I first came in contact with Peter Crawford quite by chance. The lucky link was a piece of music I had written some years before called "The Sea".

The title was one of a series of orchestral works that had been commissioned by Robin Phillips in 1991, who was at that time running Bruton Music, one of the leading music production company’s around.

Its theme was The Natural World. Robin gave perfect briefs to composers for album projects. His great skill was the way he got the composer to understand how to make the pictures look good. “It’s about the pictures” he would say. The brief for “The Sea” was… “let it just roll. No sudden crashes. Always moving. Let it just go for 3 to 4 minutes. G min 9th to F minor 9th… two chords… no tricks.”

When you have a highly usable piece, as Robin would call it, most editor's work is halved putting the pictures together and their job is made easer if you imagine what they are seeing; their images, dissolves and cuts and scene transitions etc. In other words, don’t get clever with the score, but hear it through their eyes and their imagination.

Years later, when Robin had moved on to form “Music House”, I was asked to produce another Natural History album for the same company.

My reply was that they already had one from me. Their reply was “it's old now… …we did that on vinyl!”

“But the way I heard the sea then”, I said, “would be the way I heard it now.”

I must have sounded a bit arrogant to the new producers who wanted something more modern. But eventually I managed to get them simply to transfer my old vinyl album to CD and it was eventually released some years later.

Peter Crawford had heard it through the BBC library and used it to make a short promo piece to sell his “Nomads of the Wind” series to America.

He soon secured an advance sale of the series to WNET in New York who wanted to come in as co-producers and screen 'Nomads' coast to coast. It was then that I heard that Peter was trying to track down the man called 'B.Bennett' who had composed that track for the album “The Sea”.

As producer of a new major BBC series, Peter was looking for someone who could write five one-hour films. What he wanted was a score for a large orchestra, Polynesian instruments and voices, and percussion.

His docu-drama series told the extraordinary story of the Polynesian people and their amazing journeys across the Pacific.

Yes, it was a composer’s dream project!

The following week Peter set me two long and difficult cues to try out to picture. The images were stunning. Peter and his team had spent two years filming across the Pacific and was to now make the journey from BBC Bristol to my studio in Hertfordshire.

The first cue was a full-on storm at sea. Crashing waves, thunder and lightning, trees being ripped up AND leave some room for some narration.

“Yep… don’t get in the way. Get them wet, but don’t get in the way!”

The second cue was a complex scene which had taken weeks to shoot.

The long sequence featured a piratical frigate bird hunting a fairy tern. Lots of high speed flight and movement; a kind of frantic aerial ballet. At the end of the scene the fairy tern loses the chase and ends up dead on the beach. At the end of the playback Peter's wife Pat burst into tears and ran for the studio loo.

Silence. They obviously hated the music… …and I'd upset the director's wife. Next!

More silence.

When Pat came back she said she had been emotionally moved by how the film now looked - complete with its music. She also said during our coffee break, that she had noticed some gold disks on the loo walls. I explained that they were for sales of some of my early hits with Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

Peter looked at me bemused, and with a slight edge to his voice he said; “How are you involved in that kind of music, did they record here?”

“Yes, they did.”

“So how did you fit in with them?”

“I was part of the band”

“You never told us you did that kind of work when we spoke on the phone.”

I said; “If after spending two years of your life filming a masterpiece, would you have driven all this way to meet the drummer with The Shadows with a view to letting him score your film?”

Big Pause… …at least 15 seconds long…

“No… you're probably right — I wouldn’t… Pause… But I'm so pleased I did, I would love you to score my film.”

Peter and I have become very good friends over the years and I have worked closely with him on all of his subsequent productions. It's been a very happy and productive team.