Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Craig Armstrong's solo debut, The Space Between Us.

Back in September 1995 the composer Craig Armstrong gave an interview to this newspaper. Among the subjects under discussion was his recent work on the theme song of a James Bond film, Goldeneye.

Written by Bono and The Edge of U2 and sung by Tina Turner, the song kicked in moments after Bond, played by Pierce Brosnan, had wreaked terminal havoc upon the USSR’s Arkangel Chemical Weapons facility.

Golden Eye's orchestration had to be hurriedly undertaken within two hectic days. ''At the time”, Armstrong recalled, “it was perfectly natural to find myself sitting on a sofa with Bono, the Edge, and Tina Turner. It's only later that you think: 'Wow, Tina Turner asked me if wanted a cup of tea’.

“It’s great that, as an impoverished Glasgow arranger, I can use my normal orchestrator's craft to keep my kids in nappies as well as reach some unusual musical places”.

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Armstrong wouldn't be an impoverished composer for much longer. Within three years his reputation had soared to the extent that one prominent newspaper described him as “the John Barry for the millennium, currently the most sought-after pop-film crossover composer around”; and when he released his debut solo album, The Space Between Us, in 1997, Elton John declared it was the album of the year.

As a young man Armstrong had relocated from Glasgow to London, graduating in composition in 1981. Back in his home town, he ventured into commercial music - “that’s where the first call came from’’, he would later tell The Herald’s music critic, Michael Tumelty. He earned a living as a pianist and improviser in association with such groups as Texas, Hipsway, and The Big Dish, and toured with Ultravox and Midge Ure.

In 1984, this self-confessed “gadget freak who thinks electronically'' was given an arts council grant to study sample synthesisers. This in turn prompted considerable interest from theatre and dance producers.

Over a decade or so he worked extensively with theatre companies including the Tron, the Traverse in Edinburgh, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, on projects ranging from Michael Boyd's adaptation at the Tron of Janice Galloway's novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, to Boyd’s RSC production of John Ford’s 1630 play The Broken Heart. One London critic praised the “melancholy, period-coloured music” which “sets the grievous tone with perfect tact”. Armstrong also provided theme music for programmes on BBC and Scottish Television.

Despite being a key part of pop music’s growing interest in orchestral arrangements, he was getting nowhere in the classical world, though.

“See, I don't see the difference in importance between Chic's Thinking Of You and Mahler's 5th symphony”, Armstrong told the Guardian’s Bob Flynn in 1998, “and I've suffered for it immensely in Britain. After I came out of the Royal Academy, I couldn't get anywhere in the classical field. It was the Americans that took me on. That's where I met Nellee Hooper, in a wee studio on Sunset Boulevard. We just hit it off".

Hooper was then poised to begin work with the trip-hop group, Massive Attack, on their groundbreaking 1994 album, Protection, and Armstrong offered to orchestrate. “The seminal fusing of mountainous trance beats and dub reggae with Armstrong's majestic orchestral melancholy was the chill-out odyssey for our time”, observed Flynn.

Suddenly, Armstrong's formidable talents as an orchestrator were in demand, leading to his working with such artists as Madonna, Janet Jackson, Brian Eno, Pavarotti and U2. He had also scored three short films directed by his friend, the actor Peter Mullan.

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Another key moment in the Armstrong story occurred when the film director Baz Luhrmann commissioned him, and Massive Attack’s producers, Hooper and Marcus de Vries, to devise a score for his 1996 film, Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, a flamboyant, updated version of the tale of the doomed romance between two young lovers from rival families. Armstrong’s luminous orchestrations won him a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello award.

The 12 tracks on the marvellous solo album, The Space Between Us, which was released on Massive Attack’s Melankolic label, are a potent illustration of Armstrong’s approach to composing music - an approach, he has said, “that evokes the most delicate shifts in atmosphere and emotion”. 

''Mayfest commissioned me to write a piece for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in 1996 after which I decided I wanted to concentrate on pure music - no more string-arranging; no-one telling me what to do”, Armstrong told The Herald's David Belcher shortly before the album's release.

''Coincidentally, Massive Attack offered me the chance to do my own LP, with no restrictions on whom I might want to work with. I started recording, but then got sidetracked for months working on Romeo + Juliet".

The album left a favourable impression on reviewers. “Many contemporary artists aspire to classical grandeur, but most only imitate it. Craig Armstrong … has an unsentimental orchestral strategy that unfolds in a cinematic landscape”, noted a reviewer in the US trade magazine, Billboard.

“He sends violins soaring over driving triphop rhythms on Rise and paints an ambient portrait on Glasgow. His Balcony Scene from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack is poignant, and his remake of Massive Attack's Weather Storm is ominous”.

Two of the stand-out tracks - This Love, and Let’s Go Out Tonight - featured vocals by, respectively, the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser and the Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan, the latter a sparse and deeply moving reworking of one of the standout songs from the Blue Nile’s second album, Hats. 

As Armstrong told Belcher: ''Paul Buchanan was a must from the start ... I've known him on and off for ages - the Blue Nile were the first folk I ever borrowed a synthesiser from, in fact, and Paul Moore is one of my favourite musicians - and I helped them with Family Life, a track on their Peace At Last album”.

Reviewing the album in the Observer, Neil Spencer said: “An intriguing mix of sweeping strings, dark moods and trip-hop beats, it reworks a couple of Massive tracks, includes `Balcony Scene' which he wrote for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, and throws in a couple of mournful epic vocals by Paul Buchanan and Elizabeth Fraser. A lovely oddity”.

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Writing in the Sunday Herald, Barry Didcock observed: “Listen with your eyes shut to his 1997 album The Space Between Us and the music plays widescreen, as threatening and sombre as the skies over Armstrong's beloved Glasgow. His soundscapes capture mood like Turner captured light”.

The Space Between Us remains one of my favourite albums, and Laura’s Theme, Balcony Scene, Glasgow, and Let’s Go Out Tonight some of my favourite songs - atmospheric, poignant, emotive. The album was a big hit in France, in both pop and classical circles, and for two months it was a fixture at a trendy Parisian shop called Colete, a bunch of cool Gallic style-arbiters who offer a unique one-stop lifestyle retailing experience. Balcony Scene, for its part, soundtracked an imaginative BBC trailer for its coverage of the 2004 Euro football championships.

Armstrong would of course go on to craft award-winning film soundtracks and solo albums. His extensive film work includes Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and Snowden; Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (for which Armstrong won a BAFTA and Golden Globe); Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American (the score won Novello and American Film Institute awards); Richard Curtis's Love, Actually; Taylor Hackford's Oscar-winning Ray; and, more recently, Oliver Parker's The Great Escaper, which starred Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson. The solo albums have included the captivating As If to Nothing, on which he worked with Evan Dando, Bono, Mogwai and David McAlmont, and Sun on You. There have, in addition, been numerous orchestral works, and collaborations and remixes.

Armstrong was commissioned to work on The Quiet American (2002) because its star, Michael Caine, insisted on it. “The director, Phillip Noyce, is a major music buff", Armstrong once said. "He loved The Space Between Us, the album I did on Massive Attack’s label, and he gave a copy to Michael Caine, who fell in love with one of the tracks, Laura’s Theme – and that’s how he came to say that he would only do the film if I was doing it too!”

The album itself has stood the test of time. As The Daily Telegraph's Robert Sandall ventured in an article in 2004, it is “a gorgeously melancholy and dramatic suite of string-driven tunes that gave [Armstrong] a limited profile among CD buyers but instantly promoted him to the superleague of film composers”.

Nine years ago, the German techno DJ and producer Oliver Huntemann selected it as one the top ten albums he can never forget. The Space Between Us, he wrote enthusiastically, “combines classical elements with electronica in a very special way. In some of the songs, you’ll find parts of his work for films or other artists taken out of context and inserted to create something completely different.”

In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, Armstrong gave an interesting insight into how he composes music. "It's funny, but I don't see music visually," he said. "A lot of people describe the music as visual, but I deal with pure sound, really, while plugging into a certain emotion to write something. I love visual things - if I had a day off, I'd be at art galleries or going to the cinema - but I can't really do anything like that myself.

"There's a lot to be said, if you find a piece of music hard, for working at it, just staying with it throughout the day. It usually pays off. You can hit those moments that have a buzz of electricity about them, as long as your kids don't run in at the crucial moment. But it's asking for too much to expect God to touch you, at least for a mere mortal like myself."

Next week: Kelvingrove Baby, by The Bathers