Doctor Who | Series 1 | Murray Gold
It's still Election Day, where I am. And so, people of the future, all you people who know who the Prime Minister is and stuff, please cast your minds back to those halcyon days when Dalek had just taken the world by storm and we had no idea even what The Long Game or Father's Day had to offer. Despite being sweetly protective of me in terms of trying hard not to spoil upcoming episodes - even on being told "No, tell me, it's okay!" and "No, really, this is my job!" - Doctor Who's newest incidental musician, Murray Gold, still had rather a lot to say for himself... although eventually we had to regretfully move on from discussion of Kurt Cobain, David Bowie and Jerry Dammers and remember we were supposed to be talking about the new series of Doctor Who...
"Murray says he'll be delighted to speak to you," DWM editor Clayton Hickman informs me by the magic of txt msging. "And he's lovely, so it'll be no hassle!". Like I haven't heard that one before... but I'm inevitably excited about the chance to meet and chat to the guy who's redefined Doctor Who music, so off goes the first tentative email. A flurry of enthusiastic replies follows. "I'm in Hampstead. You could pop in this evening! I've just finished episode 10, which is a mad and brilliant and unbelievably exuberant episode, so I'll probably be spending a little of the evening drunk. Then I have a trio of Joe Ahearne episodes to round things up, which means time will start pressing again...". Rarely have I been invited into a stranger's house with such sudden, near-alarming alacrity. What's a music-loving, sound-obsessed Doctor Who fanboy to do?
But as ice-breakers go, the sudden unexpected appearance in that stranger's kitchen of a mate you haven't spoken to in two or three years, clad only in a bath-towel, might take some beating. "I've got a couple of friends staying for a few days," Murray Gold had informed me, to subsequent general surprise and bemusement when one of said friends turns out to be stand-up comic Dan Antopolski, who I've known for years. After a lengthy bout of catching-up, Murray and I are just settling down to some serious Doctor Who talk when the doorbell rings. "This is Tim The Guitarist," says Murray by way of introduction. Tim The Guitarist was 'just passing by'. "Why would you 'just pass by' with two bottles of wine in a bag?" comes the pertinent question from Murray, to which Tim The Guitarist doesn't seem to have an answer. Regretfully for all of us - it looked like rather nice wine - Tim The Guitarist and his two bottles of wine have to be sent packing so Murray Gold and I can finally start to talk...
As a Doctor Who fan who works in sound and music, this gig you've bagged yourself strikes me as the dream job. Is it?
It is, really. I just had to do a quote about that for PRS magazine actually, because they were doing a special feature on Doctor Who. It could have started out as a dream job and no longer been one by halfway through, for instance, but it has remained a dream job right the way through, because it's so good. And also because you just get to write huge amounts of music - and there is something about working on something that you enjoyed, that you really loved when you were six years old, and the fact that it's with a group of people, most of whom I've had some working relationship with in the past as well. It's an incredibly high profile job, so it could have been really fraught and nightmareish - imagine if things had gone a bit wrong and everybody felt like they were doing a high wire act, or if it hadn't been popular? Can you imagine, another twelve episodes to go and nobody likes it? That could have been hard work! Because I'm still working on it now - I started back in October and have barely had a day off since then. I'm at the point now where I'm going to have a very intense couple of weeks, because episodes 12 and 13 are enormous, as most Joe Ahearne episodes tend to be - absolutely chock-full of music. But I'm really dreading it ending...
Because you'll have to find something else to do?
It's also because I'll feel as if I want to stuff everything into the remaining episodes - because I'm running out of space. There are all sorts of different themes and types of music that run through the series, even if you just get the odd glimpse of some of them - they're really stuffed full, these 40-45 minute episodes. I was having a conversation with Joe about this yesterday and he was slightly feeling the same way, I think - that he's watched episode 6 and he loved it, and I loved it, and we want to make the next ones we do together better - or as good and then better! But after that, we won't have a chance to do it again and make it better still, and that's why you feel "I don't want this to end - what if I discover something really clever afterwards? I can't go back..." Episode 13 will be stuffed full of 'opera' again, massive voices. And also there's that kind of massive anticipation - there were three musical themes in episode one that were important, and they've run throughout the series, and I hope there's going to be space for me to revisit them to make episode 13 a proper finale. I don't even know yet because I haven't seen it - I've only seen a trailer for it...
And there is the psychological feeling of loss when anything goes away - when episode 13 is finally done, and you get the chance to put your feet up and have a holiday or whatever, all that happens is that you get flooded with philosophical thoughts. Who wants a holiday, who needs to put their feet up? You don't want to wind down - Russell's motto is "never stop!"
I can believe that quite easily...
All that energy that you were putting into the show has to go somewhere, and sometimes it can become an endless internal debate about the meaning of life - and you're much better off just sitting writing some music for Doctor Who. I've always tended to look toward the 'finishing line', but I'm growing out of that. There are people who just work their whole lives through, and barely have any time off at all - Russell, and Julie Gardner, for example! It's different for Joe because he's not coming back next year, and I've got this Christmas special to start on. probably in September. And in the meantime I've been sent this movie to consider doing the music for, called Alien Autopsy... so I might fit that in over the summer, but then it will be straight back into Doctor Who. There are people in my life who might prefer it if I wasn't quite so full on - I know quite a few people whose relationships have been ruined because of music. Actually, it doesn't have to be music - there's the character in the movie Heat who can't stop going back for another job. It's not good for relationships, a work ethic! My Slovak girlfriend has run straight into Doctor Who - she might be one of the first Slovak Doctor Who fans! And if there is another one, it's probably not a 'she'. When I first put an episode on and was making a big fuss about what Doctor Who means in this country, the effects hadn't been done, and bits of it were against a green screen, and she was watching me writing this incredibly emotional music to this Dalek just wheeling around - and she said "How come this is really moving? What is that 'Horlick' thing?" and I had to just say "Believe me - this is an incredibly moving piece of drama!"
When you say 'what Doctor Who means' - is this an allusion to what it means to you, personally? Russell has said that at your first meeting you ended up chatting about The Ark in Space...
I think that happened because of the character in Queer As Folk who was into Doctor Who, and one of the episodes closes with Genesis of the Daleks playing. And I hadn't realised Russell was a Doctor Who fan, even though he had that character in it. But you know Russell, it's not going to take long for Doctor Who to come up in conversation. It's not going to take a couple of Doctor Who fans long to realise they had that in common.
Would you describe yourself as 'a fan' then?
Until I discovered what it actually means to be 'a fan', yeah - I'm probably a complete charlatan to fans in that way, because I stopped watching it about twelve episodes into Peter Davison's era, so I missed out a good chunk. But in the seventies, nothing on Earth would get between me and Doctor Who on a Saturday night, from the ages of four to thirteen. I don't know what happened after that - I think David Bowie took over!
That's interesting, as it alluded to what I wanted to ask you next - now that you're a professional musician and composer, what are the roots of that? What got you into music in the first place?
I don't know, really. It's difficult to say, because you listen to pop music and then you hear something else which is not part of the day-to-day diet of pop music when you're maybe about eleven, twelve, and there were simultaneous things that happened with me. One was 2-Tone music - The Specials, Madness, the Beat...
The Selecter...
Yeah, and reggae generally. And that strand of black music that comes from soul. And then I think I heard some David Bowie - and that was that, really! It was in my uncle's record collection, and I thought he looked weird and I couldn't quite work out what he was. And then I was actually rehearsing a play at school and somebody put on Fame, which is actually quite funky. It's quite an odd track to love, it's not typical Bowie at all. I was already mad about The Beat and bands like that, but they were very tough sort of bands, they were into politics and had a skinhead following and were quite controversial politically. But in terms of "how you get into music", I grew up in Portsmouth, and anything that had any romance or glamour about it was immediately attractive. It was quite weird because Madness came down to Portsmouth Guild Hall, and I was taken along. And that was in the days when they still had problems with far-right-wing infiltration. And I was only about twelve, and went to this gig with a cousin of mine, and I really loved that. And David Bowie was then altogether different - he comes from an altogether different place, and that was the music I put on in my bedroom and went into raptures over, really, discovering David Bowie inventing characters. I used to think that Ziggy Stardust was another person, I didn't realise that it was actually David Bowie! And the psychological implications of that for a thirteen year old boy living in Portsmouth on top of a hill were immense. It's amazing how much influence Bowie has on a lot of significant artists - I'm not including myself in that! - a lot of people are really informed by this guy who's kind of fearless but really romantic and dreamy, you know - to make stuff up and act out his fantasy world, and has these great songs about God knows what - about everything! Are you a Bowie fan?
Not a huge fan, although I've got some stuff including the obvious bits. But I do tend to like a lot of people who have been influenced by him. Suede, for instance.
Oh, Suede's completely drawn from Bowie.And I think even bands like Franz Ferdinand are very influenced by him...
I tend to hear Wire and Magazine, and even early Adam and the Ants in there...
And Adam Ant, Stuart Goddard, he's another slightly deranged individual who's seeking solace by dressing up and becoming someone else, doing these wild things. Very attractive characters, both of them, for young men - that is, if you're not one of those young men who wants to be tough and urban. All the post-punk lot, The Clash and people like that. Clash fans always looked quite 'hard', as did fans of The Jam and The Who. All the mod types seemed to do quite a bit of fighting...
I think most of the stuff I like, even when it's been loud and spiky, has a 'feminine' side to it... you can see it in Franz Ferdinand certainly, and even sometimes in harder music, stuff like Faith No More. They're not just about breaking bottles over people's heads...
Of course not. Some of them are quite involved in politics - Rage Against The Machine were very political, and there's that strand of American hardcore, or 'post-hardcore' or whatever you want to call it, that straight-edges stuff that developed out of Fugazi and the Steve Albini strand of music which sounds very nihilistic but actually has a quite heavy political agenda, some of it.
A lot of it has not so much a political agenda as a personally political one. Nirvana for instance - Kurt Cobain wasn't talking about the world, so much as himself.
Nirvana was kind of a disaster in a way, for kids - because you really wanted him to be a Bowie figure, you wanted him to have been able to rescue himself by the kind of brightness in his soul and in his personality which Bowie could do. It's weird that Bowie never seemed to be troubled by depression, he always moved on. I can't quite get over the fact that he was about 23 or 24 years old when he produced one of my favourite albums ever, which is Transformer. How does a 23-year old guy from Bromley get to be producing the solo album of the greatest art-rock band of all time... (He's talking about The Velvet Underground, you ignoramuses) ...who've already disbanded and sealed their reputation? How does a 23-year old kid get to be in the position of producing Transformer? It's unbelievable. When you see him in interviews, he's so cheerful, and never makes any claims for himself, he just does it. I love that about him, he just gets on with it. How many albums did he put in the seventies?
It was one a year, at least...
A dozen, I think. And you can go through those albums and every one is an absolute peach, from Space Oddity right up until, er...
Scary Monsters is the usual cut-off point...
Scary Monsters, yeah. I don't mind Let's Dance, although Tonight was a bit of a bore... I've never quite understood his version of China Girl, it's so inferior to Iggy Pop's. Bowie does prune it a bit, but Iggy's has something vicious going on... but then Bowie produced that album, The Idiot, as well! How did he do that?
I really should check out that period of Bowie - I know from every description of them I've ever read that Low and Lodger and Station To Station are the sort of thing that would appeal to me, I've just never got round to them yet...
Lodger is a great album. Fantastic Voyage I think is on Lodger , which is one of those great soaring Bowie numbers. And a song called Yassassin which is a brilliant track, really weird. And that's actually quite funny. The cover of Lodger was supposed to be him at the end of his tether, fucked-up on drugs... it looked like his suicide, basically. That was his Kurt Cobain. Whereas Kurt Cobain's whole thing about rejection - "Here we are now, entertain us" - didn't even have the fight of punk, it was so dejected and tired, and it hurled all that dejection at us. It's so unbelievably negative.
I think there's something uplifting in there, though. It's not joyous, it doesn't even have the humour of The Smiths, but even when it's dejected there's still something intrinsically uplifting about it at times.
I agree, I agree - but it's solace for people who believe that life is a hopeless undertaking, and it's nice to find like-minded souls, no matter how depressing the thing that binds you together is. It's tragic because you could see it coming, it's so obvious that Kurt Cobain was going to do it...
At the time we were all in denial about it, even though he'd tried to do it once before - "He'll come through, he'll be okay" - and clearly we didn't understand this at all. We though we did, but we didn't.
He wasn't through it at all. I think their best album is the Unplugged album.
The track I really love is the last one, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? Er... we seem to have ended up talking about Nirvana, and I really should talk about Doctor Who or else I'll be here all night... so when did you actually start making music yourself?
I wrote music when I was at school, I wrote little tunes when I was seven, eight. We used to have an arts prize at school, and I submitted a score when I was about twelve. And I tried to play it, and my music teacher said "You can't play that", and I said "Yes I can", and sat down and played it, and he pointed out "That's not actually what you've written...". Then I wrote songs as a teenager, as lots of people do. And when I was at university I wrote scores for theatre, and I had a band. I was in a band with Colin Greenwood, who's now in Radiohead, and seven other people. Actually, all of the members of Radiohead played funk while they were at university. A little-known fact! There was one band at Oxford which was Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's band, and one at Cambridge which Colin playing bass, and then he trotted off and got busy after university with this little outfit that was meeting once in a while playing this 'Indie' music. "What happened to the funk!?".
And then they stopped playing indie music as well, one album in...
And went into this massive rock thing. That's great, it's also very Bowie, these soaring melodies seem to inhabit the same sort of territory...
Was it actually music you were studying at university?
No I did history, but I wrote loads and loads of scores for theatre. I wrote plays while I was there, and had no-one to write music for my plays so I did it myself. And then I started doing it for other people, people who heard what I did and said "Could you do that for me, too?". And so I got into the habit of writing music for drama, so it was very practical, actually. All kinds of different drama, from Chekhov to new plays by new writers. I got really involved with new writing, and the concept of new writing was really important to me at the time. And then when I left university I went to the Edinburgh festival with a show called Glue Wedding that got nominated for the Guardian and Independent drama awards - you know what goes on in Edinburgh, those sort of awards. And it got a little run in Battersea Arts Centre, which was a good start straight out of university. Then I did a bit of work on radio shows. I did a spoof history of rock'n'roll with Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, very funny writers, and that was really good. I'd love to hear that again actually - it was called The Knowledge, and it was on Radio 1, and presented by Alan Freeman...
I think I remember this. Was this from that very brief period when Radio 1 had a regular comedy slot? The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Lee & Herring and Victor Lewis Smith and those sorts of people had Radio 1 shows for a while...
Yeah, it must have been about '92 or '93. But I didn't know what broadcasters did at the time. Even when I was doing my first TV jobs, I had no concept of them being reviewed or anything. TV shows didn't get reviewed, you'd either get one star or two stars in the newspaper to tell people to watch it. But this show apparently went out. I don't know anybody who ever heard it, but it was very funny. Every week they'd send me a script and I'd have to be, say, Elvis, The Smiths and Band Aid! And I'd write all the music and a bunch of voice impressionists would come in and record them. They were very funny, and it was good practice because I had to turn it around really fast, and capture something of the source material quite quickly. And then I did a bit of television. I did some documentaries - I can't remember how I got into that. I did some short films, Channel 4 used to have the Short & Curlies strand for short films, and I scored a few short films for that, and always tried to make the music something you would notice. I was trying to do this in theatre, where you don't get very long unless you're doing an opera or a musical - you only get about ten seconds at the beginning to make some sort of statement, so you select your instruments quite carefully and try and get something to stick in the minds of the audience. And quite often people would come to me for songs, I was the composer to approach if you wanted something a bit 'out of the ordinary', and that sort of reputation suited me. To have a reputation for being different, no matter how well-earned or otherwise it is, is a good reputation to have. Nobody wants to have the reputation that what they do is just the same as everything else.
I think a lot of musicians writing music have to wait to be instructed for their starting point, but I've been doing it from such an early age. I think even when I was about twelve or thirteen, Portsmouth City Council used to run summer arts courses for youngsters and I remember going along there and it was a bunch of dancers and a bunch of musicians and we all used to sit around banging drums and it was all very hippy-ish, very 'festival' in prototype - but it ended up as a show on the Friday, and by then you'd devised a piece of music for a girl to dance to, and you sat and performed it live, and it was fantastic! It seemed really obvious... someone would have to die as part of the show, for instance, and I didn't know about the 'Dying Swan' or anything at the time, but you'd move down into the bass range as it got sadder. I think what I got from that is that where a lot of composers need prompting, though their music might be wonderful - but in terms of drama I'd had so much experience by the time I was 25...
My first big TV job was Vanity Fair, which I got after scoring two or three documentaries, and I'd scored them all in quite an odd way - Mark Munden, who had directed one of the documentaries that I'd worked on, said to me "I've got this job doing Vanity Fair, it's a period drama, Sunday night, BBC - I want you to do the music for it". And I said "Congratulations - but they'll never allow me to do it". And he said "Just send us some music!". Now, I didn't really record music much in those days. I had a few punk songs, but stuff I'd done in theatre I didn't record - I just played it! So I didn't have a great big array of things to draw on, although some of my theatre work had a slightly Kurt Weill feel to it. So anyway I didn't send anything in and two or three weeks later thought it had all been forgotten, and then Mark rang again and said "Murray - what the fuck are you doing!? You haven't sent anything in and I've been going on about you!". And I said "Oh, well, you know, I dunno what to do, it's just fate, it's not supposed to happen". And he said "Right - get down here tonight, and bring a tape!". So I turned up at the BBC, and it's kind of like MI5 or something down there, down at White City. I felt like I'd been arrested! It was like going in for an interrogation. And I'd brought this little Maxell C90 - this was only eight years ago, but it's another era in technological terms - that I was trying not to unspool in my pocket on the way there. And Gill McNeill, one of the producers on Vanity Fair, was, in a way, like the best teacher you could ever imagine, and I felt like one of her pupils. We played the music and she just started laughing! And she said "That really puts a smile on my face - it's just that kind of music that makes me smile. It's lovely". Now, one of the reasons I'd wanted to avoid doing music was that I used to have this problem that music had no morality in it. I really love philosophy, and always used to get wrapped up in moral philosophy, normally as an excuse not to do anything other that just sit around and mull things over. Paul Abbott was saying to me the other day that human beings aren't really supposed to do anything, they're supposed to think. Anyway, I used to have this whole problem that I wasn't going to make a career out of music because (a) you can't really tell jokes, and (b) there's no kind of driving morality through it, it's decadent. It's one of those things that Plato would have had shot, along with the poets. And what kind of life is there with no jokes and no morality - they're what interest me. And then when I saw Gill laughing, I sort of realised that actually what I was doing was writing 'music with jokes in'. And it actually became a bit of a trademark, even through Queer As Folk. So anyway, I got the job on Vanity Fair, and for three months I was sure I was going to get fired. I was so sure of that, in fact, that I told myself "It doesn't matter if they like it - they can just fire me! It makes no difference, and I've never done it before, and if it doesn't work out I can do something else". And I was getting closer and closer to deadline time, and Mark Munden and myself had this idea between us that we were going to do a sort of 'out-of-tune brass band'. We had this template for the music which we loved, which was music by Charlie Hayden who's a Sixties jazz man, still around, who makes this very soulful music. He's one of those guys who really knows what the important thing about the music is. He's got wonderful soul, soulfulness about it, and it's really plaintive and still. Anyway, I said to somebody that this score for the BBC - which was really high-profile! - I wanted it to sounded really out-of-tune, and like Charlie Hayden. And that somebody said to me "What you want to do is get a bunch of students to play it. Either you get the best musicians in the world, or you get a bunch of students. You make sure that the top line and the bottom line are played by your best players, and the middle voices can be as free as you like". If it's people who aren't used to playing music immediately, every day, professionally - that 'out-of-tune' sound will naturally issue forth! And I managed to get a rehearsal out of the BBC, then we recorded the album for Vanity Fair in one day, the day after the band and I had met for the first time. And we sent this to BBC Worldwide, and they thought it was a joke! "Is that really the music?!". Because they were expecting something more traditional and English, a 'BBC Period drama' score...
Something very sweet and orchestral?
Yeah. And a bit dull! (laughs). And instead they got this very theatrical and quite biting music. And to me it still sounds fresh, even now. Anyway, that came out and it got nominated for a BAFTA, which was fantastic. And as that went out, Queer As Folk lost its composer, because of one reason or another. He went on to win an Oscar the next year, I think, so it wasn't a terrible trauma for him. And Vanity Fair had just been screened, or was actually just screening, and Russell or Nicky Shindler rang me up and said "We want someone who's really different - and that music is so hearty. What can you do with Queer As Folk?" And I think I had three weeks to score episode 1 of Queer As Folk, three weeks to get the whole episode done and then a week to make alterations or something like that. The producers were determined that the music should be absolutely right, and all I could think of about Queer As Folk was that it reminded me of a description my dad had given of going to see The Blackboard Jungle, which was the first movie ever that had Rock Around The Clock in it, which had caused havoc in the cinema. And all I could think of was the Fifties - when you saw all those men hanging out and leaning out of cars and all the lights on, it looked like Americana. So the last thing we wanted was four-to-the-floor house music... because apart from anything else it runs right the way through the show. So I was thinking a bit 'Eddy Cochran', that kind of really innocent rock'n'roll. And it comes down to the humour again, this comic spirit. You thought "These boys in Queer As Folk are so full of mischief, healthy mischief", so what you wanted to do - and I sort of knew this from theatre - was play up to that. And this is where the morality aspect comes in as well, and this I think is why writers now ask me to score their stuff - the first people to ask for me are writers, because they know "Murray will score it with the motivations and needs of the central character in mind". And on Queer As Folk someone had originally scored it in quite a menacing way, that you constantly felt there was a fly in the ointment of this story, that there was something sinister about it. But the way to release the energy of that piece was to play it on their side, from the point of view of the protagonists. And Vanity Fair was similar to that with the character of Becky Sharp, it was very much from her point of view. So after I'd done those two more or less at the same time, I ended up with two BAFTA nominations and two Royal Television Society nominations in the same year. And after that I didn't really pause. I haven't paused since.
But it's always been a certain kind of thing that's appealed to me - good writing. I call it 'romantic realism' now, because the likes of Paul Abbott and Russell Davies and Billy Ivory and the other one, Peter... er, I don't want to forget his name in this context...
Bowker?
Yeah, Pete Bowker - everything these people write is rooted in realism, but it sings.
Heightened realism, you mean?
Yeah, I suppose so. But the way that it's heightened is emotional, it's emotionally direct and it sings, that's the best way of describing it really. All of this drama sings, and you just stick the music on the top. Look at Shameless. And that's the thing that binds Doctor Who to these shows now, it's that Doctor Who sings in the same way. It's got this same drive and desire - it's got such a good strong heart beating inside it.
Joie de vivre encapsulates it, I suppose, but there's more to it than that because it's not relentless upbeat, it does have 'down' moments, but it is alive...
It has moments... I don't know if you've noticed the theme of self-sacrifice to it. With the exception of Rose, all the early episodes have that. Even the Dalek does it - it's a self-sacrifice for the common good. And 7 and 8 have it, 9 and 10 to a lesser extent maybe. There are emotionally 'down' moments, yes, but there's a different between a 'down' moment and something which has any kind of negativity to it. Doctor Who is full of life even when it's playing 'down', and it doesn't put things down to fate particularly, outcomes are always down to decisions. In every episode of Doctor Who, loss of life is down to decisions, and people do everything consciously and knowingly, which makes it an incredibly moral piece of writing. All of Russell's writing is very moral - which is not to forget the other writers on the show, but I'm sure they've picked up on Russell's approach. But Doctor Who has been something I've found very uplifting and heartening as a whole regardless of the downbeat moments. By the end of every episode, I'm pretty 'full' - I feel quite uplifted.
You're not watching an episode and walking away from it 'not bothered' one way or the other? I mean, understandably, not everyone's going to enjoy it, but either way you're going to notice it's there, and it has such vivaciousness to it...
Vivaciousness is exactly the right word, and that's the most important quality any drama can have. If it doesn't have that, you're lost. Arguably, shows can survive without 'vivacity' or 'vivaciousness', but... I mean, something like EastEnders, to me, feels like it's always 'down', and I can't participate in that, I can't watch it. I feel like I'm looking in through somebody's window. Even in theatre - a good friend of mine who's a theatre director always says to me that a misanthropic piece of writing will always get a big audience in London, something like Closer, which was one of the big dramatic hits. None of the shows I've ever worked on, with the exception of I think one movie I've worked on called Beautiful Creatures, have been misanthropic in that way. The thing is that optimism as a quality doesn't always look like the smart option, you can always look cleverer when you're misanthropic, you can always protect yourself as a misanthrope, and that's why people are misanthtropic, because it's an easier position to adopt toward the world. And it's just not a criticism that you can aim at any of Russell's work - I just can't praise Russell highly enough. Even a show that didn't do well like Mine All Mine, I think had such lightness to it, such beautiful insights into the life of a family - really clever stuff, I felt like I was watching a fully-vibrant, living family with all the details that entails, a lot more in that show that I would have done in plenty of much more successful family-based dramas. But Russell's also uncontainable, finding the right vessel for him to pour himself into is not going to be easy. Which is why Doctor Who is so fantastic - you can see why he loves it, because there are no boundaries.
To some extent, it can only be constrained by how people perceive it. As a fan, I can see that there are fairly 'standard' or 'traditional' story types such as 'the oppressed masses rebelling against their oppressors', and you could argue that it did a bit too much of that, but the new TV show has pushed against that, and it seems to be perhaps having an impact on how it's being perceived...
I wonder if, without 9/11 and subsequent events since then, whether Russell would have had a grand theme for the whole Doctor Who series. The satiric subtext of the series is pretty self-evident - and I'm not saying it's unsubtle, it's just wonderful. It's very naughty and mischievous - there's a similar strain of worthwhile satire in the new Spider-Man movies about responsibility and power, which is very clearly flagged, and I suppose after 9/11 people were wondering if the next time there was a big war or adventure feature movie, it would have to be handled with kid gloves. But you don't have to do that at all, you just do it the way Russell's done it. It's so of its time historically, what he's done with Doctor Who.
I'm not sure how strongly that point stands up to analysis, though - I mean, you've had work like Pearl Harbour out there which doesn't strike me as a particularly intelligent or satiric piece.
Well, there will always be a market for things like that. Programme makers have to judge that - they're either making things for people who are terrified of appearing unpatriotic, or they're making them for people who are interested in good drama and the themes of our times. And Russell has, I think, incorporated the themes of our times in the new series of Doctor Who. I've seen mainstream television critics writing things commenting on that, and it's very nice to see.
From my point of view as a fan, it seems nice both that the show is living up to its potential, and that the world at large is believing that it is. Doctor Who's done both of these things before, but I'm not sure how often it did both at the same time.
But did Doctor Who tackle the themes of the eighties, for instance? Did it go into corporate take-over and selfish culture?
Perhaps not those specific ones, but I believe it did, certainly towards the end. In among the sci-fi action adventure there are episodes about the destruction of hippie ideals, and about the dangers of nostalgia. The problem was, hardly anyone was watching by then - Doctor Who was widely perceived, at best, as a geeky cult show that was hanging on for dear life rather than a vibrant, important piece of mainstream culture... it's quite remarkable that, in real terms, the new series has pretty much got Doctor Who's highest viewing figures ever...
In terms of average audiences, yeah. That I find very moving, because it's a triumph of so many overlapping things - it's great that it's happened to Russell, it's great that it's happened to Doctor Who, it's great that it's happened to British drama... it's great that it's happened to Cardiff! I couldn't be more upbeat about it, that's genuinely heartfelt. Russell goes off to all these televison buyers' conventions to sell the show, and he doesn't try and find clever ways of saying it, he says "I love this show with all my heart - don't you want to buy it!?". Which is very cool.
It's fab, yeah, but he does only get away with that because he's Russell T. Davies! And I'd imagine it's the sort of pitch you can get away with once in your career, even if you take the words to heart...
Yeah... but he's very persuasive!
Obviously you'd had several major TV successes behind you and you'd worked with Russell - so how did the Doctor Who gig come about? Were you just offered it?
I was just offered it, yeah. I was minding my own business doing Shameless and got an email from Russell. A nice email to get! I'm not sure when it was. To be honest, it could have done with being a little bit earlier! It might have been October, or maybe September...
So they were well into filming by that stage?
There was a finished cut of Rose ready! I said yes, and the following week I got that. It wasn't one of those jobs where I consulted an agent, or where anyone made use of my manager - I have both a manager and an agent, and they were bypassed. I just wrote an email back immediately saying 'Of course'. And then went and rang my dad! Because I hadn't heard anything about it, and because I'm not pushy or anything, I didn't try and make any contact myself, I just kept out of the way, and assumed they'd gone elsewhere. But they hadn't! And so I just started working...
You say you're the sort of composer who doesn't need so much prompting - so did you just receive Rose and sit down and start?
Yeah. We had our first music meeting scheduled for about two weeks before the first delivery date. So I just started doing it, even before that! I basically started two versions of it - one which was made up of, kind of, 'weirdness', and the other made up of tunes, far more orthodox. Not necessarily more orthodox for Doctor Who...
...but for current mainstream television?
Yeah. And I took all this into the meeting, and basically the 'weirdness' was immediately dispatched. I have smuggled as much 'weirdness' as I can into it, but basically the brief was: Big Tunes. "We just want Big Tunes!" Russell and Julie said "I want to be able to watch this episode of Doctor Who, listening to those tunes". Russell loved the very first piece of music from Rose, that skitty rock tune with the guitars. And the bit when they go across the bridge later in the episode, he loves that! When he turned the episode off after watching it, he was still singing it. I know that not everybody would go that way with it, but that's the way we've decided to go, and it makes it more colourful and vivid. And that was all decided at that initial meeting.
When you say you 'weirdness'...
Stuff that was more abstract, less tonal, more to do with, er...
Texture?
Yeah. I was going to say 'unfamiliar sounds'. Which is great to write, it's really enjoyable. I did a lot of that sort of stuff in the theatre. You can really carry a lot of emotional content in that sort of music. It was generally felt, though, that it was not really in the spirit of what we were doing. Episodes 9 and 10 have quite a lot of it, although it's still an orchestral-sounding score. But it was felt that strings, brass, woodwind was the best way to go with it.
Doctor Who has a reputation, to some extent, for being musically quite progressive, in terms of being rooted in synthetic and electronic music. Even through the seventies with Dudley Simpson and his little chamber music ensembles, a lot of what he did was augmented by some very obviously artificial sounds. So although what you're doing is very rooted in the modern television idiom, as a long-term viewer it did bring me up sharp a little bit - it was really not at all what I expected Doctor Who to sound like. Why go for something so very orchestral, given that you can still make things sound up and contemporary and even very 'human', with synthetic sound?
The people who are making the show didn't want it, it's as simple as that, really. I know where you're coming from, because I know that there are fans out there who would rather it was 'darker', as a catch-all phrase. I'm probably doing them a disservice by saying that... but I'm not sorry, to be honest, that it's not that. You should always do the opposite of what's expected, if you can. It's not that I don't like that sort of music or that I wouldn't enjoy doing it, it's just not what we wanted to do with the music on this show. I really like Geoffrey Burgon's music, for example, and I don't mind Dudley Simpson either, I like his stuff. But I know Russell is looking to find the 'alienation' in the show in another way, and the music is definitely playing a much bigger role, there's so much more of it. So it will bring some people up sharp, and I'm really sorry that maybe some people won't be able to recover from that and won't be able to take me into their hearts... but maybe in a year or two they will! I think when you see the overall arc of the show, they'll perhaps find it within themselves to forgive me for not making it 'darker' or more 'weird'.
When you say the overall 'arc' - and because the season isn't completed yet, this might not be an easy question to answer - are you looking as much at the big picture as you are at the individual episodes, in terms of scoring?
Yeah, I think you have to. It's also propelled forward by narrative themes. Centrally, there's the relationship between the Doctor and Rose, which is a conventional narrative arc in the tradition of all of Russell's drama in being an unrequited love story. Anybody who's ever seen anything Russell's written will see that the operatic theme of unrequited love is one of the most important poetic templates in his writing. Then, in more practical plot terms, you've got the Time War, and the Bad Wolf Corporation, which are also big story arcs. And also I suppose as with all of Russell's writing but this time something that coincides with the Doctor Who history this time is the theme of mortality, and in this case it's the Doctor's mortality. It's a shame that Chris is moving on, but to look at the positives, one of the big plusses is that we all get to see an episode 13 with a proper bloody ending! Okay, a proper ending would be 'he dies' - but how could we have a new series of Doctor Who without a regeneration at the end? And don't start the arguments about having one at the beginning, that would have been diabolical...
It was a mistake the last time, certainly...
In the Doctor Who movie, yeah. But the end's going to be great. It was shot a long time ago, the end sequence, they shot it 'in case...', so that's really good. So yeah, I think in terms of the music itself, it probably is getting more wall-to-wall. The only episode that didn't have much music was The Unquiet Dead, which was just purely directorial taste, as a lot of these things are. And this is the other thing - all of the directors 'temp' their stuff with orchestral music. It's not all just me - I sit with the director, and we discuss how it's going to be, and where it's going to go. I think from the director's point of view, the music is really important. Two or three of them have asked me since working with them on Doctor Who to come and do their next projects...
But I love doing it, and I love what I've done. If the brief had been "Murray, we want you to make all of the hardcore fans happy", I could have done that. But had I gone ahead and done that, I would have been sacked, and replaced, immediately! And who's to say that it would have got the response, and the viewing figures, that it got? I've got a hunch that the music's quite popular with the wider public - all the music I've done up to now has been. I'm not saying this as a boast, more of a matter of fact, that I'm quite involved with cutting-edge drama on British television so I'm quite involved with British television audiences - and there's no point pleading a special case for Doctor Who, it is part of the television fabric. When I think about how I would intellectually grapple with the idea you mentioned earlier that it's previously been a home to more 'progressive' music, I wonder what 'progressive' music is. A lot of so-called progressive music is really old-fashioned. That's why I say 'dark' - and a lot of times 'dark' music is masquerading as progressive music. If you're a contemporary classical composer at music school nowadays, you can assume the higher ground and write very 'dark' music all you like, and you can say that it's 'uncompromising', that it's 'progressive'... but it might not get you anywhere. Some of the most progressive music has been made for the dancefloor. I don't know where that's gone, I don't know what's happened to it... I don't even know if 'ambient' music is all that progressive. My brother's really friendly with a top ambient DJ and so I listen to a lot of that stuff, and to me it sounds like wibblings from 1967, really. So what is progressive music? You tell me. I got very involved with world music. If you listen to the Kronos Quartet playing music from Eastern Europe, and to me that's progressive, it's opening up new things, it's a collision, fusion of lots of different things. But if I wasn't going to get strung up by the hardcore before, if I start introducing afrobeat then I think I will! But I'm interested in music that's from the soul in some way, and I do think that a lot of what's happening with the Doctor Who is that it is complimenting the feelings of the show in exactly the right way, and I think it is quite soulful. I sit there in tears sometimes! That's not a guarantee that it's any good, but it gives an indication as to the state of mind I'm in when I'm doing it...
I'm with you there - I mean, I only have a vague idea what afrobeat is, but whatever the hell it is, I'd be quite happy to listen to it in context if you were to do it. If it provided the right mood and style for the show! Sod the traditions, I always think... and do you feel that you have the freedom to do that, if you choose to?
Oh, I can go anywhere I want with it... and I'll get reined in if it doesn't work. You'd have to go to a dub session to see how the music works, to see why it happens why it does. If you go to a dub... you've never seen people enjoying television so much. You've got the executive producers and the producer and the editor and the director, and they're laughing and shouting, and exploding - they love it! If I have a big space number, if I start an episode with a great big piece of chase music or something, they all start shouting "It's Doctor Who! It's fantastic!", you know? When I did that very first tune in episode 1... I promised myself I wouldn't talk about this, because I don't know how you'll handle it!
Er... okay...
I'm not even going to tell you what it was 'temped' with before I wrote it, because it would make the fans sick! But...
Oh, come on, you've got to tell me now!
Well, there was a pop tune in there. And no, I just can't...
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaw. Not fair.
I picked up my guitar, and played this big tune (at which point he demonstrates! Murray Gold is playing air guitar and making silly noises at me! This is what we want...) - it's a bit like a tune by The Pixies, it's the first tune on their Greatest Hits - and as I played it, I thought... "They're going to hate this!". And to do that, and stick with it, right at the beginning of such a massive project, was really hard. But I just felt it was right. And when I played it at the dub, everybody agreed it was right. This is a difficult thing to express... but the only way of making something that will survive is to write it as a success, to write it in the most optimistic vein you can. You can't say "If this fails, I'm going to look pretty stupid for trying" - if Vanity Fair had failed, I'd have looked a right idiot. And of course, I had one terrible weekend - I was doing episode one of Casanova, and that was the week Rose was leaked onto the internet. And on the Friday night I was sitting there writing the cues for Casanova, and a guy called Joe Queenan massacred it on The Late Show, and I was thinking "Why is someone reviewing this piece of work, when I'm still sitting here writing the music for it?" But that's just the way things work these days - Welcome to New TV! - you don't get a first night. In theatre you get a preview week and then a first night and then the reviews come out... but at least you get ten days where everybody's drunk and happy! Then the reviews come out and everybody's miserable... and that same weekend Rose was leaked and I saw all these people posting, one after another, "The music is terrible, it's diabolical!" - one after another. And I was sitting there having spent all this time on it... so then I went to the launch, and I just had no idea about it any more. But the episode came on and the music played so well, every cue. And there are actually little quotes from Dudley Simpson in there, in the Mickey scene with the bin for instance. There are things like that which I thought were a little 'wink', almost a gift to the fans, little reminders were almost slightly Geoffrey Burgon-ish. But of course nobody seemed to notice it...
Gosh, I didn't notice. Maybe you were being too subtle with it?
I suppose maybe it was a bit more 'playful'... there's a knowingness about my music which probably isn't there with the composers of the past so much. You can confuse it with levity or lack of seriousness. I mean, I'm a very serious person, but I don't let that get in the way of my good humour. Other people do, and I think that's a recipe for an unhappy life.
Talking about the music being 'wall-to-wall' - the show in general is much more compressed in terms of pace, and more pertinently to our conversation there's actually more sound going on in general. Is it perhaps more difficult to find a space in which to establish themes in the minds of the audience?
That is really hard. The only Doctor Who score that I even remotely remember from childhood is Geoff Burgon for the Zygons, and he used a chamber set-up really, lots of bass clarinet... the occasional Loch Ness bagpipe I suppose, but the bass clarinet always seemed to feature... but Doctor Who's not a chamber piece any more, there's not that claustrophobia. There's an episode coming up which has a big cor anglais theme in it, but as well as thematically it not being a chamber piece, we are talking space opera here. And that's not a description I would shy away from using, Russell and I have exchanged emails about that very subject. So it's not a chamber piece. And you're right about the sound effects. It's hard as a composer because I never hear the finished effects track, and often there are competing frequencies which I'd really rather weren't there...
That sounds rather unhelpful. Surprisingly so.
Nobody in television ever gets the benefit of the final mixed track. It spans genres this series, from horror-suspense to action-adventure and a lot of it so far has been action-adventure... if you were in the movies you'd be making space for it all, but that's not always been possible. I can't write around the effects because they're not there yet, so I have no idea what's going to be there. I suppose in a way it would be lovely if there was a music-only option on the DVD, I don't think there is going to be...
Not even on the Big Special Box Set at the end of the year?
Ah, there might be. I would deliver that for them if they want it...
I think the fans would certainly want there to be one. I'm particularly looking forward to the DVDs anyway, because I have the impression that there's so much sound being compressed into the two channels that I'm missing some aspects of the sound, that I don't notice parts of it. And if there's a proper 5.1 mix of the sound on the DVD, I'll get a lot more out of it.
Well, I don't go to the dubs very often, and usually the reason I don't go is that I'm too busy working on the next one. But when I have gone, I've been "You can't put that sound effect there, because it's exactly the same frequency as what I've done at the same moment!". And you don't get ten days to dub and mix the episode. The music's in with them on a Monday and the final mix is on there the next day. We're not on movie schedules or American budgets. We're on a good budget for a British TV show, but I think probably having said that, as we've gone along we've learned how to do it.
So do you not have any contact with the sound effects people?
Not really, no.
I find that very surprising, not in terms of the practicalities, but just because it must make life so much more difficult in terms of fitting around each other.
It can be frustrating, but then dubs in British TV are always frustrating. There are a few directors who really turn up the music up loud. I don't think the music on Doctor Who's been particularly loud, but I know some people think it has. I did a score for a movie which won a BAFTA last year for best newcomer, and everything is so chamber-ish and so perfect about it, and it's got really heart-breaking music - and there was not much competing with it, so it was a lovely thing to do, but that was all from the school of minimalism. Doctor Who is being done from, whatever the opposite of minimalism is. Maximalism! The first idea about how to deal with the sound on Doctor Who was "We are going to give them sensory overload - chuck everything at them!". Now, that is only ever going to work up to a point, but in its way it has a theoretical basis; it works on a principle, an idea that this is the best way of getting through to people. And I've seen lots of other things that do that, like the movie Moulin Rouge. Now there's something that appears not to have any unifying artistic principle whatsoever, other than the desire to be loved. There's no film that is more divisive in people's minds than that. So many people loathe that film. I remember sitting watching it with my dad, and at the time I was one of those that hated it, whereas now I adore it in a funny way. And my dad pointed out this feature of its aesthetic to me - that it just wants to be loved so much, you can't help loving it! You can't help enjoying it. And I suppose there's been an element of that in Doctor Who, it's like everybody is chucking everything at it. Whether that will change or not... actually, I think it probably has changed already. Joe Ahearne's episodes are always very operatic. Episodes 9 and 10 are slightly different, but it's still wall-to-wall music. There is 35 minutes of music in episode 10, and it's absolutely massive music. Someone in my family had just died when I was scoring the part when the Doctor rescues everyone, and he's got a line, "Just this once, Rose, everybody lives! Everybody lives!" And you know what Chris is like, giving it his all and stretching out... so everyone who's been infected with this illness stands up again, and it's almost like the end of Hair! 'Oh, let the sun shine...'. And it's also quite Bowie-ish, like Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud, or something like that. But my cousin had just died, and I was putting all of the emotion of that into it, into this moment of absolute benevolence and love of the world, and various hippyish things like that. All the directors have their own style, but I think they all more or less follow that aesthetic of chucking everything at it. Joe Ahearne for instance is utterly obsessed with music. I don't know if I'm allowed to quote him, but he said to me yesterday, "The soul of this show is: your music, Chris's performance, Billie's performance and the scripts - it's nothing to do with us, this show is director-proof!" He loves my music, so what can I do? (Laughs) I'm going to have fans, and I'm going to have people who hate me!
His Ultraviolet was very music-heavy as well, it apparently has one bit with fifteen minutes of solid music and hardly any dialogue...
I felt there was something of that about Dalek on Saturday - it didn't really stop, did it?
So, the music - do you write and play it all yourself, or have you hired musicians in to play your music?
Mostly myself, but there is a bit of that. You'll know about the choir on Dalek, and there was a singer in for Rose. And I did have a violin in at one point, but unfortunately that got cut. Joe preferred the sound of the synthesisers! The next episode we've got clarinet, cor anglais and saxophone, because there is a little bit of 'swing' music, God help you all! I'm not sure yet what we're going to do for the last two episodes. Episode 12 is absolutely barmy, and the last seven minutes is going to make every Doctor Who fan wet themselves...
In fear, or excitement, or what?
Oh, excitement! And I haven't seen 13 yet, so who knows? If there's time... I'm the same as everyone else from the point of view of musicians, from the point of view of the overall thing. I wouldn't change the music, and I wouldn't change the style of the music, although I would rather have it played by a full orchestra. But there just isn't enough money, or enough time, to do that. I mean, I did Dalek in about 12, 14 days... and it's been like that for every episode, 30 minutes of music and I've not re-used a single cue, so I've written something like five hours of music so far for this show. The worst thing about writing orchestral music is that I wish I could use an orchestra. For the sake of the musicians, not just for me - although it does sound better with an orchestra. But the cue I played you earlier, if I was to do it was with an orchestra, I'd need to use 50-60 players - and that's on the conservative side - and we just don't have the budget. Although Doctor Who is classed as a high-budget show, that's the overall budget, and not the music budget... but we are talking about, possibly, next series doing something with an orchestra. I was talking to Joe about this actually, because he'd 'temped' one sequence using a piece of music from Spider-Man 2, and you know, you're basically talking about an orchestra of 120 people, when Danny Elfman comes to town... so the upshot is that I'm using mostly electronic stuff, and slipping in the odd real instrument where I can. But I wouldn't change the music itself, and I wouldn't go about it any differently. I think it's going to get more and more kind of 'mad', though... I think that any remaining inhibitions that were there prior to it starting, started to disappear around the time of episodes 4 and 5. Interestingly with episode 7, the entire end sequence has lots of drums, and I actually played it a little bit 'mellow'. If I ever dare play a closing sequence again that has that thunderous, rapturous pounding, that can come back and I just have to add to it... 8's quite weird, I think people will want to string me up after 8. I tried to write a tune that sounded as if it had been heard before, because it's all about repeating time. And it's very, very, romantic! And as we know, not every Doctor Who fan is after a diet of 'romantic', thematic material...
I suppose it would be nice if there was a music-only option on the DVD, because then people would be able to see the attention to detail that there is in the score, and possibly with the sound effects there that might not always be appreciated, certainly on the first viewing. But I know the directors appreciate it - I am incredibly efficient about it all, and there's not been a single day with delivery of the cues or anything like that. And you're working for five different directors, and for three very opinionated bosses - they've all got strong opinions and you need that. Doctor Who could not have been done again by someone who wasn't prepared to say "I don't give a shit what you think about that, it must be like this" - and the three of them do always reach a decision, there's never anything muddled, nothing conflicting. Everybody's position is bolstered by success, too. They are all very strong people, though - this show will be remembered, as will the people who made it. They're all going places, these people! I don't know what they'll do next, Julie Gardner'll probably be Director-General...
To what extent do you feel that you're working on a children's programme?
However much it's changed, it's the same thing. It was always a kids' show. I'm sorry to offend anyone, but I do think eight is the ideal viewing age for Doctor Who, and I think that when you talk about people having been very influenced or inspired by Doctor Who, I think eight was the age it happened at. That was the absolute peak viewing time for me, and luckily that meant I was right in the heart of the Tom Baker era, because that was a wonderful time to be eight and to be watching Doctor Who. I have to say, as well, that not once in the entire time that I watched the original Doctor Who did I think that anything looked cheap or unrealistic. The monster in The Seeds of Doom - I've never seen it since, but when that monster came over that house, it was the most gruesome, disgusting, ginormous thing I'd ever seen in my life. The Spiders I know were an arch-foe because that was the end of Pertwee, and obviously any monster that can actually bring on a regeneration always gets added kudos, and those thought-transmitting spiders... I don't even know what they looked like, they probably look terrible, I haven't seen them since! The glowing hand in the mine in The Green Death... I was terrified of taking my hand out of my pockets, and that trick was repeated in The Ark in Space with the green hands. Seeing that, I was almost physically sick, when his hand came out and it was furry and all covered in goo... why am I talking about this? Oh yeah, the childrens show thing. I think one of the major shifts, actually, is that it's also a show for women. I think there's a way in for women now that there wasn't before. Yeah it's always been a show for kids and it is still, and it's smart and clever and full of good humour and it's wonderful and uplifting so it's also a show for adults, but I think that's where it's changed, and it's mostly to do with Billie and Chris. Women love Billie, I think, to generalise a bit, and young girls love Billie. My girlfriend loves Billie! And there is - whether people like it or not - a burgeoning romance, that even the Dalek can see. I think a lot of women have been forced to watch it with their male friends and been surprised and said 'You know, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be...' My music, for instance, is quite feminine - er, I suppose it's not always helpful to generalise this much about something! But from my experience working with TV audiences and focus groups, and hearing responses of people to certain things, and knowing what types of things trigger what kind of emotions in people... I think if I'd put some of the music of old under this show, women would have thought "I can't listen to any more of that bloody racket!". I think if you're looking for a theory to explore, then the idea that Doctor Who is now 'female-friendly' might be quite interesting. I mean, since Verity Lambert, there hadn't been another woman at the helm, has there?
Not as producer or script editor, only a very occasional writer or director...
And we've got an exec producer now in Julie, and the script editors, who are very involved in the shaping of it, and I do think that's important to how it's turned out. It's a very romantic show. A show where the premise is one of the central characters leaving everything behind to run off with a stranger, is the stuff of romantic fiction. Doing the wrong thing with a dark, mysterious stranger - that's the heart of the Brontes! And as it proceeds, you start to realise that you're more concerned with what happens between the Doctor and Rose than about who the next monster is, or at least you're just as concerned. I'm still watching episodes where I don't know what's going to happen, and I find I'm looking forward to seeing what happens between the Doctor and Rose - and I'm absolutely gagging to find out how she reacts to losing him... He's often got an aura, that 'man' thing of having something more important to do. "Can you stop asking me how I feel about you? I've got some music to write". Well, that's the version of it in in my family...
Can you explain this to me? A good friend of mine, who's one of the most uncompromising and musically astute people I know... he kind of hates everything! He couldn't be bothered with Doctor Who at all, but he watched Dalek on Saturday and really enjoyed it, and he said "The music is very loyal to its origins". Can you explain that comment?
Er. No, I can't. Your music has never at any stage struck me as being in any particular way 'like' the music Doctor Who has had before... the sounds aren't the same, it's not obvious synthesisers or a small ensemble, it's bigger, wider and lighter. I just don't get that at all...
No, I'm not sure I get it either, it's just that there was something that was ringing bells. But regardless of what it actually sounds like, the way the music is most different from Doctor Who music of old is in what it does, in the emotional story it tells.
It's more 'instrinsic', I suppose. This is a rampant generalisation with many exceptions as well, but Doctor Who music traditionally generally provided dramatic punctuation or underscoring, rather than being an intrinsic component of the storytelling...
I can say that as a child, the music made me frightened, and that means it was successful. But you could maybe have put the sound of a drill underscoring the same moments and that might have had the same effect - I'm not sure that it did much more than that, for me anyway, at that time. I suppose it also did a bit of set-work, a bit of making up for what you couldn't see on set, a bit of scene-setting in a 'curtains-back' kind of way. And it did the 'nasty look' a lot, as the person who's going to betray them disappears into another room...
I think one thing you're missing is that it very much established the 'otherness' of the show, that this was science-fiction melodrama, rather than just melodrama.
And now the 'otherness' is just not there. This show belongs to the Earth. Its concerns are with the decisions taken by men and women, and maybe other life-forms while you're at it. Russell's so concerned with the fate of humankind, and if you can talk of such a thing as what's becoming of the Western consciousness, what's happening to us now - he's so concerned with that, with if we're becoming different, corporate, machine-like creatures that will not be capable of any future... I love it for those concerns, it reminds me of existential philosophy. The 'stupid apes' speeches... it's like we've lost track of our higher selves. Whenever Chris rollocks someone, it's usually because they've been selfish or have shown lack of concern for another life, or have suspended their compassion. He's giving them a right good Atticus Finch lecture - you know, from To Kill A Mockingird? That's where the original lesson of 'put yourself in someone else's shoes' comes from, it's the ultimate lesson in compassion, in seeing things from another side. And I really just love what he's doing for children. If Doctor Who is a kids' show, the lessons it's teaching them are fantastic... but that's me rhapsodising again. They're all great, all these shows! I'm really lucky because I think I'm working on the best TV around. I spent the winter doing Shameless, Casanova and Doctor Who, you know...?
Murray Gold. He's lovely, and that was no hassle.