Brian Eno is set to release the score of Top Boy to coincide with final season

Top Boy (Score From the Original Series) will be released on vinyl, CD, and digital formats. Aside from two tracks included on Eno’s album, Film Music 1976 - 2020, this will be the first time any of this material from the entire five seasons has been made available publicly.

Released today is "Cutting Room 1" – a completely unheard track – one of two on the album that Eno selected for inclusion, even though they were never used in any episodes of the series. Both were written for Top Boy, hence their ‘Cutting Room’ titles.

“From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer,” says Brian Eno, “making music and atmospheres and then giving it to the film makers to use as they saw fit. I try to absorb the idea of what a piece is about and from that I produce a lot of music, and say, ‘Here it is. Use it as you wish.’

“If you’d been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor, all the time. But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children, not just what’s happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up.”

Tracklist:

1. Top Boy Theme
2. But Not This Way
3. Damp Bones
4. Cutting Room I
5. Floating On Sleep’s Shore
6. Beauty and Danger
7. Beneath The Sea
8. Afraid Of Things
9. Waiting in Darkness
10. The Fountain King
11. Washed Away In Morocco
12. Overground
13. Watching The Watcher
14. Sweet Dark Section
15. Sky Blue Alert
16. Delirious Circle
17. Cutting Room II
18. Dangerous Landscape
19. The Good Fight