I’m six. I’m in the living room with my Father’s conducting baton from his music college days pretending to conduct Gustav Holst’s Mars, God of War. It reminds me a little of Star Wars although I don’t yet know why... And though I don’t realize it at the time, waving the white baton through the air without any sense of tempo or meter, I have just taken my first steps on a journey that, as an adult, now seems to dominate my every waking thought.

The present: I’ve been cracking along at this ‘career’ for some time now. Sometimes I’ve done other things to support myself but the less said about those the better since, in my heart of hearts, I am a Film Composer. That’s right! I said it. Film Composer. It’s a fundamental part of who I am, woven into me at a molecular level. I live and breathe this career. I pretty much start my day thinking about it, and I finish my day thinking about it. I have charged myself to know as much as I possibly can of this art and craft, from it’s origins to its potential futures. 

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to benefit from the wisdom and experience of more established composers such as Jeff Rona, Patrick Doyle, George Fenton, Tim Simonec, Elan Eshkeri, Atli Orvarsson, Michael Levine, Harry Gregson Williams and Hans Zimmer who have all been exceptionally generous with their time. Given such wondeful example, I though I would start documenting my own experiences for the benefit of others in an attempt to share some of that insight. 

I got my first paid gig, pretty much straight out of university on a supernatural thriller called Nine Lives which starred a then not-yet-infamous Paris Hilton. Rewind. Arriving at the BRIT school – a specialist school for the Performing Arts - aged 16, I was convinced I was going to play guitar in a rock band. I was into fiddly widdly guitarists like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and John Petrucci etc. They are still a guilty pleasure it has to be said, but anyway, BRIT is a wonderful environment to be in if you’re young and creative because it provides you with teachers who care about the arts, great tools to learn with and contemporaries who are motivated to work with you. It’s an environment where you can feel very close to your dream which is a really positive thing when you’re developing. Prior to arriving at BRIT I had taken piano and guitar lessons and my Parents and Grandparents had made a sizable investment in both time, enthusiasm and finances to ensure that any natural aptitudes I had for music could be nurtured. Many people do not receive this gift because of their circumstances and their natural talents are not developed. In this respect, I am exceedingly fortunate and I owe my Parents and Grandparents, who have now passed away, a debt I will never be able to repay.

At the end of my time at BRIT, I made a deal with Mum & Dad. I could have a year out after BRIT to “make it!” but if it didn’t work out, I had to go to University. Now, at this point I’d had a little bit of success because I’d worked as a session guitarist with Andrew Lloyd Webber on a small project with Dame Kiri Tekanewa and Boyzone, so I felt like at the very least I was going to get session guitar work. Now, this was a schoolboy error as I was actually mistaking an isolated event for a trend, but hey... Actually, what happened during that year out was that, in the main, I worked in a call centre for about £5.50 an hour and went drinking a lot. I had yet to develop a work ethic and clearly had a lot to learn about my limitations in prediction and sales forecasting.

Reluctantly, because I felt that I hadn’t achieved what I’d set out to – I was not remotely on my way to becoming London’s top session musician - I ended up going to University to study Music & Media at Sussex University in Brighton where, for 3 years, I watched a lot of movies. I talked a lot about movies. I lay on the beach during summer and went clubbing a lot, all the while thinking about movies and, crucially, movie music.

By the time I graduated from University - with a 2.1, which I owe totally to my friend Chris who let me crib from him - my career aspirations had evolved. I knew it was unlikely that I would become a Rock Star and in fact, by now, I didn’t really want to be. I’d learned to be a lot more analytical about music which meant that I became far more appreciative of orchestral music. I had a strong sense that I loved music and movies and that I might be able to carve out a profession doing music for movies. But, I didn’t have a sense of how to get from a-to-b. I didn’t know how to get a job as a film composer. The answer came from Patrick Doyle.

For me, Patrick Doyle is a vastly under-rated film composer, and I hope if he ever reads this that he’ll take that in the spirit with which it was written. It is enough to say that when John Williams left the Harry Potter Franchise, Patrick was the first composer to replace him on the subsequent movies. He’s best known for his work with Kenneth Branagh but his back catalogue includes Disney fare like ‘Shipwrecked’ and the Brian de Palma classic ‘Carlito’s Way’ that, for me, features a beautiful, heart-rending string adagio which book ends the movie.

I’d written to Patrick without really expecting him to respond, but I got carried away in writing my letter describing why I loved film music and why I wanted to be a film composer. I stamped it, posted and then promptly forgot all about it. So, it all came as a bit of a surprise when he phoned me up one morning whilst I was getting ready for work and invited me to come and have lunch with him. I arrived at the train station and he was there to pick me up himself. We had a British pub lunch and then went back to his writing room - literally a room with a piano in it - on the Shepperton Studios lot where he proceeded to give me what I can only describe as a one-on-one master class in film composition. The key for someone starting out, he said, was to go to where actors are. His reasoning, having started life as an actor in Kenneth Brannagh’s theatre company, was that so long as they didn’t give up, eventually these actors either get cast in something or they become Directors. “Go to where actors are...” he said, prodding me in the chest to emphasize the point.

This is the point at which luck comes in to the equation. I say luck, but, what I could say instead is, being “open” enough to see opportunities that other people might have missed. I had a job street fundraising for charities. These days they’re referred to as chuggers; a maligned and misunderstood job that does far more good than bad. A lot of the people that do this job are out of work actors. It wasn’t design. I didn’t take the job so that I could be near all of these out of work actors, but it does rather reinforce the point that Patrick made to me. A girl who I worked with had a birthday party. I went and got talking to some guy who turned out to be an actor. He’d just got a part in a horror film… I convinced him to give me the production company number. The next day, nervously, I phoned it.

Most Production Companies employ “runners” to answer the phone and filter calls so that the ‘important’ people don’t have to speak with the ‘unimportant’ people – the salesmen and craftspeople looking for jobs. At the time this was (and often still is) ‘me’. However, today, for whatever reason, the Producer of the film answered the phone. I hadn’t expected to get through and was a little caught off guard. But, I blabbed out something about how I could do their score for them and would include worldwide rights (didn’t really know what it meant, but it sounded good) and could I send him my demo? I didn’t have a demo, but I thought he’d probably like to hear one… He agreed, and gratefully I hung up.

With the limited equipment that I had available to me, I put together a reel of music that I felt might be appropriate for a horror film and sent that on. I gave it a week and called the Producer. He and the Director had liked my reel but didn’t feel that there was a theme there. There wasn’t. I’d basically sent them a CD of generic horror music. They wanted a tune for the movie. So, back to the drawing-board, I wrote an eerie little musical motif – a 12 note ostinato figure - that they could use whenever something supernatural was going to happen. They loved it. As Hans Zimmer would later say to me, “Whether you eat or starve as a composer in Hollywood depends on whether you can write a good tune”. So, based on my tune, I got a meeting.

At this point, my modest studio set-up which didn’t even include a computer - I had a Korg X3 keyboard which was a workstation sequencer and a Roland VS1680 16 track hard-disc recorder - didn’t allow me to easily write to picture. Clearly a massive problem if you’re trying to get a job writing music for moving pictures. But, luckily, I knew a man who did have a modest studio set-up that allowed him to write to picture, and so I called my friend Josh and asked if he wanted to help me write a film score.

We went to the meeting together which was at the film’s production office on the Twickenham Film Studios lot. The Director looked about ten whilst the Producer looked about 40. The Producer clearly doubted whether we had what it took. Josh and I went into our best sales pitch – no, we hadn’t done any other films, nope - we hadn’t even done any telly and we hadn’t recorded with anyone famous either… We were a completely unknown quantity – which, if you’ve borrowed $4m to make a movie is probably not what you want to hear. But we really wanted the job and we told them that in no uncertain terms that we would work our asses off. Clearly a long shot, but, it transpired that the Director (being ten) also hadn’t done anything either and he quite liked the idea of working with other young people. So, we were in the running… We left the meeting, excited about what might happen and terrified that it would all be snatched away.

Several days passed before they phoned and told us that they wanted us to go “head-to-head” like something out of Battle Royale with another composer. They were talking to other composers? How could they? We were so naive it was actually a virtue because we didn’t realize how impossible our goal was. They asked us to write some music to actual footage from their film so that they could compare us to the other composers... We agreed. We didn’t have any other option. Armed with my 12 note motif and Josh’s studio - which is a simplification, but you get the point – we spent that weekend writing music to two scenes – a dramatic ‘talkie’ scene and an action scene. We submitted our CD, said our prayers and hoped for the best…

A few days later, I got ‘the call’. We were hired. No experience. No high-tech studio. Just a lot of enthusiasm and a willingness to try had gotten me my first feature film score credit.

That was in 2002 and it’s now 2009. In the time that’s passed, I’ve become proud Father to a cat called Obi Wan, bought a house, gotten married to my amazing Wife, Mitra, and written an awful lot of music. Some of the time, I’ve even been lucky enough to get paid for it.