Ed: I think I read the theme song has some real guitar on it.

Jan: Oh yeah. There were more things, but that's the one that you can hear it: the chugging, distorted rhythm guitar. That's a live Strat.

Ed: Now the lead guitar melody on the theme song-that was played on keyboard I assume.

Jan: That was my sort of a trademark sound.

Ed: How difficult was it recording all of those new pieces of music each week?

Jan: It was pretty...hairy...at moments! [Big chuckle] It was a load of work, and the pressure was amazing. It got me worried here and there, but thanks to the freedom that I was allowed, I was able to work through it. I think it would have been much harder if I was under a microscope and had somebody looking over my shoulder and bugging me and micromanaging me.

What really happened after the pilot was that Michael Mann told me to in his words, "just run with it."

And what that meant was that I would just get the raw episodes without any music, except for the songs that they had placed in them already-whatever the pop songs of the week were. And then I could just watch the show and place the music where I wanted, and place whatever I want there.

So I was left totally on my own, and that really helped under pressure.

Ed: So they never said, "Well, this piece doesn't work", or "this wasn't what we had in mind".

Jan: No. The only directions that I ever got-I don't know if it was halfway through the second year, where I would talk to Michael, and he would say, if anything, add even more music.

Ed: How did you match up the timing of the music with the images?

Jan: Well the first year, I had to do it all wild, on the fly, because I didn't even have a professional video deck that I could synchronize. I was just running it on VHS, with a stopwatch, and I would just play along with the videotape rolling free. So it was all trial and error in the first year, and that was pretty hard.

But at the end of the year, I was able to get a professional deck, and a synchronizer, and at that point, I was able to get the 24 track tape recorder, and the video deck locked up through a synchronizer, and it was like night and day: things got really easier. It became a repeatable thing, where you could rewind the videotape and everything [the music and video] starts where it should.

Ed: Well if there was a particular sting, or something you wanted to tightly match up with an image, how did you let the producers know?