MICHAEL KAMEN: To work with Eric Clapton was a dream come true. So I brought Eric to see Brazil, and then shortly after that he asked me if I would combine my work with him and would do a film with him. He’d been asked to do a BBC TV movie. And I didn’t care what it was, I wanted to work with Eric, so I said, yeah, sure. And then he came over the house with it, and we put it on the video and both dissolved in tears. It was a fantastic show. It’s called The Edge of Darkness. And I don’t think it was ever shown in this country, but it was a major event in England and was immediately broadcast for repeats on BBC One and then BBC Two and then again and again and again. It was a major hit.

Again, coincidences don’t exist. The editor, named Stuart Baird, who was English but was working in L.A., was cutting a film that had just been completed called Lethal Weapon. And Stuart Baird happened to be in England when the Edge of Darkness was in its full glory. And he listened to the music, and he said, hey, that stuff is good. So he got the album. And he came back to L.A. with it and stuck it in Lethal Weapon, all the music of Eric Clapton and this string, which was a Kurzweil, an instrument that I discovered with Pink Floyd.

Because Eric Clapton asked me to make the music to Edge of Darkness, I began working on that. I bought a Kurzweil, twenty thousand pounds of Kurzweil. I mean, the whole instrument is about eight thousand dollars now.

MACADDICT: What is it?

MICHAEL KAMEN: Kurzweil is this, basically, it’s the first digital sampling keyboard. It was the first and the best of them in my eyes. It preserved the feel of a piano. It had a major sample of a piano, fantastic for that time, in 1982. That was unbelievable, that you could plug something in and it would sound like a piano as close as that. I guess we worked on Edge of Darkness in 1984. By that time I had a Kurzweil.