Meet the composers!
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This was actually a topic posted by Falkirkbairn on Maintitles some years ago. Falkirkbairn posted a few times on this board early on too, but then disappeared for mysterious reasons (please come back, Alan!).
Anyway, it’s easy:
Have you ever met any film composer (that we might have heard of) in real life? If so, what was it like?
John Barry, at a signing in HMV London in 1998. He was signing The Beyondness of Things, and he signed my programme, the BoT CD cover and also the CD cover of The Knack.
The latter was for Mrs TG, and I asked him to sign it to Becca (short, of course, for Rebecca). Initially he misheard and signed it “To Decca”, as if I was married to the record company…. We had a good laugh about it, and fortunately it was easy to change the D to a B. Lovely fella, Yorkshireman, of course 🙂
I also met and chatted to several others including David Arnold and Christopher Gunning at a charity screening of Psycho arranged by Arnold and Dave Norris, who was then the projection manager at The Empire, Leicester Square. All very good eggs.
And I also met your pal in London that time, whose name escapes me because I’m on holiday and have had a bit to drink. Eirik Myhr, it’s come back to me now.
When I was living in London (1987 to 1990), I went for a pint or six in The Red Lion pub in Ealing. There was live jazz on in a dark corner, and at the end of one piece, the lead (don’t know who he was) asked for a round of applause for the band members – “…and Derek Wadsworth on trombone”. I thought, “there can’t be that many Derek Wadsworths playing trombones”, so when he went to the bar for a pint I asked him if he was THE Derek Wadsworth “…who did SPACE: 1999”. When he admitted that he was indeed that chap, I went into a long, boring (for him) spiel about music for science fiction films. It’s funny how we (or just I?) imagine that all musicians and composers who dabble in the medium are as much fans of the stuff as we are. I was going on about how ALIEN was such a brilliant score when I noticed that his eyes had begun to glaze over, so I eventually left him in peace with his pint.
From the few words he got in edgeways, he came across as a soft spoken, polite and rather shy big guy. Another Yorkshireman incidentally.
Film scoring is indeed A JOB for many. Not their passion.
That’s a bit too hard. If you have to or want to make a living of your passion not every project you work on is and can also a passion project at the same time. Same may apply to playing in a pub where hardly anyone notices you or playing on weddings or whaterver. You really have to be in a position to afford to do only passion projects. Someone like John Williams can do that after he got his break with Spielberg. Also artist in general often have an rather ambilvalent relationship to their own work and especially older works they may consider not perfect from the currentt point of view.
Not really. I have had short conversations with guys like Thorsten Quaeschning, Jan Bang, Øystein Sevåg and Knut Reiersrud, who all dabbled in film music.
And I also met your pal in London that time, whose name escapes me because I’m on holiday and have had a bit to drink. Eirik Myhr, it’s come back to me now.
Hi, Tall Guy! It was nice meeting in London back then! Hope you’ve been well.
Have you met some film composers, Eirik, outside the Nordic ones? I know of one, in particular (actually, I know of a few you’ve met). 😉
Well, going «undercover» as your photographer, TJ, we did of course meet Patrick Doyle in 2014 and Danny Elfman in 2017… Hard to top that one, fanboy-wise! Since I didn’t want to disturb them other than let you do your interviews, I’ll just have to live with the fact that they will forever see me as a paparazzi rather than a colleague. 😀
My memory is failing, there must have been more, but I really only remember the Nordic ones, and especially my Norwegian colleagues who I often meet once or twice a year. I can’t recall actually speaking to any international composers in particular…
Oh I remember, I did meet Nainita Desai, it must have been in 2019 or early 2020. She did a great presentation at one of these NOPA (Norwegian composer and songwriter’s union) gatherings. We had a small chat afterwards, and geeked out a bit over the use of sample libraries. She was really nice, wonderful person and composer!
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