In this episode, Neil and Jason talk to the prolific British composer David Lowe about his rise to success, and his musical milestones along the way… From work experience at BBC Radio Birmingham, to composing the BBC theme that has heralded the corporation’s global News output for more than 25 years. With familiar theme tunes for internationally syndicated TV programmes such as ‘Grand Designs’ and ‘5th Gear’, unforgettable commercials for British Airways and DHL, and even a number 1 in the Indie chart, it’s all been a dream come true for a Sutton Coldfield schoolboy with a passion for synthesizers.
About the presenters:
You can find more about David and his work here
Details about Neil and Jason’s work as dialogue editors and mixers and how to contact them is here
Details of our 1-to-1, training and coaching programmes for ambitious media professionals are available at:
https://www.drneilhillman.com and https://soundproducer.com.au/coaching and www.soundformovingpictures.com
Technical notes:
Written, produced and presented by Jason Nicholas and Dr Neil Hillman – IMDb
Recorded using the CleanFeed remote recording system
Programme edited by Jason Nicholas
YouTube fair use disclaimer:
Where copyrighted material appears in episodes of The Apple and Biscuit Show, it is used under the ‘fair use’ guidelines of the Copyright Act: i.e. “Use of these clips follows Fair Use laws regarding commenting and criticizing”, where Fair Use allows for the unlicensed use of copyrighted material for purposes such as Commentary, Criticism, Parody, News reporting, Teaching, Scholarship, and Research.
In instances where copyright or credit is questioned, please contact us directly to discuss receiving credit, or removing the featured content.
Transcript:
Announcer Rosie
You’re listening to the Apple and Biscuit Show with Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman.
Neil Hillman
Hello and a very warm welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Neil Hillman.
Jason Nicholas
And I’m Jason Nicholas.
Neil Hillman
We’re two experienced film and television sound professionals with an insatiable curiosity for everything and anything aural, whether it’s the way that sound design is implemented in a movie to evoke emotional response in an audience or the way that the characteristics of sound can influence human behaviour in our everyday lives.
Jason Nicholas
And whilst our day jobs involve us being supervising sound editors, dialogue editors, and re -recording mixers, our academic backgrounds have given us a slightly different take on our moving picture sound design work. Neil’s doctoral research involved the way that sound design can influence and affect human emotions, and my interests lie in human ecology and psychology.
Neil Hillman
Our call to action is to create awareness of the often underestimated but powerful way that sound can be used in modern film production. And from this we also aim to foster a genuine ongoing connection with our listeners as they develop a new or renewed love for the medium of sound, especially sound for moving pictures through the wider aspects of sound that we examine and present as a way to expand the boundaries and possibilities for imaginative filmmakers.
Jason Nicholas
So hopefully the content of our podcast and the guests who join us will prove enlightening to anyone with an interest in filmmaking, regardless of their level of experience. Maybe you’re a student just embarking on your studies, an industry newcomer, or you’re already an experienced professional. Maybe you just love movies. Wherever you join us from, you’re welcome along, and as always, we know that there’ll be plenty that we can learn from today’s guest, the composer, David Lowe.
Neil Hillman
David is one of the busiest and most successful composers working in television. And if you don’t recognize his name, I guarantee you’ll recognize his music…
[Music plays]
David, welcome. Are you well? And where do we find you?
David Lowe
Hi, both of you. Very nice to be here. Well, I’m in the UK. I’m in the lovely Cotswolds near Chipping Norton, where Jeremy Clarkson lives about five minutes away. So yeah, that’s where I am.
Neil Hillman
Those were familiar tunes to British ears, David. And just in case at home, you’re going, ah, which program was that one? We played the themes for the BBC News, The Antiques Roadshow and The One Show, as well as the hugely successful internationally syndicated television program Grand Designs. But for our international listener, we could have played music that introduces television programs on Al Arabiya in Dubai, Abu Dhabi TV, NDTV in India, TV2 in Norway and CCTV1 in China. Have we left out any territories where your music hasn’t been heard, David?
David Lowe
Well, I did do the music for Bloomberg TV which was over in America and I’ve also done Euro News which was broadcast pretty much a a lot over Africa and the Middle East.
Neil Hillman
Fabulous. Well, I wish I’d received a royalty payment for the total number of 5th Gear shows I mixed where your theme music was played for the opening titles and the closing credits. In the UK alone, the show ran in a prime-time slot for 150 1-hour episodes. And then every episode was later remixed for overseas syndication… So literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of programming was chopped and tailed with your work. But if we may, can we go back to pre-full-time composer days? The listener won’t know this, but you and I attended the same high school, Riland Bedford in Sutton Coldfield, just outside Birmingham. But you were in the year ahead of me, so as these things go, we didn’t really have that much to do with each other. And for most of that time, the late 1970s, we as students were prepared by our high school for a career in the engineering and manufacturing industries that Birmingham was known for. But you’d started to follow a different path whilst you were still at school, so can you tell us about your love of music as a child, your interest in keyboards, and how it was that this led to your first involvement with sound production at a radio station?
David Lowe
Yeah, well, I was always, I suppose, had music going on in my head all the time. I didn’t really think about it as a kid. I always used to think that everybody was the same. And it was almost, I suppose, a way of getting over fear or anxiety, I’d always hum a little tune, if something was a bit scary to myself. And I was brought up on…
Neil Hillman
You’d “give a little whistle”…
David Lowe
Give a little whistle, exactly that. And I was sort of brought up on, I suppose you’d call it easy -listing music, in those days, my parents had the radio on all the time, it was all that sort of stuff. So I was tuned in to melodies and good melodies and then also theme tunes in those days were much more melodic and tune -based in a way and latched on to those as well. So I was always music bubbling away and I used to tinkle around on the piano and a bit later on synthesizers started to appear and I got into electronic music in the sort of mid -70s. And all sorts of stuff was coming out. There was a guy called Tomita. In fact, my dad introduced me to it. It was this guy called Tomita that did classical music. He did Debussy on synthesizer, and that album’s still available now called ‘Snowflakes Are Dancing’, and it was a game changer for me. And on the back of the album, they had synthesizers that he’d used listed, you know, with a picture of him sitting in front of all these cables and knobs and things. And it was like the Bose ring modulator and Roland so and so and so and so. And I was like enthralled by the whole thing. So, we used to sort of go into town in Birmingham. There was a couple of music shops there that had keyboards in. And of course, they were way out of our price range, but we used to sort of dabble around and we were 15-year-olds just, “Can we just play it a bit?” And I go, “Oh, listen to this, wow, it sounds incredible.” So, I was really into that. And I suppose I was always interested in television and radio as well, from a backstage point of view when I was a kid growing up. And I had that book, you could get the Lady Bird Book of Television and there was a picture of BBC Television Centre in the front flap cover. And I’d be looking at it, go, oh, look, there’s that studio there, and there’s that. I was completely enthralled by how it all worked, and there’s a program called Blue Peter, which we all remember. And there were occasionally, they’d have wide shots of the studio, if they were bringing something in through the studio doors, and you could see the cameras, and you could see the lights, and, oh, there’s outside, oh, wow, there’s it, I was just totally blown away by all that. But I didn’t really think of it as a career as such, because obviously, I used to think, well, how does it, how does a guy from Sutton Coldfield get into the BBC? And pretty much then the BBC was all there was, you know, and ITV, but the BBC was the thing. And it wasn’t till really the sixth form that it all started to gel a bit. And I went to a careers talk at our local town hall and lo and behold, there was a BBC careers stand. And I walked up tentatively and said, “Oh, I want to work at the BBC.” And the guy said, “Well, what do you want to do at the BBC? “There’s hundreds of jobs at the BBC. “You could work in the kitchens. “You could work in the thing. “You could be an engineer. “You could be what? “You’ve got to decide what you want to do.” And he gave me this sheath of papers of careers at the BBC and I’ve still got them somewhere. I used to pour all over them and stuff. And then a bit later on, we were at school, and we used to get these careers talks, optional in the sixth form, where somebody will come in and talk about their business and their work in that sort of area. And I went along one afternoon, as a teacher from school was giving the talk that week. He talked all about the BBC and he’d done some sort of work experience at BBC Local Radio in Birmingham. And he was talking to us, telling us all about how the BBC worked, how radio worked. And I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s so what I want to do.” So afterwards I said, “Look, that’s really what I’m interested in doing.” And he said, “Well, as it happens, I do this show for young people at the weekend, and they get guys your age to come in and help out. You know, I’ll give Roger the producer a ring now.” And he took me to his office. I’ll just remember it very clearly, going to his office, giving Roger Thomas the producer a ring. “I’ve got this guy David in, he’s interested in coming along, can he come along?” And he said, “yeah, send him on Saturday.” And I was like, wow, that was I think 1976 or something. And then, literally, I walked into the BBC in Birmingham, which wasn’t just the local radio, it was television as well.
Neil Hillman
They used to produce network TV shows, and dramas there. Pebble Mill – Pebble Mill was a regional broadcast centre…
David Lowe
Absolutely, and they had a live show every lunchtime, a live chat show every lunchtime, so that would always be going on. So the whole place was this buzz of excitement and activity of making television shows. Of course, I was absolutely enthralled with it, and I arrived at the radio studio, and there were a bunch of guys in there who said, “Oh, right, okay, this is Dave”, and then I just stood and watched. There wasn’t really any like, “okay, you’re doing this, you’re doing that.” It was just like, okay, just turn up. And I said, “well, can I come next week?” They said, yeah, come along. And it was so casual, you know. And so, I just kept going in every week and then eventually got more and more to do. And they were giving us training about how to edit, do interviews to go out. We could go out and do our own interviews, come back, edit them, put them together, put them on the show, a bit of presenting, then of course, actually drive, they used to call it driving the show because they had the presenter in the booth. We were in the control room in front of the panel. And so, we had to sit and actually, the presenter just used to do the talking. We secure in all the records that was on vinyl then. So you’re queuing up the vinyl.
Jason Nicholas
That’s incredible.
David Lowe
Yeah.
Neil Hillman
Yeah, it was ages before they were self-op studios, wasn’t it?
David Lowe
Absolutely, so it was all like that. So, queuing up the vinyl, you had like, you used to call it a slip mat underneath, so you could hold that, set the turntable going, and at the right point, you just let go. It was just like, the music could start, you know, it was such good fun. And then we had jingles, we had a whole jingle, rack of jingles, and tapes, and then there’d be phone -ins, and they expanded this show to like two hours live on a Sunday morning. And by that point, I was pretty much making the show, you know, you could choose what records you wanted on, you could go and do interviews and things if you wanted, and-
Jason Nicholas
So how old were you again here?
David Lowe
I was about 17, 18 then, yeah, 18 I think. And I got that, I suppose, I really latched onto the sound side of things. I was really interested in sound. The technical and creative mix I think really appealed to me somehow. I don’t know why but I just hadn’t even thought about it before but I just latched onto that thing of mixing sound and timings and I just absolutely loved it and then I started to sort of put jingles together using two tape machines because we could just go in the studio if there wasn’t everybody in there and I spent hours in there. Grabbing sound effects records and mixing things together and trying that tape delay where you’d put a loop on the machine and it would go ma -ma -ma -ma -ma -ma -ma -ma, doing all that. So, I’ve got some here actually, so let’s see if I can find them…
Jason Nicholas
While you’re looking for that, did you have contact at this point? Was the Radiophonic Workshop still going at the BBC? Did you know about that or was it a thing that that was still going?
David Lowe
That was in London so yeah yeah, yeah it wasn’t connected. Okay, so yeah, I used to put some jingles together I’ve got some of them here, I could just give you a quick blast
[Music plays]
So it was always a very sort of basic sort of sound stuff but of course the technology then that it was it all you had was with the two tape decks but I just totally loved it and then I got more into pretty much into that I ended up doing this sort of sci-fi series three-part, like a sort of sci -fi comedy little thing, 10 minutes per show. Spent hours putting that together and that was all sound effects and mixing and stuff and we sort of wrote it together with a Birmingham comedian and a guy called Alan Dedicoat who’s still around now and he’s a presenter.
Neil Hillman
He certainly is. Alan and I worked together in hospital radio, that was the first time that I took to the radio, I was under Alan’s tutelage.
David Lowe
Yeah, so, and he was narrating it. It ended up on [BBC] Radio One. I did it, we played it on our show, and then just for fun, I sent it to the show on Radio One, said, “What do you think of this?” And they said, “Oh, we like it, “we’ll play it on our show as well.” So I think I was 21 and had to think of this thing on Radio One, you know, which is I was like, “Yeah!” At the same time, I was still interested in music and keyboards and that was all happening. Eventually, I got a job as, I was trying to find a full -time job at the BBC in that area of sort of technical and creative, but pretty much the BBC was divided into either engineering in which was a sort of physics engineering type background or production, which much more of the academic sort of Oxbridge background in a way. And so, all the training courses they had were fitted into those two categories. There was one particular job called studio manager, which I vaguely sort of fitted, which was right for me, or, you know, assistant at the local radio stations, and I was applying for all these jobs. And I even went for a job at the BBC in engineering, you know, just out of, and I’m completely useless at physics. The first thing the guy asked me was, “Can you draw the polarity of a bar magnet? What does it look like in a little diagram?” And I was like, drawing little birds in houses and pretty people and things. And then he said, “Can you draw me a diagram of two lights on the landing if you want to switch it on at the bottom and at the top? What would the circuit look like?” And I just stood blankly, draw another little pretty picture, and he said, “You don’t know, do you?” And I just said, “No.” So that was the end of my engineering course at the BBC, but he was very nice about it. So, at the same time, we were, yeah, all the synthesizers and keyboards were coming out, and I was into that electronic music thing. And then I got a job as a sound man came up. And that was being out on the road. And I think you’ve done that, Neil, as well, haven’t you? You’ve been a sound man.
Neil Hillman
Absolutely, yes, yes, yes.
David Lowe
So, we sort of followed a very similar sort of career path in a way. It was interesting. So being a sound man meant just going out with a pair of headphones, you had the mic, you’re on location, you either had a mixer which was attached to the camera. And it was a film camera in those days and we had these sort of almost archaic straight out World War II mixers and it was so battered you could hardly see the VU metering and literally just like a tiny little mixer and a mic and that plugged into the camera and we just used to go out and shoot news stories for our local regional news program and It was great fun. The camaraderie was absolutely brilliant, but in terms of any creative input, there was absolutely zero. You were literally just pretty much like a human mic stand in a way. You just used to go out and get the sound, you know? And you were always a bit treated a bit like the sort of the weird sound man. They’d all come up to you, “Are you okay in there? “Are you getting any sound?” As if there was something like you were slightly, a slightly weird sound man, you know, and this camera man used to say, “they’re all weird. It’s the magnets next to their head, isn’t it?”
Neil Hillman
Well, in that great Venn diagram of life, we, you know, we had overlapping colleagues, but we never actually worked together because of course, location sound recordists rarely do. And in that sense, it was rather a solitary experience, wasn’t it? As well, you know, we almost never had an assistant, unlike the camera department. But looking back it was a unique time to be in the industry, wasn’t it? Film was as prevalent as video when we both started in broadcast television in the early 1980s and we certainly received a very well-rounded training. I mean especially you with your opportunity in radio. It was real hands -on experience that I’m not sure today’s industry newcomers get the opportunity to enjoy. I heard an interview recently with the brilliant keyboard player and pianist Rick Wakeman, talking to Rick Beato. And Rick Wakeman was talking about the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, being a golden age for the variety of studio session work he would be engaged for as a young professional musician. And he made the point that there would never be another time like it. And I think he’s right, because I think our time, yours and mine, was the equivalent of putting on professional growth in the 1980s when the subjects and scope of the work that we covered, for instance as documentary recordists, I know that as news recordists it was a bit sort of plain and simple. But we truly worked alongside some talent. The camera men didn’t we I’m thinking of people like Jim Knights, Derek Gruszeckyj, Peter Rance, Keith Froggett. And I suppose the thing that was different then was it truly felt like we were working in a meritocracy. If someone felt that you were up to the job, irrespective of your age, you’ve got the opportunity to try your hand at it, didn’t you?
David Lowe
Absolutely. And you’re absolutely right, though. It was much more of an open thing. And I’m truly grateful for Jim [Knights, MD of Magpie Films Ltd.] for giving me a job, you know, because somebody just said, “Oh, there’s a job coming up at Magpie Films.” It was a company that we were working for. And I went along to see Jim. He said, “Hi mate, yeah, well, go out with the lads next week and see how you get on, and we’ll take it from there.” So, I went out with Chris [Weaver, Cameraman] and Sam Cox, the cameraman and Sam, and did a few little news jobs with them, and then spent the week just doing that, going out on the road. And then I came back and Jim said, “Well, yeah, you’ve got the job, mate, yeah, everyone says you’re okay, so let’s start on Monday,” and it was just like that. I hadn’t any training at all or thrown in quite right at the deep end. And I remember pretty much like the first week, I think I lost an 816 microphone. I was a bit of a disaster as a soundman, I have to admit, in terms of losing things, but I think, yeah, we went to this job and I think I left it on the roof of the car or something or while I was packing the car away and I got back, and I had to sell Jim that I’d lost this 816, which is pretty hard to lose, because it’s so big. But he kept me on, you know, and I’m forever grateful for Jim for that. And also, it was a really amazing opportunity to learn all about television and sound in television and the way that television’s put together, you know, and the people that work in TV, the sort of mentality of producers and directors and people on that side of it. So, it was a real opportunity for that, and the variety of jobs that we used to do and the fact that you had to sort of really be on your toes, you know, and get in there and often in very tricky scenarios like riots and things and all sorts of stuff. I went to Romania on one job during the revolution and we got sort of shot at by snipers and things, you know, so all sorts of things. From that point of view, yeah, it was amazing. The opportunities then in the 80s were much broader and the output of television, I suppose, was much more varied.
Neil Hillman
There’s also a casual way in which that you could be commissioned as well, wasn’t there? Am I right in thinking that there was a chance conversation in the bar that led to your first musical commission for the BBC?
David Lowe
It was. Yeah, so when I was working at Magpie as a soundman, I started earning a bit more money. And right at that time, we were also at the very beginning of the technology revolution, in a way, in TV and radio, the way that televisions grown from just the BBC and ITV to everything that we’ve seen over the years. We were pretty much at the birth of it all. And I was also at the birth of the domestic home recording music market. So Roland, who used to produce all these massive sort of expensive synthesizers, produced this much cheaper polyphonic synthesizer called the Juno 6 and it was the first, one of the first that you could do that you could play chords as well as on, because most synthesizers were monophonic in those days. And this is the first one you could play chords on. There was a music fair music fair in Birmingham, and I went along with a friend of mine, and we were just walking around like we did, and he’d go, “Oh, look at that one, look at that one.” We came across a Juno 6, you could play it, I put the headphones on, tried it, and I was just completely blown away. I was just, “Oh, wow.” And it was because I was really sort of influenced by Van Gellis in those days, and all the sounds that he used to make. And so it sounded like Van Gellis, and I was like, “Oh, wow.” And I just spent ages standing there and he said, “Well, come on, make up your mind, why don’t you just buy it?” And he said, I just went, “Well, I suppose I could, couldn’t I?” So I put an order in for it and bought this Juno 6, you know, and literally got it home, took it out of the box and I haven’t stopped since, I think that was, I pretty much every single day since 1987 when I, no, no, it wasn’t… Every single day since 1983 when I bought this synthesizer, I’ve been writing music and just haven’t stopped. That was a complete game changer. So, I started writing songs and then they brought out a ‘Portastudio’, which was like a four-track recording multi-track on a cassette. So, you used to use metal cassettes, quality ones. And you could do multi-tracks, you know, so you could bounce sound and create your own stuff. So, I was hooked on that as well. I think I’ve got one of the first songs that I wrote. Do you want to hear one of the first songs?
Neil Hillman
Absolutely, of course, yeah.
David Lowe
Hey, hey, let’s have a look. So, this is the very first track. The very first time I got to get a Portastudio working, I was up all night and I came up with this…
[Music plays]
I think that’s probably it, isn’t it? So, I was trying to be a bit Vangelis-y,
John and Vangelis were the influence at the time. And that sort of expanded,
got a bit better like this…
[Music plays]
It got a bit better like this, so surprisingly I mean it’s sort of, the quality is not too bad for a cassette, is it? It really sounds all right still. And there was no MIDI on the keyboard, so you had to pretty much start, there was an arpeggio machine on it. So I think I’d always start with the arpeggio as a sort of basic rhythm. And then I’d have to lay the whole track all the way from start to finish. And I have no idea how I did it. I can’t even remember. So how did I know where the middle eight was and how did I know where that bit was? So it was really good musical training, so I’d lay the whole track down and then I’d start adding chords on by hand, you know, there wasn’t any sequencing or quantising, so it was all pretty much done on the fly. And then you’d bounce tracks down to stereo so that you could have another couple of tracks to put vocals on. So it was a really good grounding in multi -tracking and the limitations of what you could do made you more creative in a funny sort of way. So I’d just spent ages, every spare minute I wasn’t at work I was doing that; and we had a band and we went out on the road and got some decent gigs, but because I was a soundman doing that all day, humping boxes in and out of buildings and then back in the car again, I didn’t really want to do it at night as well, you know? Which is all that sort of early gigs were, where you’d sort of take all the gear, go to some pub somewhere, set it all up, do your gig and then bung it back in the car and drive all the way back. So and I could never guarantee that I’d be available as well, you know, for a gig. We had one in London at the Town and Country [famous London music venue]. In fact, we were supporting the Fine Young Cannibals, believe it or not, because Samantha Mia, who was the lead singer in our band, was friends with them. They said, “Do you want to come and support us at this gig in London, in Kentish town?” And so, yeah, really exciting, except that, of course, being a soundman, you could never guarantee when you’d finished the job, and I finished a bit late. So I had to go later, and I got there about 15 minutes before we were due to start and the stage door was closed, so I had to queue up with all the punters you know at the front doors “I’m the keyboard player let me in!” So yeah, so I was much more into being in the studio and mixing and multi-tracking like I did in radio you know that side of things playing the sounds, mixing, multi-tracking. People got wind of it at work and sometimes I’d take the keyboard in to if we had a quiet day. We’d be on News standby, you know, we’d be sitting around a lot. I’d bring my keyboard in, you know, and be playing around with it and this is great. So when people got word that I’d got this keyboard, which was producing all these 80s synths sounds, and I was in the bar one night after work, and we were chatting about it with Charlie Pitt, the cameraman, and I went over, he was chatting to this guy called Richard, Richard Burns, who was a graphic designer at Pebble Mill. And I strolled over, and Charlie goes, “Hey, Dave, this is Richard, Richard’s a graphic designer. Dave does music, he’s got this synthesizer and Richard, you ought to see it, it sounds amazing.” So he was telling Richard all about it, and Richard goes, “Oh, wow, I’m looking for some music actually for Midlands Today [BBC Regional News programme]. I’m doing the new title graphics for it. Do you fancy having to go out doing a demo?” And I said, “Well, yeah.” I went home, came up with this idea, and put it together, and then took it in and played it to Richard, and he said, “Oh, yeah, that sounds all right. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, let’s go for that.” And he played it to the sort of the powers that be. Of course, being journalists, they had no idea about music really. “Oh, that sounds fine to us. Yeah, let’s go for that.” So I suppose it was in a way revolutionary because it had that 80s synth sound at the time. And the way that they commissioned music pretty much up to then for television was by commissioning composers, and some of them were serious composers and they used to do TV music as a bit of a sideline thing, you know, or they’d use library music or whatever. And if they commissioned a composer, they’d have to then commission a band and to play it. And so, theme tunes cost a fortune in those days, you know, the budgets for theme tunes. So then I come along with this keyboard, it’s just me and here’s a theme tune. And so from their point of view, it’s like wow, yeah, and it also had that modern sound. So let’s have, do you want to have a quick listen to that one?
Neil Hillman
Of course.
David Lowe
Here we go.
[Music plays]
So that was a tune and I did the demo at home and the BBC then were very sort of keen on the quality, you know, had to be broadcast quality and so when they commissioned it, they said, “Well, we’ll get you into Pebble Mill, they’ve got this 24-track studio that they use for BBC sessions and recordings. We’ll get you in there and we’ll just produce it. So, my first theme tune was done in this fantastic BBC 24-track studio with an engineer, assistant engineer and producer from the TV show. And they even had this guy coming in, you know, with his sort of brown jacket on, saying, “Oh, all right, I need to, you know, don’t plug it in before I’ve tested your circuitry to make sure it complies with BBC regulations,” you know. So it was completely old-school BBC, and it was fantastic, you know. So that was the first theme tune I did for Telly.
Jason Nicholas
How much do you still incorporate hardware in your composition, your work, because I’m a bit of an analogue synth enthusiast myself. But I realize that the time and financial constraints that you have as a working musician for film and television, it doesn’t often allow for use of hardware. And you usually need to call up and replicate a patch for tight deadlines. And it’s a lot more sensible to do that in Omnisphere or something to try to make some massive complex thing on your modular system. Maybe talk through, can you talk through a bit of how your kit has changed over the years?
David Lowe
Absolutely. So, everything started off pretty much analogue and hardware outboard gear. And that was the first sort of part of the technology really. So, I got everything that I did pretty much up until 2000, I guess, was done using samplers and outboard gear connected by MIDI and a sequencer, a MIDI sequencer. And there were no screens involved, obviously. All you had was the speakers and you’d listen to stuff. And so, yeah, I built up my career. There’s much more endeavour in finding sounds as well then because, you know, if you needed a hi-hat, you’d get the floppy disk, shove it in the sampler, cue it all up and everything. So, it’s much more endeavour in terms of finding sounds and much more limitation in terms of sample time. You know, you thought 3Meg [Megabyte] was amazing when that happened and 32Meg, wow. And so, but again, the limitations on the technology almost made it more creative really. And so that, in a way, was a really good grounding as well. I suppose that’s why, in a way, less people were involved in it, because it took a lot of effort and practice and learning to get to learn all this technology and know how to use it creatively.
Jason Nicholas
And plus, of course, at that time, buying something like an Emulator or a Fairlight or some sort of sampler would have been prohibitively…
David Lowe
Expensive, absolutely. Yeah, but modules were coming out all the time and getting much cheaper and, you know, accessible. And then Paul White, from ‘Sound on Sound’ magazine, who’s a legend, we happened to live in Malvern in the same town, coincidentally, and so I got to know Paul. And he said, Dave, you’ve really got to get Logic. You’ll love it. You’ll love Logic audio. I was reluctant because I was so used to using this sequencer. So I could fly with it, you know, I just didn’t even have to think what I was doing. It was just all just subconscious really. So eventually I thought, well, I’ll go, I’ll start using Logic. And I’ll use Logic as just the sequencer and I’ll buy a desk. And the one limitation that obviously we had using analogue gear and analogue equipment was you couldn’t back it up and you couldn’t save the mix. And so I had this fantastic desk actually, it was an Alesis desk and I had that for years and it sounded really nice. And a lot of my early stuff in the 90s and the first BBC news music was done with that desk and my single was done using that desk and all that gear. And it used to sound great, you know, and so I was quite reluctant to change over. So I thought I’ll use Logic as the sequencer, and I’ll buy a desk, I bought the Mackie, I think it was the digital 8-bus, I think it was called, which was sort of automated mixing, and I’ll mix everything on the desk, and I’ll use Logic as the sequencer. And so, I’ve changed, had this massive changeover of technology, obviously a big learning curve. Within a few months, the desk became almost redundant and all the hardware gear became redundant. And I’d do everything, in the box, in Logic. So effectively, the desk became almost like just a massive big headphone amp, you know, just plug the headphones in. And then I started working in London as well. So I had studio in London, had a studio up in Malvern. and I replicated the setup in both, had two Mac desktop computers and a laptop that I’d travel in between, sort of very over the top in a way. I started to think, “Oh, I just load that file. Oh no, that’s in London. Oh no, I haven’t got that.” And that frustrating thing is, “File not available.” And I bought a few bits of, I bought an outboard virus synth, which sounded really nice as well. But I just found myself much more and more because of TV, having to save mixes, come back to them. That was so useful to be able to save your mix that I eventually thought, no, actually, what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna slim it all down, get rid of everything and just do everything on the laptop. I thought, “Well, if I did it, I could do it all on 32 meg on an Aki -S 3 ,000, 10 years ago and get fantastic creative ideas. I’ve got all these laptops more than adequate to, you know, to come up with ideas and put it all together.” So I took the plunge and I thought, “Right, that’s it. Ditch everything. Do it all in the box on the laptop,” which is pretty much what I’ve done ever since.
Jason Nicholas
Do you still have that Juno somewhere though?
David Lowe
I do. It’s sitting right next to me right now. I actually sold my original Juno but I thought now I’m going to go out and get one just to say I’ve got one still. I’ve got it here. I don’t use it much but it’s quite nice to have sitting there and I’ve got the replica patch in Logic, the patch you can get which is the Juno, so if I’m ever gonna use Juno sounds, I’ll use that.
Neil Hillman
It’s not just television though, is it, David? You’ve also composed extensively for commercials, famously for clients such as Barclays, HSBC and Santander Banks, but was it a British Airways commercial that really got you underway with the big agencies? And I believe there’s quite a nerve-wracking story of how that one finally came to fruition over several months.
David Lowe
Yes. Well, what had happened was I built up my sort of portfolio of TV themes and things and, and incidental music. And I started working with this fantastic guy, still a friend now called Julian Ronnie. And he said, you could do more, you know, you’ve got a great portfolio here. Have you thought about going out and looking for more work outside? And so he said, well, I’ll tell you what, I don’t mind. He was an actor. And so he’s used to rejection and people telling him to go away and I wasn’t all that good about selling myself and getting on the phone and doing all that and he said, “Oh, I’ll do that for it. I’ll go out and see if I can get us some work.” So his mum, I think, posed as an agent and she’s phoned up all his ad agencies in London and said, “I’ve got these two young guys from Birmingham. They’re really hot. They’re really new. They’re really great. They’ve done ABCDE and they’ll come and say hello.” And so Julian eventually went down to see this guy at Saatchi & Saatchi and went out for a drink. He literally sat in the pub with him, had a drink. And he said, “So what are you working on at the moment?” And he said, “Well, we’re doing the brand-new global British Airways campaign. It’s going to go out to 52 countries. And it’s the next big global ad after the previous one, which became really famous. It had got a Malcolm McLaren soundtrack and it was like this eye from above and people just forming this shape of an eye on a little island in the middle of the sea. I remember that. It was a massively famous ad. Do you remember that one?
Neil Hillman
I do. Yeah…
David Lowe
Massively famous and Malcolm McLaren did this sort of dance version of the Delibes ‘Lakme’ theme, which British Airways adopted as their theme. And so, yeah, we’re going to use that music again. And he said, “Well, what’s the ad about?” And he said, “Well, it’s about world faces from all around the world, different cultures, different faces.” And we got this brand-new technology where we could morph a face into another face and literally like the face changes. So, we could have all these faces from all around the world, all these different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, all morphing together with it, and everyone’s going to be smiling. And that’s the whole premise. And Julian said, “Well, have you thought about doing a sort of world music maybe version of the Lakme?” And he said, “Well, that’s an interesting idea.” He said, “Well, go away and see if you can put a demo together, you know, we’ll have a listen.” So Julian comes running back and said, “Dave, Dave, I’ve got us a demo for British Airways. I was like, “What?” And so he’d got a copy of Dame Kiri [Te Kanawa] singing. He’d also got this sample CD from a wonderful composer called David Fanshawe, who he’d actually studied when he was doing music at Leeds. Julian had studied this piece of music called ‘African Sanctus’. And David Fanshawe was a composer / explorer and he was the first composer to use sourced sounds from in the field. He’d go to sort of say the South Pacific and he spent months though with his Nagra [1/4-inch tape recorder] and his mic, recording Indigenous people singing their traditional music and he composed this whole symphony called African Sanctus which actually used in the actual performance, they’d have a reel-to-reel recorder with somebody manning that as an extra instrumentalist with all the cues, so they could actually perform this thing live, you know, with a mixture of orchestra and Indigenous recordings. And so it was quite famous as a piece of work. And Julian had the sample CD of the samples are clean that David Fanshaw had used that you could get. He said, why don’t we put some of these samples and we’ll mix that with the, and we’ll find a way of mixing them together. So we found a couple of really nice samples that matched. And then I came up with this percussion line on tablas. And pretty much I did it very randomly. I just set the sequence ago and I’ll just hit the notes and then let it quantize into a sort of rhythm, and it came up with this.
[Music plays]
So we came up with that sort of rhythm and a bit of the indigenous sounds and a bit of the opera Mixed it all together and to sell that sounding all right. Yeah, we’ll work we won’t finish it. We did about 50 seconds I think and to be thought we’ve got enough for them to hear the idea because we’ve got Absolutely zero chance of getting the job, you know because it’s so big So anyway Julian sent it to them and lo and behold, they said, “Oh yeah, we like that. We’ll get back to you. Can you develop it a bit more?” So we ended up doing another version when they said develop it. They said it needs finishing, you know, it doesn’t sound finished, but send us a, develop it and see where you come, where you get on. And we thought they meant, oh, it needs more sounds in it, more voices and whatever. So we did a sort of completely different mix, which we call mix two, which was not so raw. It was much more produced, and it had a lot more sort of gospel choirs and all sorts of things going on in it. Sent that to them and they said, “Yeah, okay, fine, we’ll get back to you.” And so, we waited on tenterhooks pretty much for about six months. And obviously they must have been to-ing and fro-ing with other composers, trying music out. And then in the end, I was on this sound job in Germany, on location, and Julian phoned up in the middle of this thing and said, “Dave, they’ve just phoned us up “and we’ve got the job, “but they want us to go to LA on Monday.” And this was like the third of Thursday. And so of course they were ready to get going in LA and there’s only one of these edit machines in the world that can do this morphing thing, and that’s in Hollywood. And I said, “Well, I’m on a sound job.” You know, he said, “Well, just get the gear, get another soundman, and you’ve got to come over. We can’t miss it. We can’t not do this.” So, we fished around, I managed to find after a couple of days another sound guy to come and take over, and I was, of course, didn’t tell anybody on the job. So I was standing there thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve got to be in LA.” And I couldn’t tell anybody. So eventually we found someone, he flew over, Sam Cox, his name was. I sort of pretty much handed my gear over to him, got on the plane, and that was the last sound job I ever did, you know, in a way. Got back to Julian’s to play the track to him. He said, “Dave, you’re never gonna believe this, “but I just phoned them up to find out what they wanted us to do. I could hear them playing demo one in the background.” And we’d been spent months working on demo two, but in fact, it was the first idea that they liked, and they hadn’t told us it was that one. And so we’ve got to go back to demo one, you know. So, okay, fine, let’s see if we can reload it. So I put the floppy disk in to get that tabla rhythm. And the floppy disk wasn’t working, it said ‘disk not working’ or something. Oh no! So, I literally spent all night trying to replicate this random tabla rhythm and I couldn’t get it, you know, exactly right. And so that was the start of the tension in a way, the nerve -wracking bit. So I spent all night, literally, staying up and eventually I got something that sounded almost the same. I thought, hopefully they’ll go with that. And so we go to get on the plane to Los Angeles. They booked us in a standard class. And Julian said, well, hang on a minute, we’re doing your advert here. Surely we should be in club class. So anyway, they booked us in to club class, flew over to LA and we stayed at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, which is like where all the music people stay and everything. It was incredible, you know, to be flown to Hollywood to do this thing. And Julian had found a studio. And in fact, it wasn’t a music studio. It was an audio production studio like you guys, more than a music studio. But anyway, it was sort of convenient location. Actually, it was on Sunset Boulevard, I think, right in the middle of Hollywood. And so we rocked up there and we’d hired all the Akai’s, the outboard gear, the MPC sequencer we’d hired. So all we had to take was the floppy drives with all the samples and stuff on. I loaded up my floppy into the MPC. And lo and behold, it worked! The original, it’s working, we got the original back! So that was an incredible sort of relief because I think they would never have gone with it with a new they’re so picky that they wouldn’t have gone with a new one. So we put a mix together in the studio there. All these creative guys were turning up. It’s such a big job that they had this massive team of people all with their individual ideas of what they wanted it to do. So one by one, all these creative people would be coming along from Saatchi’s and saying, can you just do that? Can you take that watery sound out? And we go, what do you mean watery sound? You know, that thing. And so we’d have to play bits over and over. Oh, you mean what, you mean the cymbal? And so we’d sort of jiggled it around. We got a mix that they were reasonably happy with. And they said, oh, we’ll wait for Tony Kaye, the director, to come and listen. And so we sat twiddling our or at ages waiting for Tony, this director to arrive. So eventually he did, and he was a complete sort of, everybody said he’s a bit of a slightly nightmare guy to work with. And lo and behold, he goes, “Right, what you got then, lads? “Let’s have a listen.” And so we played it, and he goes, “That’s a load of (beep) that is. “I could have done better than that.” And we said, “Oh, okay, Tony. what exactly is wrong with it then and he was like, “Wow, it doesn’t sound like a demo. The demo sounded great. I mean, how did he record the demo?” And we said, “Well, we did it at home on this all cheap gear.” And he said, “Well, just do that. Just need to finish it off. It just sounded great. All you need to do is finish it.” And we just couldn’t get what he meant by finish it. We just couldn’t figure it out. So anyway, Oh no, no probbs. Okay, we’ll start again. We’ll find another studio more like our home studio. And so okay, so we found this little music store and I bought a little fifty dollar Alesis reverb thing. You know, literally one of those little boxes you could get for fifty dollars. And Julian was literally on the yellow pages looking for studios, yeah. And then we found one, they got later and later and later, so we eventually found the studio called Sunset Studios, which is very close to the hotel. I said, “Well, let’s go for that, let’s go for that.” And we went to have a look, and it turned out to be one of the biggest studios in LA, you know, that Madonna had just been there the week before and stuff, and they had this fantastic, like, 48-channel, Neve desk. All the thing, we got the engineer engineer and stuff. And we said, we’ll have to go for this. And so I said to the engineer, can you just plug this box into the output? Just on the on this door. All $50 of it. Yeah, this $50 box. She said, you’re joking. She said, I can’t do that. I’m sorry. I just cannot do that. I said, well, you got to please, you know, I think I had a compressor as well. Because we thought it was all about the home quality sound you know we thought that was part of the thing so anyway we put another idea together in that studio which then Tony Kaye said oh yeah that’s working and we sort of breathed a sigh of relief and thought we’d finished it, and I flew home, and Julian stayed on a bit in LA and then he eventually got back he phoned me up and said “Dave, they’ve changed their mind.” And he said, “Tony wants to use ‘When You’re Smiling’ by Louis Armstrong, Tony wants to go with that. But the rest of the creators love our idea.” And they basically said, “If you can make your idea work, I’m sure Tony will be swung to it, because he does like it, but he says, it’s not finished.” And we’re going, “What do you mean it’s not finished?” So anyway, we’re absolutely tearing our hair out and so we do another mix and that’s booked into a studio in Malvern, just a little local 16 track studio I’ve never been to before, you know, to put the mix together and stuff. And so, we put this mix together, we get a live drummer, we do a bit more and then we listen and by that point they got some pictures they sent us and we were playing it to the pictures and it wasn’t quite fitting you know suddenly we like have this brain wave and we thought hang on a minute it’s just not ending in the right place – when they say ‘finished’ it’s literally as simple as everything’s in the wrong place, you know it doesn’t need reproducing, it doesn’t need mixing. everything just needs moving things around so we need to repeat that section twice so we sliced it up and recorded a stereo version put that in the sampler and then sort of repeated sections twice and we could edit it around it was more of an edit job and we got this sort of edit together which fitted the pictures perfectly and ended everything in the right place and it all fitted And we thought, “Ah, that’s it, this is it.” And so we phoned them up and said, “We think we got it.” And they said, “Well, play it down the phone and we’ll cue the pictures at our end.” And we did five, four, three, played it. And they said, “That’s it, you’ve done it. Get it down to us now.” And this was on the Friday. And they said, “We’ve got the dub on Monday. It’s going out to 52 countries. We cannot miss that dub deadline. Nine o ‘clock get it to us, you know, and so we said, okay, fine, fine, fine. So I get back home to listen to what we’d done. I could hear this crackle coming out the right -hand side, and I thought, oh no, we didn’t notice it in the studio, but when I got home and listened to it closely, there was a definite sort of little crackle going on. I said, “Julian, we’ve got to do it again.” He said, “no way!” So anyway, we had to go to another studio, put all the bits together, got back to my studio on the Sunday this was, and started assembling it all. And then, lo and behold, at 10 o ‘clock Sunday night, we started getting these clicks coming through from the samplers, inexplicable sound, you know, halfway through the music, “What are we going to do? Oh no, where are we going to find a sampler at 10 o ‘clock on a Sunday night in Malvern?” So I said, “I’ll tell you what, we’ll use this, I’ve got this old Akai 12-track recorder that I bought that was part of the system earlier on.” I dragged that out the cupboard and plugged it all in and when it was running Julian had to literally hold the tape against the head with a pencil to make it all work. And so I threw everything down onto this 12-track, got it together and we finished it about like five in the morning I think it was right get in the car get to London. So we literally drove down to London with that tape and arrived at Saatchi & Saatchi at about two minutes to nine, and the production manager was waiting on the steps for us outside, and she said, “Run!” So, we ran down Charlotte Street with this tape to get to the dub, and that was it basically it. So, we got it there in the end, you know. And then that went out, and that literally changed our lives, that commercial. But after that, it was a massive break; all everybody then wanted was the same sort of sound and we went through this whole phase of about two years coming up with world music versions of different tracks. We did one for DHL, which is this one…
[Music plays]
So, it was a whole phase of doing that, and ideally, they wanted us to be London-based, but Julian was in Manchester, and I was near Birmingham, and so we’d come down and book studios in London. When we went to the studio to do that [DHL commercial], it was a slightly dodgy studio. I don’t know where Julian found them, but I think he was trying to save money, but we didn’t realise that you had to book an engineer separately as well. We hadn’t done that, and they got this assistant engineer, and they said, “Well, he can do it.” And all the clients were going to come along and listen to it, and then the singer arrived, the session singer, they are completely professional, and they can just nail it straight away. She couldn’t get, for some reason here, the feed right in the headphones because he hadn’t done it when she was getting increasingly annoyed and annoyed and annoyed, you know, and the clients were there. And then we were trying to keep them amused while she was getting annoyed. And then she said, “Can he change the key?” And we said, “Well, no, because we’ve got all the tracks done.” She said, “Well, I can’t reach that high enough.” And I said, “Ah, right, okay.” So she came up with that idea of keeping it na -na -na instead of going to the top note, which is a -na -na -na, which is why it starts like that, basically, because she couldn’t quite reach that top note, and she is stressful.
Neil Hillman
This is the plot of the film, isn’t it?
Jason Nicholas
I was just going to say, in the film remake of this… We recently interviewed Dr. Mark Deeks about metal music and got his thoughts on composition and even the therapeutic power of music. And I asked Mark about the audience he has in mind or the intent that he has when he’s composing music. And he said that the initial audience is himself and that the enjoyment of his music by others kind of flows out from that. But I’d imagine though that when you’re commissioned to do a piece for a corporate or a product identity, that it’s just the opposite, that you’re specifically attempting to engage an audience and have to have them in mind through the compositional process. Can you tell us a bit about how writing this kind of music differs from other genres?
David Lowe
Yeah, I think interestingly, it’s much more about the brief, working to a brief. As you said, if you’re an artist, normally you’ve an artist, normally you want to do your own thing and sometimes you don’t even care if people listen to it or not, you’re just creating music because you like creating music. People like it, then that’s a bonus. Whereas what I do is create music that I hope people are going to like and enjoy, a particular brief of the show. So you try to work out what the audience is, what time the show’s on, what the show’s about, You know, so what style of music you’re going to fit to that show, how you can make it different to being too cliched or whatever. So it’s a completely different sort of brief and a lot of artists don’t like doing TV stuff or because they don’t like sort of being told what to do or trying to work to that brief. Whereas I’ve always lapped it up. I mean, I don’t mind at all. I think it stems from maybe the early days of TV, understanding TV people and whatever. So, I’ve always thought of myself as part of the TV production team and just in charge of the music. And I’ve always wanted to do music. I’ve not been bothered about doing music that I like. I’ve always wanted to create music that people are going to like and enjoy. And I think when I started writing TV themes, because my ambition, of course, was to have a top 10 hit or an album or whatever which is what we all want. And I love pop music and I loved all that style of music. So when I started writing theme tunes I thought well maybe this is a way, what I’m going to try and do is write theme tunes that people like you know and people warm too and people feel attached to and might even want to go out and buy you know and so that would be a way of getting my music out there and people buying it and people wanting it you know. So I was always working with the audience in mind rather than what I wanted to do in mind. There was a combination of having that musical skill I suppose innately inside which I’m very fortunate to feel that I’ve got which people say you’re either musical or you’re not and so I’ve always had that sort of musical language inside and just to sort of being able to adapt that in the TV area and create music is brilliant, you know. So I don’t mind at all from that point of view. So yeah, but it’s definitely a different thing to writing songs or whatever, or your own things.
Jason Nicholas
Which you also do – in 1997, you released your first album, ‘Dreamcatcher. And then in 1998, you had success with a single called ‘Would You?’, going to number three in the main chart, and number one in the indie chart. And then as a bonus, 25 years later, it charted again when DJ Campbell issued a remix version. Did it feel very different and as well, I guess, are these two completely separate worlds for you?
David Lowe
Yeah. I mean, tremendously exciting, an ambition, you know, a dream come true. What was, the dream catcher came from the British Airways commercial, a really amazing guy called Charlie Gillett got in touch. We were introduced to him and he loved world music and he said, “Oh, there could be an album in this style of music. Are you interested in putting it together?” So I eventually, me and Julia started it, but Julia sort of wasn’t really into the studio side of things. He was much more into theatre and being a musical director. So he sort of said, look, I tell you what, Dave, it’s your bag, you go ahead. And so I finished this Dreamcatcher album and with Charlie, which was that British Airways sound of world of instruments and beats, which was actually quite a popular sound in the 90s. Yeah, – What was it? – What was it to Ari Amos? – “Deep Forest” was pretty big. Then they were a big band that did it. And that was probably Dreamcatcher, that album was probably the closest I’ve got to actually producing something that was coming from me, you know, that I wanted to make the sound and do. So that came out in, I think, 1997. And then I was like, “So what should we do next?” And then Charlie said, “Well, don’t even think about doing another album because it took so long. Just let’s come up with some ideas for singles. And so that’s when “Would You?” just came out of the blue. It was just as a random idea. I played it to Charlie when I’d done it and he said, “Oh, that’s gonna be a hit, Dave.” And I was like, “What? I couldn’t believe it.” True to his word, he basically took it around. The record label’s got it on to Radio 1, and I didn’t actually believe it would ever happen. Charlie just was convinced… ‘Would you?’… um… And Charlie was actually telling me, look, okay, this is going to be big. I think I can get you, if this works, I can really put you forward as an artist, which will get you sort of more film work because film soundtracks are much more about the artist, the composer is the artist. It’s a bit of a sort of fickle game if you’re seen as just writing TV themes. Film producers and people aren’t really gonna consider you as a person that could do a film soundtrack, even though I have done film soundtracks and drama soundtracks. If you want to be a film composer, it’s something that you have to pretty much want to be doing from the beginning and it’s a different type of training. It’s a different type of background, you’d go to music, college and study, film and music. Charlie was convinced it was going to be a hit, I wasn’t so convinced. He wanted me to stop doing the TV stuff and just focus on being an artist and I was a bit sort of reluctant. So I didn’t really focus on doing more tracks after our single and when it came out, we hadn’t actually got an album to go with it, which is everyone’s going, “Oh, so when’s the next one coming out?” So we’re actually blagging our way through, going, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be in a couple of months.” So I had to then get an album together. So it was an incredible thing, so exciting to have a single in the charts. And in those days, it was still CD singles. So when you hear that it was on the Radio One playlist, Woolworths had just ordered 250 ,000 copies. We can’t get enough out of the warehouse. We’re keeping boxes aside for people. It was like incredible, so exciting. And yeah, when it came out last year, it was even better in a in a way, because it just didn’t have to do much or do anything really, but just enjoy the fact that it was out there again. They listened to her by a different audience, a younger audience re-emerged again, so it was very fulfilling and exciting. Yeah, but all the way through, I’d always thought, well, I’d just still like doing my TV work, So I just hung on to doing it so pretty much my doing my TV work is still my main thing.
Neil Hillman
David, probably the music that’s earns you the most recognition is the BBC news theme that’s been heard all over the world for more than 25 years. You wrote that back in 1999 and it still feels fresh It’s also become quite a cult track for sampling and remixing; my favourite happens to be the Ben Howell mix ‘Hallucinate’, featuring Dua Lipa. So maybe we can play that shortly alongside the original news theme. But I’m interested to know how such an iconic theme came about conceptually and also how you got the gig in the first place.
David Lowe
Well, I got the gig through the BBC World Wide Music, which is a sort of publishing album of the BBC. And they put me forward on a long list of So they phoned me up and said, “Do you want to be on the long list of composers to be considered to do the new BBC News brand?” Of course I said, “I’ll have a think about that.” Yep, of course. So got shortlisted and then we went for an interview about six composers with the creative director of the whole project, not just the music, but the whole of the BBC News brand project, a guy called Martin Lambie-Nairn. And the idea was that they were going to create an overall umbrella, one single look and feel for BBC News, which with the advent of digital and satellite and cable news channels and everything, the BBC wanted to sort of bring everything together under one look and feel for BBC News. Because up until then, all the BBC News shows had all had separate themes, they’d had a separate look, separate graphics and things. And so that was the idea. He had this very single-minded idea about what he wanted it to look like. And he also had a very single-minded idea about what he wanted music to achieve. And he said, “What I wanted is something “that’s completely different. “I want to wipe the slate clean, “start with a blank sheet of paper “when we’re thinking about news music. “I want to get away from all the old cliches “of news music from the past. Get away from these massive big authoritarian orchestral sounds. I want something much more closer to the audience. It’s got to be modern. It’s got to be elegant. But it’s above all, it’s got to be completely different. And the main thing is that it’s got to have a distinctive sound that everybody will instantly recognise as soon as they hear it, and a sound that can be adapted across the whole of the BBC News output from online, radio, TV, worldwide. Each part of the BBC News output, you know, having its own individual identity but keeping the feeling of BBC News so you hear it instantly, you know it’s the news. So that was the brief. So I sent in a demo which wasn’t really that good, you know. He said, but don’t worry about coming up with the demo is the right thing. He said, I’m not interested really at this point in judging you by what you come up with. I’m just interested in meeting composers and seeing if I get on with them, see if I can get a vibe, and seeing if I’m going to work with them. And then we can create the idea from there. And So I went away, sent this demo in, and thinking, “No, he’s not going to like it.” And so two weeks later, I’ve got this phone call out of the blue, and said, “Oh, Martin wants to work with you.” And he’s like, “Wow, fantastic, you know.” He said, “Come back for another meeting.” And so I went to see Martin again, and he said, “Well, your demo, I think I’ve got it here somewhere. Let’s see if I can find it. I’ll just do a little key.” So this is the demo I sent in.
[Music plays]
And obviously sounds completely different. And Martin said, “I like the sound, you’ve got a clear sound musically, you know, I like the production of it, but it’s not the idea is wrong, you know, I’m not looking for that, the idea is not there.”So, but what it does, it puts us on a sort of timeline, where I can say your idea fits there. I want it to go more in that direction, in that direction. So he said it’s a good starting point. So he said, let’s focus on this sound thing. I’m just looking for a distinctive sound. And he gave me a few examples of things he’d heard like, sort of big drums, blah, blah, blah. And he said, one of the sounds that I really like is the Pips on Radio 4. The PIPs obviously Radio 4 has used the Greenwich Time signal since the BBC’s inception in 1926, you know. So I think it’s even 24. I think the PIPs was 100 years old this year, actually. So the BBC’s used the Greenwich Time signal on the radio, every hour, on the hour, on Radio 4. And so Martin said, as soon as I hear those pips, if I’m in another room in the house, I know that it’s coming up to the o ‘clock, you know, 12, one, two, three. I know what the time is, and I know that the news is gonna be on next. And he said, that’s a really great example of a sound. And they’ve also played me some sort of dance tracks and things. And I thought, well, maybe we could do the pips with a dance I said because I was thinking the Pips is already an iconic BBC sound. It’s almost like a badge of the BBC, a mark, you know. And maybe we could make that the new sound. And it also hints on the accuracy and reliability, because it’s one beat per second and timing. I think we were both thinking the Pips would be a great idea, you know, to use. So I went off and they said, “Come back on Friday and bring some ideas.” So I tootled away. It was a Wednesday, I was thinking, “Oh, can I really do this? “Can I do something with the Pips?” So I got back to my studio and started laying the idea down. So I came up with that, which is actually just a sine wave, very simple. And then I started adding the beat to it, the bass line. The bass line is a world, it’s called Tresillo beat and it’s got that bum, dum, dum, dum, dum, which is always something I’ve enjoyed you know and I just put it in because I was enjoyingthe sound of it. I thought oh yeah that will work because it gives an idea of It’s a sort of global sound. So I thought, yeah, that’s working. Then I started adding the big drums because they wanted a sound that, for every headline, they wanted a big drum sound. Or they wanted a sound to signify every headline. So I thought, yeah, a big drum. So does the job. So I thought, yeah, big drums, that’s working. So I’ve got the big drum going for the headline and then I thought, well, the chords next and the chords are quite tricky because they can’t be too, chords are the emotional centrepiece of music in a way. Chords just very subtly give you all the emotions that you feel when you’re listening to music. Could be anything from anger, from sadness, joy. They are emotions in sound really, chords, musical chords, and so the thing about news is it’s got to be quite neutral because you can record and report all sorts of different news stories every day. I’ve got two neutral chords, and most neutral really in a way are a minor chord to a major chord, so minor signifies sort of sadness in a way, or anxiety if you like. A major is like resolution. So, I just had these two chords going from sort of anxiety and I thought that’s the news coming in you know what’s happening, what’s going on and then the BBC processing that and being solid and steadfast and here’s the news you know so I thought yeah those chords work So I added those to the beat, minor to major. So there’s really not that many layers in there. And I thought there’s enough there for Martin to sort of get what the idea is happening. So I laid that down, I took him to the meeting and he introduced me to the BBC, sort of execs that were gonna be working on it and around this big board room table. He said, “Oh, here’s David, he’s going to be doing the music. David, you’ve got some ideas to get the ball rolling, what have you got?” And so I pressed the button tentatively on the CD and I played this idea and then they were all like quiet after I’d finished and they looked at me and Martin went, “That’s it. You’ve done it. That is the idea. That is absolutely brilliant. Don’t change it. I can’t believe it. You’ve done it. That is the sound.” And they were all going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.” So that was a sort of crowning moment of getting the job.
Jason Nicholas
How does it feel? I mean, people all over the world for the past 25 years have listened to this theme on the BBC in the happiest moments of their lives and also some of the largest crises that we’ve seen. How does it feel to have your music conveying this on such a scale?
David Lowe
It’s quite spooky. It’s surreal in a funny sort of way. I mean, I feel incredibly honoured and I’m still excited by it. It’s one of those things in life where it’s a parable that you hear about all the time is like, if you want to do something as much as you want to do it, you make a wish or whatever it is or you focus or you visualise what you want to do in life and it will happen and when I think back to those early days when I was a kid of wanting to work for the BBC you know how excited I was seeing the BBC on TV to end up having writing this iconic theme that is actually says the BBC is just an incredible feeling and I think part of the reason why maybe you know I got the job because I was so in tune with the BBC and myself having worked for the BBC, and I was so in tune with this idea in my head of what the BBC should be like as a sound in a way. I was just pretty much transmitting that idea of this is the sound of the BBC as the idea, and without even thinking about it, you know, and…
Neil Hillman
Amazing, it’s an amazing story.
David Lowe
Yeah, it’s a pretty awesome sort of feeling, you know, and satisfying feeling so yes and it’s one of those things that you know if you’d told me like when I was 18 at Radio Birmingham that I’d end up doing what I’ve done I just wouldn’t have believed you in a million years you know because I hadn’t had any musical training I hadn’t even thought about writing music then and had any musical training I just used to love music and synthesizers but I hadn’t thought about doing music because of Korea, but to tell, you know, I really wanted to work for the BBC, that was it. So to actually been able to say, “Right, you’re going to end up doing that.” It’s just, it’s still like, wow. And the best thing actually, the funnest thing is when you tell people, it’s one of those things that people say, “Oh, so what do you do then?” And then, I love that, you know, when you’re just having a normal conversation with someone and then you tell them about the news and their faces, their jaws drop, they go, “Oh, whoa, you know, that’s just a fun moment.”
Neil Hillman
Now, you may have thought that that was the crowning glory of your career, but when we invited David to come onto the show, we asked if he would not only share his stories, but if he would also break down and explain for us how the composition process works. But our discussions went further, because unbelievably, David agreed to compose the theme for the Apple and Biscuit Show as a demonstration piece. And then just for good measure, he also took the brief for a new motorcycle touring channel that I’d muttered about wanting to start on YouTube. So, first of all, we nervously gave David our vision of what we felt the Apple and Biscuit Show represented. Obviously, we’re a talk show and we said that we aspire to be authentic, authoritative, maybe even serious at times, but never stuffy.
Jason Nicholas
And the show’s logo, which is an homage to Neil Young’s Harvest album, reflected our wanting to project both a laid -back nature and a desire to be fun with a ready smile when appropriate. But again, not frivolous with either our subject matter or our guests. So David, we can’t wait to hear what you’ve come up with.
David Lowe
Well, this is quite interesting because this is the process basically, so I’ve come up with, this is the moment where the scary moment for me is like playing you the idea and saying, if you like it. So, and there’s not a lot to explain. It’s basically, I’ll just play it and see what you think and then we can talk about it from there, shall we?
Neil Hillman
Okay, okay. This is genuinely the first time that we will have heard this.
[Music plays]
David Lowe
So, that’s the idea. So, it was about just finding an overall tone I think? What do you think?
Neil Hillman
I like it. I like it because of that coffee bar jazz piano feel. It feels a little bit grown up and sophisticated. But it also feels relaxed. I can smell the Java. So yeah, I really like the voices at the start. Perhaps we could run an even longer montage of guest voices that we’ve had with us on the show. I mean, we are a talk show. But music is also integral to what we do, obviously. So the theme itself is important. Jason, your, your thoughts, your
comments?
Jason Nicholas
Well, I don’t know. I just don’t feel it’s quite finished…
[Laughter]
David Lowe
Oh, no!
Jason Nicholas
I like how you’ve incorporated elements of the interviews that we’ve done, and then leave a bed for us to work with, because we is obviously talk over the introductory music and it gives us room to use in the edit.
David Lowe
That’s the idea, it’s sort of like a donut shape. So you’ve got your opening bookmark little sting. I mean, the voices are optional, obviously. And then it goes into a bed, which you can run as long as you want. And then there’s a sort of end sting that you can put just as a little end bookmark, and you can cut that according to how you want it to fit really. And you can use that little bookmark as a standalone between different items and different things. And obviously, you know, the client likes it or you like it. I say, well, that’s the sort of idea. I can do it a million and one different ways, you know, depending on how you want to use it. I can do different mixes, different lengths, different lengths of stings, background, and also, you know, if you wanted you could actually, that’s all using sample instruments as well, and but to give it some extra life and energy, I could get real musicians on it, you know, to play guitar and…
Neil Hillman
I think that might be a little outside of our budget…
David Lowe
Yeah, I I mean, that’s always down to budget, really. So, yeah, that’s good.
Neil Hillman
No, we really like that. And we will listen. We will be developing that because we are looking to have a new theme for 2025.
David Lowe
So it’s basically about finding the tone. It’s more about that, the layers aren’t that important. But you can hear what the layers are in that. There’s drums, bass, standard sort of jazz setup, if you like, drums, bass, guitar,
piano. That gives you that sort of, like you said, the laid-back, coffee bar feel, but sophisticated.
Neil Hillman
Laid-back but sophisticated. Yeah, it’s moving from Neil Young towards Steely Dan, and that’s not a feel I’d ever disagree with. That’s an excellent job done, David. Fantastic. Excellent. Job done. And now for composition number two. Remember this is for a proposed YouTube motorcycle travel channel where the vibe is to be free. It’s about watching safe riding, nothing alarming, the adventure coming from being on two wheels, journeying to amazing destinations, and at all times it’s a relaxing, almost meditational experience for the viewer. The proposed shots are designed to let the viewer experienced the big skies, the stunning scenery, and the wide open roads of Australia from the comfort of their own home and favourite armchair without necessarily owning or even knowing how to ride a motorcycle. So, what were your thoughts about this brief, David?
David Lowe
Yeah, interesting, and I know you sent me an MP4 of the pictures, but I hadn’t actually started, I didn’t look at the MP4, I can’t remember, I think I started the music before I looked at the pictures incidentally, but I sort of got an idea of what I could imagine the pictures would be, which it ended up being pretty much identical to what the pictures were. So it was a bike start, bike starting, and then on the road, POV [‘point of view’] shots, and you were saying there’ll be some drone shots as well. So I got that as the vibe, and I thought, well, it’d be good to start with a motorbike sound, a bit of sound design feel, which is in fact what he did on your… exactly what he did on your video. And so I started the music without having looked at the pictures, so this is what I came up with.
[Music plays]
So that’s the sort of demo without pictures and then I’ll play you one that I’d rejigged it a bit when I’d seen the pictures and I laid it to the pictures and so this is the same thing but with the pictures as you’d imagine them.
[Music plays]
So, it’s pretty much the same but more an ambient feel to it.
Neil Hillman
Yes, I really like that aspect to it. I like the Doppler effect that I could hear. It felt as if there was movement, traffic going past, that kind of thing. You’ve got that in both versions, which I enjoyed. I liked the opening of the second version because there were more bike effects, which was the sound of the key going into the ignition, the engine starting, and then the familiar clunk of a motorbike going into first gear, and then on board the bike riding away. I liked that very much. So on balance and on first hearing then, I think I prefer the second version or ambient sound? That feels nice.
David Lowe
Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because I when I saw your video I’d seen that you’d actually used that ambient track on it and I think that I thought oh that works really well and that would gave me more of a feel of what you were aiming at in a way so I thought it needs to be more ambient rather than too musical. I think the ambient sound works really well actually. So if I was gonna develop it, I’d probably go more ambient.
Neil Hillman
Yeah… Jason, what do you think?
Jason Nicholas
Yeah, I think the ambient nature of it gives the viewer an entryway into the piece. So the music isn’t standing out.
David Lowe
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you could probably go like your track on the video, you could probably even go even more ambient. So in a way, I was probably saying, mine’s possibly too musical for your idea.
Neil Hillman
Well, I don’t know, we’ll see. But it does give some impetus to my other thought of incorporating an element of ASMR into the bike videos. And listener, if you don’t know what ASMR is it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s a term first introduced in 2010 by Jennifer Allen and it’s the biggest YouTube trend you’ve never heard of. It’s described as a relaxing, often sedative sensation that begins on the scalp and moves down the body and it’s based on a montage of everyday sounds or a whispered voice. Now how practical that will be with the sound of a cycle, I don’t know. But if it’s about sound and it involves evoking an emotional reaction in the listener, then it comes into my field of interest. And who knows, we may even end up doing a podcast on ASMR. David, thank you so much. How can we adequately say thank you for the time and energy you’ve put into not only our client brief, but also for your time in sharing your stories and giving us the benefit of your experience? Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been brilliant catching up with you again.
David Lowe
Absolute pleasure
Neil Hillman
The link to David’s website and his social media links are on today’s show notes page, which will also give you his contact details and production portfolio. Also on the show page are contact details for Jason and me, as experienced and enthusiastic dialogue editors for hire. My work as a sound producer, helping ambitious filmmakers, by acting as a consultant in overseeing their film’s soundtracks from pre-production, right through to post-production, as well as a link to the live, online coaching sessions and workshops that we run on sound design and DaVinci Resolve, which we like to think are relevant and useful for all craft creatives such as directors and picture editors and not just sound professionals.
Jason Nicholas
It’s our goal with this podcast series to educate listeners from all backgrounds about the underappreciated, wider roles, sound plays in life as well as in the film and television industry and also to develop a sound language and style of dialogue that filmmakers can use to more easily communicate with each other about sound for moving pictures. If you like what you’ve heard today, please be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave comments about what would be helpful to you and your work and who you’d like to hear from on the show. And lastly, as ever, thanks for listening.
Announcer Rosie
The Apple and Biscuit Show is written, produced and presented by Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman. It is edited and mixed by Jason Nicholas in our Sydney studio.
