Excerpt from MB autobiography:
"I was commissioned to write the music for an animated TV series called the Dreamstone. Noting how good the animation was, I implored the producers to try to afford a budget that would enable me to write a symphonic soundtrack. I felt that such a soundtrack would reflect the quality of the animation work, giving it a Disney feel. The story was essentially of the Dream Maker, - a wizard who concocted and bottled dreams to be sent out across the land, populated by the Noops, who constituted the local populace. The evil Zordrak, Lord of Nightmares would try, using his comical army of Urpneys, to steal the magic stone, which was cut like a diamond and transmitted the good dreams throughout the land. This premise, combined with hard and clever work from creator Mike Jupp and producer/writers Martin and Sue Gates was an absolute gold-plated smash hit, beating the ratings for Steven Spielberg’s animation show on the opposite channel. So successful was it that it was recommissioned three times by ITV so that in all, 52 half hours were made. This was a fantastic opportunity to write some exciting symphonic pieces. We had raised the budget sufficiently to be granted ownership of the audio masters and the six Dreamstone overtures are still available and part of my recorded catalogue today. I formed a special record label called “Adventure Records” (now lo longer in existence) to release them, plus an album of music cues and songs. “Better Than A Dream” was the main, title song- which I sang myself, and the other standout song was “The War Song Of The Urpneys, for which I recruited the Unlikely trio of Billy Connolly, Ozzy Osbourne and heavyweight boxing champion Frank Bruno. It was a hilarious working with them. I had recoded Frank in Abbey Road studios in London, and Billy too. But when I went out to LA to record Ozzy, Billy and his wife Pamela had just moved there, and so I invited Ozzy and Sharon and Billy and Pamela to dinner at the Dome restaurant after Ozzy’s vocal recording. It was one of the funniest dinners I’ve ever been at. We were all on the floor laughing.
The Dreamstone is a job I’ll always look back on as an example of some of my my best work in both songwriting and composition