I first met Tom Newman in a small office on Wilshire Boulevard in LA sometime in 1998. He struck me as gentle, wry, and self-deprecating to a fault. I already knew he was incredibly gifted. He agreed to write the music for American Beauty. He wrote a sensational score. The other day I watched him across a crowded orchestral stage at Abbey Road and realised it had been 21 years. The view of him standing at the podium is now as familiar to me as saying “action”. Tom is still all the things described above, except he is more gifted than I originally thought. On top of which, I can now also count him as a friend. This score for 1917 is wonderful. The fruits, I suppose, of 21 years of collaboration. I hope you enjoy it.Sam MendesINFOSam Mendes, the Oscar®-winning director of Skyfall, Spectre and American Beauty, brings his singular vision to his World War I epic, 1917.At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield (Captain Fantastic’s George MacKay) and Blake (Game of Thrones’ Dean-Charles Chapman) are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers—Blake’s own brother among them.TRACKLISTING1 19172 Up the Down Trench3 Gehenna4 A Scrap of Ribbon5 The Night Window6 The Boche7 Tripwire8 A Bit of Tin9 Lockhouse10 Blake and Schofield11 Milk12 Écoust-Saint-Mein13 Les Arbres14 Engländer15 The Rapids16 Croisilles Wood17 Sixteen Hundred Men18 Mentions in Dispatches19 Come Back to Us