Blair Mowat's 'Nolly'
CineConcerts met with composer Blair Mowat to discuss his score to the new series Nolly!
Composer Blair Mowat
CineConcerts (CC): Where are you from, and how did you get onto this career path?
Blair Mowat (BM): I played music from a very early age and had a family member, a woman called Sanchia Pielou, who was a very famous harpist in Scotland. My mum got me playing the harp from a very early age. I was doing piano lessons and harp lessons but I wasn’t a great student and I didn't really connect with music until I discovered rock and pop music as a teenager. I then discovered guitar and songwriting And started writing my own songs and I also started playing in a band along with doing music academically at school. It started to dawn on me, because of my love of filmmaking and films as well, that there was this job where you could write music for film. When I realized that was something I could potentially do, I just had laser focus with that being my end goal. This was from about the age of 16, which is why I think I managed to be quite prolific.
CC: Were you inspired at that age by a specific score?
BM: I saw Elmer Bernstein do a concert of his music with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow. I was about 11 years old. I would later conduct the RSNO and record one of my film scores with them - the same city that I saw Elmer Bernstein conduct his music. And I was rescoring a remake of a film that Elmer Bernstein scored in 1972. It was a film called The Amazing Mr. Blunden. It was a full circle moment for me as I was recording with the same orchestra that I saw him with when I was a kid and that inspired me to realize that film music was a big deal.
I went off to university to study music, the history, the philosophy behind it and also composition itself, orchestration, armed with what I needed to know so I could prioritize certain things. I actually prioritized my extracurricular activities at university over my academic. I mean, I still got a good marks but instead of like spending weeks on my essays, I would do them the night before and I would spend that time orchestrating film scores by ear to then conduct with the orchestra at university. I could take film scores that weren't commercially available. I was transcribing, these film scores, and I was also adapting, pieces by bands.
I did, sort of concert work called the Radiohead Transcriptions, which was one bar of one Radiohead song, two bars of another, three bars of another, four bars, and they were all joined together. And I knew that the students loved Radiohead because it was very trendy. I postered all around the colleges with this mysterious thing that just said “The Radiohead Transcriptions” with one of the Radiohead logos, and then just put the date and the time that it was happening. I didn't tell them that we were also doing and I almost got in trouble with the president of the orchestra because I'd ordered a whole bunch of lighting to make it look nicer and make it feel more cinematic. He told me that we probably can't afford that because we didn't know what the audience size was going to be. So, I took a gamble, ordered it, and then told him, I said, you know what? If people don't turn up, I will pay for this myself. But I guarantee you we're going to get a good crowd. And we did and he was happy. For a moment he was like, Blair, what have you done?
CC: Let’s jump to Nolly. The score seems fun, festive, and pompous at times, but also soft and lonely. How were you approached to work on this project?
BM: I was speaking to the writer, an executive producer of that show, Russell T. Davies, over email about something else and he said to me in one of his replies, “Hey, we're actually looking for a composer right now for this project that I've written about a very famous soap star who was like one of the most famous people in the UK back in the 60’s to the 80’s, Noel Gordon.” He’d said nobody of my age would probably really remember or think about her now, but she was such a huge deal. She was sacked without ceremony, just really brutally. He wanted to tell the story of that part of her life and wanted to right a wrong and to celebrate her life. This woman had gone through something very difficult and really struggled to understand at the time, and Russell wanted to chart that emotional journey.
CC: It's a character study, right?
BM: It's a character study of somebody that's no longer culturally relevant. So how do you sell that to a broadcaster? Well, the way that you sell it is you get arguably one of the best writers in the UK to write it. You hire the guy who won the BAFTA for directing who's Peter Hoar, who also directed It's a Sin and was recently Emmy nominated for The Last of Us. Then you get a superstar like Helena Bonham Carter who is arguably one of the most recognizable English actresses in current times, and then, of course, it becomes commercially viable.
I went off and I spoke to Peter Hoar, the director, who I met for the first time. I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who. I grew up watching Doctor Who since I was a toddler. Peter is also a fan which is probably what drew us towards Russell T. Davies and ended up working with him because we're all just huge geeks.
Peter and I had a wonderful conversation about the character of Nolly, who she is, her emotional journey, and he listened to a whole bunch of tracks from other projects that I've done. After our conversation, he went back to Russell and he said, yeah, we’ve got to hire this guy. So, I was brought on really early on. They hadn't shot it yet. This was a script stage. I had the luxury of being able to sit down at the piano to find a theme. I ended up deciding that there should be two themes for her, because reading the script, it was clear that when she was at work, she was a very different character than when she was by herself.
The loneliness that you describe, there is a kind of a bittersweet melancholy. She was very happy being by herself at home. She would, as you'll see in the show, pay a lot of attention to learning her lines and working. She took her job very seriously because it was her life. She had some relationships, but they were affairs. There was somebody very significant in her life, but he was married. So, there was a slight loneliness to her existence. But she had an amazing friend who we meet in the show who's called Tony, who lived opposite her whom she spent a lot of time with.
There’s a lot of joy to the show, as there always is with Russell's writing of course. I knew when I read the script, there was this moment in the script where it says the music soars, at the end of the show she looks back across her entire life. I knew that's where emotionally we had to end up. So, I created a theme for her when she first comes home in episode one that gave me the latitude to be able to do something quite epic and quite sweeping at the end, that was the first thing that I had to work out. Once I had that, I then focused on what I called the “Nolly at Work” theme, which is very peppy and energetic, it has a rhythm and that very much comes from Russell's writing. I think there's a rhythm and there's a quickness to Russell's writing, the wit, the way that people speak to each other, and I really needed to support that.
One of the other scenes I did very early on in episode one is where she is rehearsing and she's kind of emasculating the director by taking charge. She's rewriting the scripts and figuring things out. So, you might hear the typewriter sometimes in score, which kind of mixes in with the percussion elements. I sampled the typewriter and created my own typewriter instrument and mapped it out onto the keyboard so that when I was having to compose it relatively quickly, because once you get the episodes, it's TV and TV moves very fast. I was able to use the typewriter as a percussion instrument, including the sounds of when you're changing lines, you get that kind of sound.
Once I had her “Work” theme, I knew if I had two great themes, that I felt represented who she is.
CC: It's pretty cool that you came in so early. That's rare for a lot of composers, right? Because they always come in at the end when stuff's been shot and so were you able to use some of these rough sketches while they were editing?
BM: Peter came up with some musical influences of other scores. I mean, very eclectic. There was a lot of old stuff from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, etc. and the first time we met in person, I'd also created a list of stuff, and we realized that there was some crossover, having not even really spoken about particular scores or composers. We already had some common ground, which is when I think Peter and I realized that this was this is going to work really well because we were already thinking the same thing. It was great to be able to have that luxury.
I got in there giving them temp score which included some of my own pieces. There was an issue in a scene where I had used give some stuff from another show I worked on and they got a little bit attached. Not too attached, for it to be a problem, but they really loved this piece of music. I remember Peter saying, “I don't know how you top this because I just love this and it just works. It works perfectly.” We couldn’t use it because the publishing is owned by somebody else but there was something in that emotionally that he was saying, how do we replicate this? Thankfulky, I'd already come up with this theme. I took some inspiration from my own orchestration, from this other piece of music and I knew that this theme was going to fit better than what we had there. Once he heard it, he completely agreed.
CC: Is that the toughest thing for you as a composer? When the producers and directors get attached and you need to detach them a bit?
BM: It can be tricky. I think I've been really lucky in general in my career that it hasn't happened too many times, and I do tend to get on stuff very early. All the other shows that I have worked on with the same production company that made Nolly, called Key Street Productions. I've been on that script stage, the project was greenlit, but they hadn't shot it yet.
For shows like After the Flood, which is one that I did recently, I sent them a whole bunch of stuff. They had a whole library of stuff that was bespoke to the actual show. I wrote the main theme very early on, which then became the main titles when I adapted that, and they had loads of stuff to play around with the edit. That was so useful, because the sound of the show then becomes the idiosyncratic, bespoke material that I've come up with, and it's not a copy of somebody else.
CC: What is your process like for projects like this? Do you have to internalize the characters and understand the story? Do you begin on a piano?
BM: I actually find you write better themes on a real piano. If you sit down and you try to write themes on the keyboard using a piano sample, it should be theoretically the same because we have amazing piano samples now. But when you actually are in a room with the real piano and it resonates with the overtones in the way that pianos do. I think it's more inspiring. You write better themes. So, I always start at the actual piano itself. Then quite quickly, once I find the musical material I want to use, I then go from there and I start orchestrating stuff out in the computer.
CC: Do you ever get inspired randomly? Do you have a recorder on you at times when you're not near a piano?
BM: Sometimes I'm singing into my phone. I use the voice notes on my phone. If I'm really deep into a project, sometimes that happens. Once it happened to me when I was in the bath and I had to get out the bath because my phone was on the other side of the room. I've not finished my bath yet, but I'm going to have to sing this at the piano and I think I went through to my studio because this is when I was back in my mid-twenties, I was living in London and I went over to the studio dripping wet to start playing stuff. I was searching for a particular theme. It was actually a show called Class, which was a Doctor Who spin off, an eight-part TV series that we did back in 2016. I had to get out the bath when I found the theme, Charlie and Quill's theme. It doesn't happen very often. Usually, I'm at the piano.
CC: I have to imagine, you're doing something just mundane, and then all of a sudden, you see or hear something and you're like, “I got it!”
BM: For me, it tends to happen more conceptually than musically, like thinking about instrumentation or warping something or using a combination of instruments or a stylistic thing. When I compose, I very often have a sheet of paper in front of me, but I'm not drawing musical notes on it. Very often I'm actually writing down words, and I'm writing down conceptual ideas for how the score might come together and become interesting in terms of mixing styles or mixing orchestration. For Nolly, for example, I started to be very drawn to swing elements and jazz elements for the stuff that’s happening at work. I sent Ryan Russell a few things to listen to, like a musical mood board, he kind of pushed me away from the from the jazz stuff and said, “I'm not a massive fan of the jazz stuff.” That for me was really difficult because it was early on and I know that swing is going to help so much when she's at work. Sometimes when somebody gives you a note like that, because you're not speaking to somebody who is primarily a musician, you sometimes have to read between the lines and jazz encompasses such a wide variety of stuff. He wasn't saying, don't use swing rhythms or those kind of jazzy elements, because then the score becomes a fusion of bits of jazz, and then this toy band thing where we're using a snare drum and a melodica, and loads of banjo as well, which is incredibly quirky. That started to come in a little bit, to represent the quirkiness of Nolly the character.
Instrumentation is a really good way of making something feel unique, because if you use piano and strings, obviously we do use piano and strings in this particular space. If that's the only instrument you use that’s tough. There's only certain moments in musical history where people like Bernard Herrmann managed to do it with Psycho, for example. He managed to change the way that we interact with a string orchestra because of the techniques that he was using at that particular point. So, it can happen.
CC: It seems to me then, as you're sitting at the piano sketching things out, you already have done the orchestration in your mind. So, if you're playing a theme, you're already getting a sense that this is going to be sort of a swing or a jazzy feel or maybe potentially on a banjo. You've already kind of mapped that out?
BM: Not always when I'm at the piano. I'm starting to think about stuff, in terms of instrumentation, but it's really when I come to the computer and I start playing around with instrument combinations that that happens. Having that sheet of paper in front of me where I'm writing down ideas and testing them out and seeing how they blend, because when you're trying to create new orchestrations, you don't necessarily know how they're going to blend. There is an established way of orchestrating where certain instruments complement each other in the classical concert world. When you're working in the medium of film score, especially if you're working on something where you're trying to do something that sounds unique to that project, I think you have to experiment inside the actual computer to see, well, does that actually work?
That’s where I think as composers, we're very lucky in comparison to the generation that came before, because they would have to sit there on the piano and play it. John Williams would sit down and play it to Spielberg and be like, “Well, this is going to be on the horns and, etc.” They did that type thing. Now they get to hear it really well realized with orchestral mockups and they need to. They want to. I think that has actually made us, perhaps better orchestrators as composers because we have to do the whole thing.
Our orchestrators now have less latitude to play around with stuff. In the old days, you could send something to an orchestrator with the melody and the harmony and then say, “I want this on the horns, I want this on the flutes,”. Orchestration is so intertwined with the composition that almost everything I do is violin one, violin two, viola, everything is color coded. You go into this extreme detail which actually makes the job of an orchestrator, I think, more boring. They used to be able to put their stamp on stuff, and they are less able to do that now because everything has been approved in such immaculate detail.
CC: And there's expectation that you're going to deliver that.
BM: Yeah and people get used to the sound of the sampled instruments and the temp score effects, and can become attached to the temp score, sometimes they'll get attached to the way a certain instrument sounds. Just in the same way that the Beatles would do these demos that were out of tune and then when they heard the stuff that was in tune, they were saying something was wrong because it was—they call it the demo effect—and it was burned into their brain that that's how the song sounds.
It can sound wrong, and you have to teach people that there is this psychological thing that happens in your brain when you get used to something that becomes familiar. The novelty of something new can then sound wrong. But it doesn't mean that it is wrong just because your audience is hearing this for the first time. If it's a better version of it, then you have to rely on the fact that they're going to be able to spend enough time with that new version that they that it will turn out better. There can be a moment where it can scare us as composers, where somebody says, “I kind of preferred the old version.” It's not always better, but they prefer it because they know it. That’s just something you have to do in any job where you're working with a client, basically.
CC: How do you separate yourself? For a cue you really, really love that potentially might not work, at least in another creative’s mind. Is that hard to do?
BM: It can be absolutely brutal sometimes I have to write an impassioned email arguing intellectually why perhaps, you know, it would be good to go this way. I don't do it very often. I call it the hill to die on. Directors have this as well, where they choose their hill to die on and they're say, “No, have another listen, have another look at that.” You get one maybe on each project when you start with somebody new because you don't want to be someone who isn't collaborative or is difficult to work with.
You might get one on the first project with somebody, and then on the next project you might get two. When you establish a really good working relationship with them, you maybe you get like 3 or 4. That doesn't mean that you actually get to die on the hill, but you can give it a good shot. I think a good executive producer should recognize in terms of keeping their creatives happy, that as long as they're winning 95% of the time, if you're a creative who is just unbelievably passionate about something and it's not necessarily wrong, but it's just different? Then I think it's wise from a morale perspective to give somebody a win.
CC: And I think so too. The director has a vision, the composer has a vision, the set designer has a vision, right? Everybody has their own sort of vision. I mean, if you don't allow them to express themselves through their work, then what's the point?
BM: Yeah, there's got to be a little bit of latitude there. At the end of the day, it is a job. You are being paid money. Yes, it's art as well, but it is a business where it's not just for fun and you do have to keep your bosses happy. It's one of the most important things, the people who hired you should walk away and say, “I really enjoyed that interaction.” I think sometimes you being really passionate about something and showing that you care so much that you've written a 500-word email about why this should be this way. I think people actually like that because you’ve got this guy who cares. This guy isn't going in at nine and leaving at five.
I’ve literally had sleepless nights trying to work out, I still want to do it this way, and they want to go that way, so I need to at least argue my case. It really does not happen that often. You choose those hills to die on. Usually, it's often that version one is approved, if they hire the right person and you share the vision, most of it is going to go through just fine. But then occasionally I think you're well within your right to at least open it up for discussion.
CC: Is there anything in particular that people should listen for I the score? Is there anything that you’re particularly proud of as composer?
BM: I really love the opening track, “Nolly Goes to War” because, as that progresses, and especially towards the end of it, I think it's a really good example of what I call the toy band. It’s got this jazz bass, like plucked bass stuff going on and all the percussion. I think that's a really fun track where we’ve got a lot of little quirky details in it.
That happens in other tracks, on “Undercover Operation”, there's one called “Sam Hurst,” “The Funeral.” Those tracks I think are really good examples of that kind of cool, toy band thing that we came up with for this.
The other track that's really connected with people and the one that has the most plays on the album is called “Looking Back on Life.” Ironically, that's kind of steering into more traditional territory, in terms of instrumentation. But emotionally, that has really connected with people because the very end of Nolly, not wanting to give away any spoilers, there's a four-minute montage scene which has very, very little dialog in it. I mean, interspersed with moments of dialog, but it's music driven and it said that in the script that the music soars and this big orchestra, etc., etc.. so that is the track that people keep going back to and they want to listen to.
Everybody’s going to die one day, and everybody's going to look back on their life, and it's going to be bittersweet because it's not all going to be great. Some of it's going to be joyous and I think that bittersweet feeling of somebody looking back at their life is obviously something that we don't think about every day, but it's something that's quite emotionally attractive to us to think about and future casts. How are we going to feel at the end of our life? Did we lead it well?
I think emotionally, I managed to capture something in that because I was so emotional writing it because I didn't know who Gordon was when I first came on this project. At the age that I am, I didn't really watch Crossroads, but by the end of it, I'd really fallen in love with Noele as a character and because she was a real character when I was watching her, looking back through her life, I'd got to know everything about how she lived it, I genuinely was emotionally celebrating the entire life of a real person, and I knew that people who knew her were going to be watching this.
I know that the some of the actors who were in Crossroads actually make a cameo at the end of that sequence, and obviously they're going to be watching it. So, I felt this huge responsibility when I was talking earlier about writing a role, in terms of what he was trying to do with the show. He was trying to go back and celebrate her life in a way that he felt was more appropriate than how it ended. That's a huge emotional responsibility. I literally cried and that's when I knew that it was working because I was sitting there doing my job and it was really emotionally affecting me.
If I'm getting goosebumps and it's making the hairs stand up on my arms, then I know that it's going to do that for other people as well, because I've heard that piece hundreds of times as I was composing it. I've seen that sequence hundreds of times and if it's still doing that to me at the end of it, then I think that's when, you know, okay, I think we got this.