About a third of the way into this wonderfully enjoyable and informative book, Mark Kermode recounts an exchange he had with the Scottish director Bill Forsyth. Kermode was humming some of the music from Forsyth’s film Local Hero (1983). Forsyth said that he was sad to realise how much Kermode loved the music, explaining: ‘a really good film should work without music.’

Forsyth’s ideal is a little drastic, but for several decades after the introduction of sound it was the conventional wisdom in the film industry that music should do its work by stealth, heard but not listened to, cueing emotional responses, guiding the audience through the story, Things changed with the discovery that a theme song might help to sell a film and that a soundtrack could be a profitable spin-off. 

I realised, reading Mark Kermode’s Surround Sound – written by Kermode in collaboration with the radio producer Jenny Nelson – that I have never quite adjusted to this development. Though I love the music of many films, I love it in the films; even when I have bought the album