The Burning Rope
- Mar 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 21
Why the courage to climb counts far more than any view from the peak
From Abbey Road to mixing award-winning scores for Notting Hill, Gravity and Our Planet, my career has been one long climb on a rope that’s always burning beneath me - a metaphor I first found in a 1978 Genesis song. Here’s why the glorious madness of daring to climb is the only thing that lasts when everything else turns to dust
As a Score Mixer, Music Editor, and Composer with forty years in the film, TV, game, and theatre industries, I’ve always found that the most powerful metaphors for our careers come not from trade magazines or industry panels, but from the music we first fell in love with.
I’m an unashamed, lifelong fan of prog-era Genesis. Tracks from ...And Then There Were Three… have lived in my head since I was a teenager. None more so than “Burning Rope”, written by Tony Banks and released in 1978, long before I set foot in the music business.
The song isn’t just a brilliant piece of progressive rock, with one of Mike Rutherfords’s most soaring guitar solos and the astonishingly energetic drumming of Phil Collins; it’s a near-perfect philosophical framework for what it actually feels like to build a career in music for picture.
The central metaphor is as brutal as it is beautiful: you climb a rope that is literally on fire beneath you. You’re escaping the “mob below” - the safe, ordinary path everyone else is taking - but the very thing supporting you is burning away in real time. Opportunity is temporary. The higher you climb, the faster the rope disappears. And yet… you climb.
This was not my original thought. It belongs to Genesis - specifically to the lyrics that have fascinated, driven, and inspired me since the late 1970s. I often reflect on these lyrics in the quiet times between projects, when the flames appear more distant, and again when I’m working towards an important deadline, with the fire seemingly getting closer. When I step into a mixing room with a ticking deadline, or when a film I poured months into disappears from cinemas and lives only on streaming, I hear Tony Banks’ complex, melodic chord progressions and his words echoing back at me.
The Core Metaphor: A Path Only a Few Dare to Take
The song puts it plainly: “Yet only eagles seem to pass on through.” Most people see the rope. They admire the view from the top. But only a tiny few actually grab it while it’s burning and start climbing. That’s the film and TV music business in a nutshell.
I started at the legendary EMI Abbey Road Studios as a recording engineer - the music industry equivalent of a steady, respected “day job.” In 1993 I walked away from that security to go fully freelance as a producer, score mixer, music editor, and composer. The rope was already smouldering. The industry was changing fast: analogue to digital, big orchestral sessions shrinking, deadlines compressing, budgets swinging wildly, recording studios closing and the music business shifting away from the label-based A&R model. Plenty of talented people looked at that burning rope and sensibly chose the ground. Others - the eagles, if you like - decided the only way to reach the view was to climb anyway.
Look at the credits that resulted: mixing the Oscar- and BAFTA-winning score for Gravity with Steven Price, shaping the sound of Notting Hill, From Hell, Dark City, Suicide Squad, Fury, Last Night in Soho, Coyote v Acme, and the entire Our Planet / David Attenborough documentary series. Those films have collectively taken over $4 billion at the global box office. I’ve scored award-winning films such as Madron, games like Warhammer Combat Cards, edited music for Netflix blockbusters, and produced the soundtrack albums for the complete cycle of 37 Shakespeare plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Every single one of those projects began with the same decision: grab the burning rope and climb while it lasts.
The Paradox: Success Still Turns to Dust
The song doesn’t sugar-coat the ending. Even if you reach the top, “All you have accomplished here will have soon turned to dust.” That line hits harder the longer you stay in this business. A score you slave over for months can be replaced in a spotting meeting or executive phone call. An iconic film you help make streams for a few years then quietly disappears from the algorithm. Awards are wonderful (the Cinema Audio Society win for Gravity and Emmy nomination for A Life On Our Planet still make me proud), but they don’t stop the next project’s deadline from arriving at 9 a.m. Monday.
Yet that’s precisely the point. The meaning of life in our industry is not “reaching the top” and planting a flag that lasts forever. It’s daring to climb in the first place. It’s long sessions in the studio when the orchestra overdub layers lock together, the moment a director hears the mix and the story suddenly breathes, the quiet satisfaction of knowing your work helped millions feel something when they watched Our Planet or David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. Those moments are the climb. They’re what make the burning worthwhile.
“You Had Put the Flaming Out So Others Could Follow”
One of the most moving lines in the song comes near the end: “You had put the flaming out so that others could follow.” That’s the quiet responsibility every original thinker carries. The first climber takes the worst burns so the next ones have a safer rope.
I see that every day in the film music world. When I mix a score, I’m not just serving my own ego; I’m clearing the path for the composer’s vision to reach the audience undiluted. When I edit music to picture, I’m making sure directors and producers can tell their stories, and so the next generation can tell even more ambitious stories. The techniques I learned at Abbey Road in the analogue days, the workflow innovations we pioneered moving into 5.1 and immersive audio, the lessons from working with the best composers and artists in the industry such as Trevor Jones, Steven Price, Elvis Costello, Phil Collins, and Sting - all of it gets passed on. I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with composers who are now influencing the next wave. That’s the real legacy: not the individual credit, but the fact that someone else can now climb higher because you put the flames out first.
The Burning Rope as a Psychological Driver
In our business, opportunity really is temporary. A project lands, the clock starts, and when it’s done the rope burns through again. You’re often working in relative isolation - lit only by the software glow of an array of computer screens, staring at waveforms late into the night - while the “mob” outside debates box-office predictions or the latest streaming trend. It can feel lonely. It is lonely sometimes. But that tension between the individual and the crowd is what makes the climb meaningful.
So what is it all for? Not immortality. No one’s film music credit lasts forever. The meaning is in the daring itself. In choosing the burning rope over the safe ground. In the daily decision to keep climbing because the act of creating - of shaping emotion through sound for millions of people - is the freest, most alive way I know to spend a working life.
If you’re in music for picture - whether you’re just starting out or 40 years in like me - I hope this resonates. Next time the deadline is impossible, the session is over-running, or another project vanishes into the streaming ether, remember the rope is burning. Grab it anyway.
The eagles fly. And the view from above, while it lasts, is extraordinary.
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