“I wanted to create sub-layers,” he once noted in an interview, “I wanted to create sounds and layers that don’t hit you the first time, but hit you the sixteenth time. Once beaten, and immersed in an aural landscape, he’d dive back into the track and pull out intricacies and complexities and work on them – spooling out themes, sounds, motifs, and ideas and layering them in to create something altogether more… magical. He’d always beat the level first (“figuring out the jumping” was always the hard bit, apparently) before sketching ideas down and creating “a general attitude” for any given level. His process – even back in the 90s – was noteworthy. I had no idea that Stewart Copeland, the drummer from some old band I’d seen CDs of on shelves in Woolworths, had squirreled himself away in a small Hollywood studio, playing the game as it was being developed and wrestling with some ugly 90s audio software to give birth to one of the most magical and endearing game soundtracks that have ever been made. As you see Spyro soar through the air, a little purple dragon offset against a teal sky, with castles and clouds and peculiar creatures cutting about in meadows and across oceans, you hear these small orchestral teases – tiny little swells of something grand and majestic, breadcrumbing you into what’s to come. Little did I know – the first time I booted up the game and heard that hypnotic, enticing track that welcomes you to Spyro’s world – that the drummer of The Police was behind more or less every bar of music you heard in the game. So how did a young, greasy-haired greebo (that’s 2004 for ‘kid that’s into metal’) get into a band that wrapped up all its loose ends and took its last breath almost two decades earlier? As it happens, it was through Spyro the Dragon. READ MORE: ‘Final Fantasy 15’, Florence + The Machine, and an ode to ‘Stand By Me’.The Police – with their new wave sensibilities and nigh-incomprehensible lyrical babbling – weren’t really on their radar. My mum was more into Northern Soul and disco, peeling off occasionally for some reggae or pop. My dad’s taste in music was either much more CBGB – anything sweaty, coated in spit, rallying against whatever there was to be rallied against – or tended towards to morose laments of Ian Curtis and the incessant basslines of Peter Hook. My parents weren’t exactly into The Police. This week, Dom Peppiatt looks back on a PlayStation juggernaut – Spyro the Dragon – and reflects on how an unlikely video game for children kickstarted a love for one of Britain’s most infamous new wave exports. Rock The Spacebar is a twice-monthly column investigating the great music that underpins your favourite games.
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