Friday, I left home at about 6.30am to catch the 7am train to Manchester. Having then tried to work creatively in the same room with Martin Galway, (which was really hard on some days. Especially the days where he was tweaking the sound or pitch on a 3 or 4 note sequence, over & over & over for like 4 hours). You may like the Galway, ‘guitar-esque’ riff at the beginning of Ocean’s ‘Game Over’ or the wavy, vibrato’d, downward, 4-note progression at the start of ‘Parallax’. How about listening to either of those 170 times in 4 hours, without a break? I’m sure you get the idea. At finishing-time I’d catch a 6.30pm train in Manchester and be home around 7.30pm. In short, I just got fatigued with the daily journey and, as the months went by, less creative because of it. I asked the management team about changing my working arrangements. I proposed coming in on Monday morning to set tasks & goals for the week then work from home until Friday when I would come into Ocean and present my work for the week. Other people within Ocean already worked this way but they refused to let me. Software Creations were keen to pass more work to me and I had a comedy band that was just starting to get the attention of some bigger entertainment agencies. So, I left.

After Ocean, I wanted to get back to playing ‘live’ with a band more and Software Creations had ‘paid work’ for me, if I wanted it. So, I continued to do a few projects with them (which helped to pay the bills and buy equipment) while my new comedy-band was rehearsing, getting slick and filling up the date-sheet. Richard Kay was always professional with me and had been really understanding over the ‘Mission of Mercy’ debacle. So, I was a bit reluctant to pull out of creating SID tracks for him. Then kind of a well-timed transition happened. My comedy band got an offer of a summer season touring holiday camps, all around the UK mainland. 13 weeks of fairly non-stop touring, just as Software Creations met ‘The Follins’. So, I slid out, they slid in and the rest, as they say, is history!

Bubble Bobble was a huge project for Software Creations to land and I was so happy to get the job of recreating the sound for it. It was so important for the future reputation of Software Creations and my own reputation post-Ocean. I probably put more hours into that set of sounds & music than any other, (and that includes Ocean Loader III). The maximum amount of time that I spent on a C64 project was around 3 months, (based on the quiet months at Ocean). With Bubble Bobble, I took the full 3 months to shape & finesse the feel of the soundtrack. Zzap-64 raved about the C64 version and it’s regarded as a very good arcade conversion. Thank You! I’m happy that you think I did a good job on it.

Over the years, I’ve been described in different ways by different people and I remember once being described as ‘a butterfly’. I can’t remember by whom now; and it wasn’t because this person watched me reinvent myself, (although, I’ve done that a couple of times too). They felt that I had trouble sticking at one thing constantly and I would agree with that. I can’t remember a time when I was just doing one job for more than a few months. I’m either playing music in some setup in the evenings and working during the day or working a couple of jobs of some description. Even at Ocean, with all of the politics & stress within that environment, I was ‘gigging’ at weekends and doing work for Software Creations. Eventually, Ocean raised the subject of ‘conflict of interest’ with me because of my work for Software Creations. I argued that I wrote music, to the best of my ability for both companies. My motivation was to get good reviews for my music. They argued that; by helping a competitor, I was disadvantaging Ocean. I guess this also had a bearing when it came to making my decision to leave Ocean.

Looking back from here in 2020, I sometimes think it would have been good to stick at writing games music but shortly after 1988, I was playing with really good synths & keyboards in bands and in the studio; and I kind of rode the tech-wave from the musician side of me rather than the programmer side. Once we got to the mid 90’s, MIDI was solid for recording and performance and the sounds were immense and exciting. Over the years since the late 80’s, I’ve owned, (and sadly, sold) most of the classic keyboards & synths, Fender Rhodes, Yamaha DX-7, Roland Jupiter 8, Yamaha CS-80; the list is long. Now, I use a Digital Audio Workstation and sample-packs. I still, occasionally pull a real keyboard or synth out and dust it off for a track. I have a ‘modelling’ guitar that can emulate loads of classic guitars and a ‘modelling’ amplifier which emulates lots of classic guitar amps. Game-music standards are now in sync with the music-tech that’s available. All of it can now be used to produce game soundtracks and I still have the compositional skills I had in the 80’s. So, now would be a great time to be writing games music and if the opportunity arises, I will.

I think that with every creative project, your own enthusiasm comes into play and it’s that enthusiasm that drives the creative process inside you. There were never any projects where I thought to myself Oh! I really can’t be bothered with this or I simply wouldn’t have taken the project. I guess the nearest thing to that was ‘Top Duck’. Richard Kay briefed me like this… This is just a ‘cheapy’. There’s almost no money in it! Just knock out a quick title tune and some FX.