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Never Meet Your Heroes – unless it’s Ennio Morricone

A Proud Day

Never meet your heroes, eh? Nothing could have been further from the truth when I was invited to Rome to work with one of my few all-time idols, the late Ennio Morricone. We were to record at Forum Music Village Studios, on what would sadly prove to be one of il maestro’s final projects.

I’ve adored his deeply-felt, highly idiosyncratic music since I was a kid – Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, even The Humanoid – and his immense influence can be heard in so much of my own work. If ever I found myself stuck for an emotional approach, I would ask myself ‘What would Ennio do?’

So as an utter fan-boy to finally encounter the man, it was a thrill to find he was everything that I could expect: completely focussed, a supreme musician and – once he realised I was a fellow composer and not some advertising exec – wonderfully gracious and warm.

Even at the venerable age of 90 and frail, he endured almost four hours on the podium conducting the hand-picked orchestra of Rome’s finest, meticulously crafting the brand-new 60-second piece he had created for MSC Cruises’ campaign.

When it came to the 40, 30 and 20-second cutdown versions, there were no separate arrangements or charts; he simply did the arithmetic in his head and dictated the cuts from the podium.

Back in the UK, my only task was to add additional rhythm and production elements for the final dub.

Riposa in Pace, Maestro. It was an honour.

ENNIO MORRICONE (10 November 1928 – 6 July 2020)

NEW CHOREOGRAPHY AT NORTHERN DANCE

Flores de la Noche premieres to invited audience

After a break of too long, I’ve recently returned to the joys of scoring contemporary dance and the excitement of a live audience.

Choreographed by Northern Dance’s Artistic Director Maxine Fell at their dance lab in Newcastle, FLORES DE LA NOCHE premiered March 2023 in a showcase of new and pioneering work in visual art, dance and film. The piece draws inspiration from a flower painting by the celebrated British painter Anthony Whishaw RA,– also on display – and explores notions of female sensuality.

Blending influences of loungecore, tango nuevo, flamenco, jazz and EDM, much of the score was improvised live in real time to the dance performers, and featured locally-based jazz soloist Giles Strong on acoustic steel-string guitar with me on accordion and bowed cymbal. It was exhilirating to respond musically to the moment-by-moment energy of the performers, as they turn fed on our spontaneity.

Visual artist David Leonard was responsible for FLORES’ delicate lighting design. We also previewed work-in-progress from David’s own longer-form dance work EPHEMERA: a film extract using AI technology to transform images of Maxine in performance. Also presented was David’s haunting visual art piece ROTATION, accompanied by the music of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir.

Picture shows performers Katherine Whale and Pagan Hunt, photo © David Leonard.

Birth of Valerie Venus Wins Score Award Nominations

NewFilmakers LA and Soundtrack Cologne Give Nods

So thrilled that both my score and Jane Guernier‘s hilarious and mischievous performance in Sarah Clift‘s comedy short The Birth of Valerie Venus have been recognised for the tenth annual Best of NewFilmmakers Los Angeles awards, as announced in Variety. The nominees are selected from the independent films screened as part of monthly NFMLA Festivals during 2021. The Awards and their prize fund honours the memory of producer Anthony Rhulen, the late founder of FilmEngine Entertainment. You can now watch the film on Disney+ here.

The score was also a finalist for the Peer Raben Music Award at Soundtrack Cologne, Europe’s leading congress for music and sound in film, games and media.

The Beaker Girls

A New Generation in the Beaker Universe

Jacqueline Wilson’s perennial character Tracy Beaker returns to our screens in THE BEAKER GIRLS. The new five-part series which I scored hits our screens this December, featuring many familiar faces – Dani Harmer (Tracy) and Emma Maggie Davies (bookish but tough Jess) and a few new ones like Jordan, played by Chi-Megan Ennis. It’s a real emotional rollercoaster of a series which looks at tough, genuine issues of identity, belonging and trust with a compassionate, unflinching but always entertaining eye. The score featured mandolin, banjo, ukelele, piano, Zebra softsynth and clarinet (Barnaby Robson). Photo here by Simon Ridgway

Courage is Beautiful Recognised for Top Honours

Campaign highlights the bravery of healthcare workers during pandemic

I am staggered at the response to this campaign, not only from the public but how this purpose-driven material has been selected for many of the highest awards in this business,  including the D&AD Yellow Pencil, the One Show Gold, the Clio Silver and perhaps the industry’s highest accolade the Cannes Golden Lion Grand Prix.

In support of frontline healthcare workers battling the pandemic, Dove and its parent company have donated over $100 million worth of soap, sanitising and care products since the outbreak. Honouring these key workers’ sacrifice and bravery, Ogilvy created the simple campaign Courage is Beautiful, featuring raw, powerful portraiture of these heroic individuals, their faces ravaged by the scars of PPE after shifts of untold stress.

I was approached to provide music for for the editors to cut the film version on a Friday afternoon in early April 2020. By the Sunday night, the first film was on air in Canada. It went on to many other countries where the donations were being made.

The track is available to stream or download wherever you get your music and is my first independent release, inspired by over two-thousand Shazam hits it received from the broadcast. Thanks to my dear friends Ben Dray for the cover photograph and Tom Climpson for the graphics. Click on the image below for the link.

The Birth of Valerie Venus

Score for BFI short film now available

My original score for writer/director Sarah Clift‘s mischievous and beautifully made short, The Birth of Valerie Venus is now available on to download or stream on all major platforms, as the film itself starts to gain awards around the world.

As Sarah puts it: “Trapped in a world of domesticity and servitude, long suffering vicar’s wife Valerie (55), has spent a lifetime serving others. At her wits’ ends, she makes a quiet plea to the Virgin Mary, who answers her prayers in the form of a strange force. Convinced she is possessed, Valerie fights her path to enlightenment every step of the way, until she realises there actually might be some benefits to being kind to yourself.”

The score draws on Baroque minimalism and Tango elements, and was performed by founder member of the London Tango Quintet, David Juritz (violin) and Nicholas Holland (cello).

Continuing the Legend

Scoring My Mum Tracy Beaker and some thoughts about my own family history

My Mum Tracy Beaker has been CBBC’s biggest ever launch, racking up over 2.1 million streams on iPlayer in the first weekend alone and setting social media reaction on fire in early 2021.

I have to confess the world of Tracy Beaker – Jacqueline Wilson’s feisty ‘problem child’ –  had escaped me.  I was born too early for it to hit my childhood viewing or reading.  All the same, I knew Tracy was an essential part of the cultural landscape for my children.  Blimey, hadn’t Stormzy even quoted the theme tune?

So when long-time collaborator, producer/director John McKay (Compact Pictures) invited me to come aboard this new chapter for CBBC –  My Mum Tracy Beaker – it was a great thrill and opportunity to be part of the canon, but I needed to bone up quickly – I immediately devoured the previous series over several days.

John saw the new series as a love story between mother and daughter, seen through the eyes of Tracy’s daughter Jess.  Along the way, it examines ideas of home and stability, and more sombre questions of mental health, parenting and childhood trauma – something which resonated, of which more later.

It was clear the bond between Tracy and Jess needed an emotional thread, a simple, tender and honest musical idea to return to. After a few false starts, I presented a slightly hymnal, almost folk piano sketch which I performed to John on the on a Zoom call and it seemed to hit the spot – aspects of sanctuary and tenderness. With his encouragement I found it blooming into an expansive second section under my fingers, before returning to the spare, opening mood and a gentle resolution; John could hear this forming a Heart and Home theme and it became a central element of the score.

The script was shouting for other musical reactions, so even before they were shooting – under Covid restrictions, of course – I started to present other character sketches to John and CBBC exec Spencer Campbell in Zoom meetings.  John and I often work like this – it’s very much a dialogue in the early stages, trying things out, writing away from the picture, trying to capture the spirit of the story in character sketches and subtextual layers.  On occasion, a musical approach might trigger a bold editing idea or even a new sequence – always exciting.

First was a potential title theme for Tracy in her groove, on top of her world: confident, cheeky, with a hard-won toughness but not without emotional depths. I heard rhythms of reggae and ska, the dubby sounds of a diverse, contemporary Britain, with eclectic instruments for the melody: banjo, melodica and the Arabic oud.  A toy piano – and elsewhere mandolin – consciously evoked Tracy Beaker Returns in a nostalgic nod to Joby Talbot’s delightful earlier work. The fresh, swaggering theme found a perfect home in the opening sequence, here.

To reflect Tracy’s hair-trigger rage when threatened or challenged, and perhaps work as a main title theme, I created a kind of 80s-pop stomp-and-clap with a playground-type chant.  I went through several versions improving it or so I thought, making it punchier, busier, ever more aggressive, but John kept returning to the demo for its simplicity and sense of fun. I think they even dubbed the demo into the final film, despite our slicker later mixes

For me, the character of our narrator Jess – precocious, bookish, perhaps as wilful as her mother – called for something naïve yet spirited which we found useful for bridging passages, to suggest time passing and things changing.  Here it melts into luxurious loungecore as they arrive at Sean’s swanky pile.

Much as I made every play to bag the theme tune, it was perhaps inevitable that nothing could displace the original Keisha White song Someday, so long and affectionately associated with the Beaker universe.  EP Spencer approached the original producer/co-writer Brian Harris who soon brought us several new versions with a fresh vocal from Keisha: a cool, dark R&B mix edit became our end-title music, and the fabulous disco-tastic arrangement got a star appearance in the wedding scene.

The score was mixed by my long-serving engineer Steve Parr. Given the geographical and Covid constraints, we were forced to mix remotely. In a successful first experiment, we had Steve operate my computer workstation here in Newcastle from his facility in London, while I simultaneously streamed the full-resolution audio back to him. We kept in contact via a continuous WhatsApp call on our phones – it worked a dream and saved loads in time and travel costs.

The Heart and Home theme runs through the story whenever Tracy chases a dream of stability for her and Jess, something Tracy wasn’t lucky enough to experience consistently in her own upbringing.  There’s something bittersweet about it that seems to make it work on both happy and more melancholy scenes.

It wasn’t until I was in sight of the finishing line, polishing the closing cue with more mandolin and starting to relax, that I had a small epiphany: so much of the story in fact had deep echoes in my own family history, echoes now triggering a wave of unexpectedly powerful emotion in me.  At once I recognised again the many parallels between Tracy’s story and that of my own, dear late mother, whose upbringing had brought its own challenges and struggles throughout her life.  While their personalities could not have been more different, I realised what I had been writing for Tracy B, I had also been writing for her.

So Mum, this one’s for you.

Barbara Jean Sargent (née Jones) 1930 – 2003