Francis Monkman, who has died of cancer aged 73, was a gifted classically trained musician who brought his technical skills and eclectic tastes to a rich variety of projects. These included stints with Curved Air and with the guitarist John Williams’s classical-crossover band Sky, as well as collaborations with artists including Renaissance, Kate Bush, Brian Eno and the Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. Monkman’s much-admired soundtrack for John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980) was an integral part of the film’s success, and prompted him to leave Sky to concentrate on other soundtracks. His playing also featured on numerous film scores, including Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Live and Let Die (1973).
Part of Britain’s late-1960s progressive rock boom, Curved Air mixed rock music with various classical influences, and gave Monkman his first taste of popular success. When the band started, he was still in the middle of his classical music degree. However, he was beginning to feel the lure of rock music, and while his main instrument was keyboards, he also learned to play guitar, partly inspired by the fretboard pyrotechnics of Jimi Hendrix.
