Anne Dudley

Anne Jennifer Dudley (née Beckingham; born 7 May 1956) is an English composer, keyboardist, conductor and pop musician. She was the first BBC Concert Orchestra's Composer in Association in 2001. She has worked in the classical and pop genres, as a film composer, and was one of the core members of the synthpop band Art of Noise. In 1998, Dudley won an Oscar for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score for The Full Monty. In addition to over twenty other film scores, in 2012 she served as music producer for the film version of Les Misérables, also acting as arranger and composing some new additional music.

Dudley was born in Beckenham, Kent. She graduated with a master's in music from King's College London in 1978. Trained as a classical performer, she moved into the competitive commercial field as a session musician, where her professional relationship with Trevor Horn began. In 1982, Dudley made significant contributions to the Horn-produced The Lexicon of Love album by ABC. She went from fleshing-out keyboard parts to scoring the album's orchestrations (which were, according to Horn, her first-ever string arrangements) and also co-writing some of the songs.

Dudley was a founding member of the successful band Art of Noise in 1983, which helped pioneer the use of sampling within the pop genre. Their stand-out hits include "Beat Box" (1984), "Moments in Love" (1985), "Close (to the Edit)" (1984), "Paranoimia" (1986), which featured a monologue about insomnia by the artificial intelligence character, Max Headroom (who fitted in well with the group's futuristic anonymity), and, with Tom Jones, "Kiss", a Top 10 in 1988. Art of Noise also produced the theme tune to the ITV game show The Krypton Factor which was used between 1986 and 1993 and is arguably its most recognised theme. "(Theme From) The Krypton Factor" was composed and recorded in 1986 and was reworked as "Crusoe" on their 1987 album.