One of five children in a London household appreciative of classical music (her parents turned the television off rather than see their children exposed to pop music), Dudley nevertheless saw the connection between the two forms when the Beatles' and Smokey Robinson's expanded orchestrations played on her transistor radio. By this time she was well on her way to a classical music career, but after leaving college in 1981 she started work as Trevor Horn's musical arranger and keyboardist. This involved working on some of 80s pop's most successful and innovative recordings, including music by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Wham! and ABC. She then became a key member of the adventurous Art Of Noise, who stealthily offered the public avant garde compositions packaged as dance music. The influence of tracks like "Beat Box" and, in particular, "Moments In Love", continue to reverberate around the 90s music scene. After that group disbanded at the end of the 80s, Dudley went on to enjoy a successful career in scoring soundtracks for film and television, including Jeeves And Wooster, Kavanagh QC, Artists In Crime, The Rory Bremner Show (theme), Buster, The Miracle, The Pope Must Die, The Crying Game, The Grotesque, and The Full Monty, for which she won an Academy Award for "Best Original Musical Or Comedy Score" in 1998. Her non-soundtrack work included an album of Egyptian-derived recordings made jointly with Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman, before Dudley returned to her roots in 1995 for an album of mainly classical compositions. Titled Ancient And Modern, this was scored for a full orchestra and 18 singers, with the material drawn largely from historical sources. "I'm not a pop musician who is attempting something in a style with which they're not familiar. I've always come from a classical orientation. Even the pop music I do has its classical side; the way I score it, voice it, colour it." Dudley reunited with Horn and Paul Morley for the 1999 Art Of Noise album, The Seduction Of Claude Debussy.
