www.musicweek.com INTERVIEW DAVID ARNOLD
FROM BOND TO BAKER STREET
FILM AND TV MUSIC BY PAUL WILLIAMS
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As the BBC rolls out a music and film season, Music Week talks to acclaimed composer David Arnold about James Bond, The Olympics and working on the next series of Sherlock
LEFT We’ve been expecting you Mr. Arnold: David Arnold with an award from US music rights organisation BMI
s a kid in the late Sixties, David Arnold sat enthralled in his local cinema in Luton watching the Bond movie You Only Live
Twice and listening to John Barry’s captivating soundtrack. It would have taken quite a flight of imagination back then for him to have envisaged that one day he would be succeeding Barry and scoring Bond movies himself. Recommended for the job by Barry after
impressing him with an album of Bond covers he had made called Shaken and Stirred, Arnold went on to compose the music for five films in the franchise from 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies to Quantum of Solace in 2008. He has also been behind the music of more than
two dozen other movies, including Independence Day for which he won a Grammy, A Life Less Ordinary, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Hot Fuzz. These have happened alongside TV work on programmes including BBC comedies Little Britain and Come Fly With Me and the acclaimed modern-day version of Sherlock, for which he is currently working on music for the forthcoming third series. His talents are now being stretched to the
theatre with a stage version of the 2010 film Made In Dagenham, which he scored, while he was last year musical director of the Olympics and Paralympics closing ceremonies. With such a stunning CV behind him Arnold is a key contributor to a new BBC TV and radio season launched last week called Sound of Cinema and dedicated to the contribution of composers, songs and scores to the big screen. To run alongside that he talks to Music Week about the part music and film played in his life growing up, his decade- long “apprenticeship”, the secrets of successfully writing film music, Bond, London 2012 and his new move into theatre.
You’re busy at the moment on the next series of Sherlock. Is there much difference between writing music for TV rather than film? The thing I’ve always said is if you’re writing for media, whether it’s film or TV, effectively the job involves you siting in a room by yourself looking at a series of moving images and trying to solve the problems it asks you. As far as the actual work is concerned that doesn’t really change. Whether it’s a $100m, $200m film or a £10,000 TV pilot you’re still left with the essential same problem, which is what is this all about and how can we express it with music? The difference is in the financial aspect. Are we going to be able to use the kind of players that we’d like to use and in the numbers we’d like to use and in TV the answer is usually “no” so you have to find a way round that. Also with scheduling TV is quick, usually a couple of weeks, and with a film you can be anything from four to six weeks to three, four or five months.
Growing up watching films, whether at the cinema or on TV, when did you start thinking about the part that music was playing in them? It was evident to me pretty immediately. When I was growing up there weren’t that many contemporary films on the television so a big movie on TV was a huge event. Now there is a big movie on TV on 25 different channels every night. In the
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