As is often the case with vintage b-movies, it’s the poster for the 1967 Amicus production of They Came From Beyond Space that really draws you in. The curvaceous space woman and her menacing alien team firing upon a terrorised planet Earth suggests way more action and excitement than perhaps the film delivers, but it does the job.

The movie is a typical, low-budget affair – a sci-fi drama originally released as a double bill with The Terrornauts and directed by Freddie Francis, the celebrated cinematographer who went on to shoot The Elephant Man and Scorcese’s Cape Fear. In the mid-60’s and early 70’s he cut his teeth working almost exclusively on horror anthologies and action fantasies. For whatever reasons, They Came From Beyond Space lacks his later flair. An early scene at the scientist’s laboratory was clearly filmed outside a school with no attempt to hide the rugby pitch or traffic in the background. The wobbly meteorite sequence must have had Gerry Anderson’s effects team howling with laughter whilst the plague victim’s makeup looks like water paint blown through a straw and The Moon Master scenes recycle the set from another Amicus production, Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD.

Yet despite the film’s limitations, it’s still lots of fun, helped along by a tense, snappy, jazz inflected score. The opening titles grab you immediately with psychedelic lighting and a swaggering big band theme by British composer James Stevens. Having worked as an uncompromising avant-garde composer for the BBC in the 1950’s, Stevens was skilled in blending unusual and dynamic sounds into mainstream projects. His career began at Ealing Studios, where he devised innovative audio techniques for film, television, radio and theatre. He won an International Society for Contemporary Music award in 1968 and that same year his single Exploding Galaxy, (recorded as Paul James) reached No 1 in the Melody Maker pop charts. In 1990, he was nominated a Bafta for his score to the BBC drama Chelworth. A lifelong pacifist, CND campaigner and buddhist, Stevens was highly regarded in serious music circles but failed to gain wider acclaim during his lifetime.

Stevens passed away in 2012 leaving a sizeable collection of classical, operatic and experimental works alongside his soundtrack recordings. Despite lengthy investigations, the only surviving copy of They Came From Beyond Space’s score that I could locate was a musty 1/4 inch compilation tape tucked away in his archive at the British Library. After careful digitisation by the Save Our Sounds team, additional work was needed to remove heavy wow & flutter along with some nasty tape scrunches. It was a challenging process but hopefully we’ve managed to present the best available version of this groovy, long forgotten soundtrack.

The score has a distinctly Brit-Jazz, Soho swing feel with it’s bombastic themes countered by moments of drawn out suspense and some lovely, pastoral grandeur. Considering jazz wasn’t his main repetoire, Steven’s music stands up alongside 1960’s big-band contemporaries such as Michael Garrick, Tubby Hayes, John Surman, Ian Carr, Mike Westbrook, Alan Skidmore and Tony Oxley.