John Barry - Alone Again (via The Ipcress File: Original Soundtrack Album)

John Barry - A Man Alone (The Ipcress File: Original Soundtrack Album)

John Barry - Meeting with Grantby & Fight (via The Ipcress File: Original Soundtrack Album)

Q. It’s a much more low-key score and film [as compared to Barry’s scores for James Bond films]

John Barry: Absolutely. Even the fight scenes. All the Bond scenes were all loud noises. But in The Ipcress File, [director] Sidney Furie did this lovely fight scene outside of Albert Hall, where they’re in the distance, on the top of the steps, and I have that arpeggio music going against it, and it was wonderful.

Because you saw these two stupid men. It made you realize how stupid physical violence is. It had such a different effect, and I think a very penetrating effect, from what violence in the movies is all about.

-excerpted from Overtones and undertones: Reading Film Music

John Barry - Main Title (The Ipcress File: Original Soundtrack Album)

“The Ipcress File represents Barry’s only significant non-Bond spy scoring. Barry avoids the bombast of a typical Bond score by using smaller scale orchestration featuring vibes, piano, guitar, and most notably, a cimbalom (a melancholy-sounding stringed instrument traditionally played by Hungarian Jews or gypsies).

‘The Ipcress File was like my homage to The Third Man,’ Barry recounted. ‘I knew that was how I wanted to do it from the start, but obviously I wasn’t going to use a zither.’”

-Kristopher Spencer, Film and television scores, 1950-1979

John Barry - Alone Blues (The Ipcress File: Original Soundtrack Album)