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The Best Music in Film

Badly Drawn Boy

(Mercury Music prize winner Damon Gough composed the music for About A Boy)

S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?

"One that always springs to mind is Midnight Cowboy (1969). There are quite a few good moments in that soundtrack. There is the John Barry side of the score which is brilliant just as a thematical thing, which even if you're just listening to the soundtrack takes you back to moments in the film. It's a universal piece of music which stands alone, which is cool. And you've got the Fred Neil song as well which kick-starts the whole film; that's the most memorable bit of the whole film. Jon Voight is stood on the street and the start of 'Everybody's Talkin' kicks in and its just perfect again; the perfect balance of image and sound. It is really eclectic: the Barry stuff, the Neil song, which is very memorable, and then there's all this weird psychedelic music by bands of the day, for example, Elephant's Memory. There's so much diversity in that soundtrack. On a simple level, I'm a big fan of Michael Nyman's work, stuff like The Piano (1993); so together. The stuff he wrote made the film so perfect."

S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?

"I think the first thing it has got to do is somehow speak for the emotion in any particular scene. In Hollywood a lot of the composers get a lot of the work because it does boil down, in an ironic sense really, to the formulas. There's a lot of formulaic stuff. That's because it works. A hell of a lot of money gets spent on films so risk-taking is not a big part of what Hollywood wants to do. When I did the soundtrack for About a Boy (2002) it was pretty much a risk, because I was an unknown entity in terms of applying music to a film specifically. My music had been used in films before, but this is very different to actually writing music for a film. They don't want to take risks so a lot of the same composers will do the scoring that you will hear in blockbuster movies. I suppose that kind of makes them similar, makes it formulaic. What everybody, who want to do it well has to do, is to make the visual play better; somehow enhance the theme. That was one of the nicest thing I learnt whilst working on the film. Stephen McLaughlin, who was the score producer, taught me a lot about studying the pace of the scene and they do usually have a metre to them, even with no sound you can study the action, even if it's just two people in a room and a glance. Sometimes you have to play the action literally. I based the initial few songs on breaking down the script into the characters and writing from various viewpoints lyrically. It was largely guess work working on melodies and lots of chord structures to suit character. Different scenes suit different paces. There's one piece in About A Boy of a very successful marriage of sound and image. It is New Years Eve and Hugh Grant falls in love with Rachel Weisz's character. The piece is one of the most successful to listen to on its own. It is the nearest thing to a proper score in the film and merges themes from other songs in the film. It was of the most challenging pieces. It's probably been the most used piece of music that I have written. It has been used by the BBC as trailer music and by Nickelodeon, which undermines the fact that it was written for the scene really."

S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?

"Something that would be a huge challenge, I suppose, would be Citizen Kane (1941). It was a film that I boycotted watching for years because it was everybody's favourite film, and you think there's no point in watching it because your opinion has been taken away from you, and then when I watched it I thought: "Shit! Everybody's right" - it is amazing. I couldn't really remember the score, but just the stature of a project like that. At the moment I'm watching The Wizard of Oz (1930) at least ten times a day because my daughter is so into it. There is not a lot to be sniffed at in that film. Everything works so well. When Dorothy gets to Munchkin land there is like twenty minutes of Munchkin music!
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