Category Archives: The Borrowers

The Borrowers – Plan B: Ill Manors

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What tune does it use?

A figure from the Symphony no.7 by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, known as the Leningrad Symphony. This massive piece lasts well over an hour but Plan B, who obviously knows it well, takes a brief bit of music from the last of its four movements.

This is an opportunistic sample, the kind the best hip hop and rap artists are very clever at utilising, and Plan B (aka Ben Drew) makes a whole song from it. This is despite using a very small musical figure – only nine notes, with a slightly longer bit of the sample added at the end of each fourth repetition.

There are very few pieces of Shostakovich that have had this treatment so far, partly because the composer died relatively recently (in 1975) and so his music is still well in copyright. That Plan B managed to get permission to use this sample is an impressive achievement in itself – that he went on to build such a fractious song on it is another.

How does it work?

Plan B takes the figure from the Shostakovich symphony in this clip, some five minutes in to the last of four movements:

You can hear that the sound is processed, the softer orchestral sound now much harsher, as though it has been processed to sound rougher and tougher. Plan B uses the nine-note motif to go round and round in circles, adding the extra bit at the end of each musical phrase before adding a big rhythm and bass line at 0’28”:

Then he takes a bigger bit of the Shostakovich, starting at 5’05” in the original:

Then the chorus kicks in. Now the Shostakovich sample is dwarfed by a serrated bass line, the music tense and angry:

Then, at 2’52”, where he says “I’ve had it with you politicians”, the sample is refracted so that you can hardly hear it – but when the chorus kicks in again at 3’16” the raw aggression is back!

This song surely provides the proof – if it were ever needed – that classical music is not comfy and cosy! Plan B uses this for an upfront song that bristles with attitude, and the result is electric.

What else is new?

The Leningrad Symphony is one of Shostakovich’s very biggest orchestral works, it is set in four massive movements (sections) that tell of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but which also end up as a defiant statement in the face of those horrors.

Take the composer’s depiction of the approaching invasion, about seven minutes in to the symphony, where Shostakovich uses a snare drum in an obsessive and almost unbearable repetition as the orchestra plays a march tune:

Around seven and a half minutes later, the full horror of the army is upon us:

The whole piece can also be heard on Spotify here:

The Borrowers – Village People: Go West

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What tune does it use?

The much-loved Canon by the 17th century composer Johann Pachelbel.

Pachelbel (1653-1706) was a composer and organist who seems destined to be celebrated for just one work. He seemed to specialise working in very strict forms such as the chaconne* and the canon, whose rules dictate that once the harmonic progression is heard it must be repeated with almost exact precision for the rest of the piece. What happens above this progression is up to the composer.

This way of working fits in perfectly with pop music, because a lot of pop songs use the same chord progressions throughout – so to make a song over a predetermined chord sequence is a great challenge. The Village People did it in their use of Pachelbel’s Canon:

So did Pet Shop Boys, in their cover of the same song:

Even Kylie Minogue and her production / writing team of Stock Aitken & Waterman used a very similar sequence for the chorus of I Should Be So Lucky. Indeed Pete Waterman went as far as to describe it as ‘almost the godfather of pop music’. Having listened closely the references are not quite as obvious…but Pete’s comment illustrates how it was inevitable Arcana would be mentioning this piece early on!

Yet another pop song to use the chords is an altogether different dance track, The Farm’s 1990 hit All Together Now. It even adopts the same key as the Village People:

How does it work?

It really is as simple as a direct lift of the chord progression from the whole Canon. Village People take the chord structure as outlined in the clip below:

They even keep it in the same key as the original:

What else is new?

The Canon has been arranged for literally hundreds of musical combinations – but it is worth remembering it is not the only piece of note by Pachelbel. Here is his Chaconne in F minor, for instance. Who can spot any pop tune that uses this? I can’t yet…but it wouldn’t sound out of place in a record by any band from the so-called ‘Canterbury scene’!

Glossary

*chaconne – a form of music commonly used in Pachelbel’s time, where a repeated, pre-determined cell of chords and / or bass-line would become the foundation for a whole piece

The Borrowers – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: Joybringer

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What tune does it use?

Jupiter from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets, written between 1914 and 1916.

Jupiter must be one of the most plundered bits of Holst’s set of planets for orchestra. Its stirring central theme became the melody of the song World In Union, used by Kiri te Kanawa for the 1991 Rugby Union World Cup in the UK, as well as in countless other vocal arrangements (Kathryn Jenkins et al). Here though, a much more original bit of ‘sampling’ gives rise to a fantastically uplifting pop song, completed by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1973.

How does it work?

Mann takes the tune from 0’57” in the Planets, clip below:

Then he moves it down in pitch by half an octave to make the whole tune.

Then, after the second chorus (at 1’32”) Mann uses another tune from Jupiter:

Here is the original:

The band subject it to a synthesizer improvisation before it goes into the growly Hammond Organ at the bottom. Then, before we know it, we’re back to the tune, and joy is unconfined!

What else is new?

Joybringer comes from the album Solar Fire – in which Mann continues to use the whole of The Planets for inspiration in the song titles. Listen to it via Spotify below: