I have the best job in the world really, and although I have to remind myself of this quite often when I’m stressed or exhausted from crazy all-nighters to meet deadlines, or when the piece of music I thought was genius (it probably IS genius!?) is unceremoniously rejected by a director or producer…. the long and short of it is I get to write soundtracks for films and television and have my music heard (and, dare I say, enjoyed?) by millions of people without ever having to show my face!
When I think of the scores that I’m proud of (to name a few 9/11: One Day in America, Emma., Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen, Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, Angry Birds Toons, Trust No One, Our Great National Parks, Charlie & Lola, The Afterparty S2) I’m most pleased by the fact that there’s a wide range of musical styles across a wide range of film & tv genres, and yet there’s always something about it that’s definitely me! I spend most of my time trying NOT to sound like myself, but still end up with my musical fingerprints all over whatever score I write!
To quote the inimitable David Byrne… ‘Well, how did I get here?’
I wasn’t doing scales and arpeggios when I was 3, or even when I was 9. But when I was 11, I started playing guitar and piano, and then joined a band playing (then unfashionable) new-romantic music.
We were called Syntax and we were the best band that ever existed that didn’t get famous. We carried on until we were 18 and old enough to know better, but many of us are still doing musical things professionally now, including Gabriel Prokofiev and Nathan Cooper.
From writing songs, I turned all serious and started writing classical music. At 16 I wrote a Requiem for choir and orchestra. Then I went to New College in Oxford University and learnt mostly about music that dead people wrote. Though I also started making music with computers while I was there. Even though it wasn’t all that long ago in the big scheme of things, computers then were pretty rubbish at making music compared to what they can do now, but I still thought it was all amazing! At the National Film and Television school I did more learning, this time about how music could work with moving pictures.
After leaving the NFTS that I started writing music for a lot of television documentaries and animated series (an early project I worked on was the fantastic Charlie & Lola), as well as drama and feature films. I love working with directors and producers, figuring out what music is going to work with any particular project, devising new combinations of instruments, sounds, textures, rhythms. There are always new challenges… Sometimes it seems easy, other times less so. I’ve always been a bit nocturnal which helps when working to constant and ridiculous deadlines.
As well as continuing to work on my own scores, over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with many other composers on a variety of projects. Most recently I have co-composed the score to Season 2 of Christopher Miller’s The Afterparty with the very talented Daniel Pemberton. I worked with John Lunn on music for the 8 part series The White Princess, initially using his themes and then developing many of my own as the series went on. Further collaborations have been with Ruth Barrett on Series 2 & 3 of Victoria with whom I later co-composed series 2 & 3 of Sanditon; I worked with Martin Phipps on Series 3 of The Crown, with Jocelyn Pook on The Kingmaker, and with Isobel Waller-Bridge on Vanity Fair. I later collaborated with Isobel to co-compose the score to the Focus / Working Title film, Emma.
I still love writing songs, and have a side project band, in analysis, which bases its songs on anonymously contributed stories. I rarely get time to work on songs for this as the soundtracks work has been so busy, but our first album was on the subject of mothers and you can listen it on Spotify, or elsewhere. On our website you can read all about that project (and even buy a limited edition yellow vinyl version), or contribute an anonymous story to our next album, which is on the subject of love… all profits from in analysis go to the charities, Mind and Samaritans.
I have a family that I really like which includes my lovely wife, Mary (a writer and art publisher), and four no-longer-so-small children who are just fantastic. We also have two cats… and a chicken. For many years when the kids were very small I worked in the loft of my house, but these days I am lucky enough to have a beautiful studio down the road, filled with amazing musical gizmos of every description which I get to play with on a daily basis.
Having written music for over 1,000 episodes of animation, and hundreds of hours of television, I like to think that at any given point there is someone in the world watching a show with my music on. I have no way of proving this is the case, but nor can it be proven to be untrue!
Anyway, please have a look around the site and listen to some of my music and feel free to get in touch.
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Studio photos by Sean Myers
(Recent) portraits by Charlie Gray
