Four Hours at the Capitol

When Jamie Roberts (Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty) approached me to score his new film, a feature doc on the January 6th Capitol riots, I was really excited to take on the project. But it was only when I watched the first assemblies and saw the protestors’ own footage from the day, that I realised how significant an event it was, and how much worse things could have been.

I wrote a few early sketches for the film earlier in the summer, and then sadly my father passed away in July. I was at his bedside quite a bit in the last couple of weeks (luckily he was at home rather than in hospital) and the day before he died I was playing around on the piano as he quite liked to hear me playing. That day I wrote a theme that I ended up using in a few cues of this film (in the track ‘What If?’ among others). It felt like a kind of death march for democracy.

Dan Reed, the producer (and director of the amazing film, Leaving Neverland) and Jamie wanted the score to be epic, at times adrenaline fuelled and building in intensity, but also have a gravitas and sense of importance matching the subject and the setting of that day’s events. I decided to use a lot of horn in the score, which was brilliantly played by Meredith Moore. There’s also some cello (courtesy of the excellent Nick Holland) and I dusted off my clarinet to play on a few tracks. I even bought myself a bass clarinet for the first time which I used on a couple of cues. I wrote the score in a very short time which I think helps add to a sense of coherence across the score. We are hoping to release a soundtrack to the film in due course, but in the meantime, I’ve posted a handful of cues from the film here.

The film is going out on October 20th on BBC in the UK and HBO in the US. Other countries will be broadcasting it soon too, I believe.

The Financial Times described it as a ‘terrifying, suspenseful account of a dark day’.

UPDATE January 2022: I’m pleased to report that the soundtrack for Four Hours at the Capitol is out now on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and the other digital places you might go to to find music.