By 1975 my collection of film soundtracks numbered about fifty film scores and numerous compilations, both on vinyl LP and cassette tape. Apart from my sister, who owned a few Elvis and David Cassidy records, I was the only person in our house who regularly listened to music, and so both the family record and cassette players were usually to be found in my room. The record player was a Bush model and looked something like this. My parents had bought it in the Sixties, and it still had the price tag - in guineas - stuck to it. Before I started collecting soundtracks our family's record collection was modest - mostly easy listening (Shirley Bassey and Val Doonican) and a few classical discs (Beethoven and Tchaikovsky) on the budget-priced Music for Pleasure (MFP) label. Our cassette player was an even more primitive machine and looked similar to this. After so many hours of use the tape heads would get dirty and had to be swabbed clean with alcohol using a Q-tip. Vinyl records were easily scratched and there was always a tension when playing a record for the first time to see if any of the tracks were marred by blips or jumps. Cassette tapes could warp, and if the spools stiffened the tape band could get entangled in the rollers and chewed up by the machine.
I had a lot of John Barry (various Bond scores, compilations of film and TV themes, original soundtracks such as The Day of the Locust) and a growing number of Bernard Herrmann discs (The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann, the Unicorn recording of Psycho, and Bernard Herrmann Conducts). Otherwise my collection was an eclectic mix of composers: Elmer Bernstein, Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, John Morris, Roy Budd, Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin - even Andrew Lloyd Webber, who scored the 1974 thriller The Odessa File. Although I was aware of the work of John Williams (primarily through the disaster pictures he had scored) I did not own any of his scores until Jaws.
On the record cover of a film score there was always the legend: Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. However, this was something of a misnomer for the music was not lifted directly from the soundtrack of the film but recorded separately, usually with a different orchestra. Individual tracks could be made up of various cues from different parts of the film and would often appear in an alternative sequence to the original film. None of this information was of any interest to my non-soundtrack-collecting friends. They would listen to Pink Floyd albums on headphones and marvel at the way the footsteps seemed to walk across the inside of your head. They spent hours discussing the lyrics of Yes and Genesis and admiring the gate fold album covers of Queen and Led Zeppelin. I would sit in my room listening to tracks with titles like 'Bond Back In Action Again' and 'The Giant Chameleon and The Fight'.
It was something of a comfort, therefore, to read Steven Spielberg's liner notes to the Jaws soundtrack - printed on the fold-out inlay of the cassette box - in which he described himself as "an insatiable collector of film music". I was not alone.
