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Arts And Crafts
AWARD-WINNING COMPOSER STEPHEN WARBECK TALKS TO QUENTIN FALK
THANKYOU FORTHEMUSIC
As a composer your career tends to get shaped by the peo- ple you’ve worked for,” opines Stephen Warbeck, whose exten- sive CV reveals regular collabo- rations with film-makers like John Madden and Udayan Prasad as well as theatre directors such as Ian Rickson, Adrian Noble and Stephen Daldry.
The Daldry connection includes a stack of distinguished stage work, notably An Inspector Calls, which won awards on both sides of the Atlantic. So when Daldry followed up his short film Eight - scored by Warbeck – with his acclaimed feature debut Billy Elliot, he naturally went back to the same composer.
It earned Warbeck his fourth BAFTA nomination but as with TV’s Skallagrig and Prime Suspect not to mention Shakespeare In Love – which won him an Oscar over There - he was finally pipped at the post Here.
In the case of Billy Elliot with its instantly memorable, Eighties-redolent, toe-tapping T-Rex tunes, it’s perhaps all too easy to underestimate Warbeck’s contribution which helped stitch the whole film together musically and, as he helpfully points out, thematically too.
“People tend to forget that there’s over an hour of original music in the film. The Marc Bolan stuff was in the script. Having songs specified in the script is unusual and the director may decide not to use them as they can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. That was nearly the case in Billy Elliot with a bit of Fred Astaire.
“Unfortunately, decisions can be made about the use of existing music which are not necessarily artistic,” he adds, with the air of someone who has clearly suffered some past fall-out from the experience.
now combines being Head of Music and Associate Artist at The Royal Shakespeare Company with his film and television work.
He was “gently eased” into first writing for the screen when the produc-
pre-records would be able to be pil- laged for thematic things later on.
“It was the same again with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin where I was involved before, during and after film- ing. I greatly prefer that because it’s
such a long gestation period and the music, though not that exten- sive, is alongside the film right from the moment bits start getting assem- bled. It would be arrogant to suggest that it hap- pens to a huge extent but the film may, on occa- sion, be a response to your music – and, of course, vice-versa.”
With scores completed for yet-to- be-released films Captain Corelli as well as Jez Butterworth’s Birthday Girl and Udayan Prasad’s Gabriel And Me, there seems to be no let up in the Warbeck work rate.
As he begins to get a taste for his next assignment – Charlotte Gray, co- starring Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup and Michael Gambon – by visiting the location and watching some rushes, Warbeck admits:
“I have now decided to try and keep things end to end rather than overlapping. I suppose I could take on more films but then I’d probably have put out more to others for orchestration – and that’s something I really enjoy.” ■
Warbeck says he could write music “from when I was very little.” He start- ed piano lessons aged four, gave up at five “because the teacher smelt too strongly of tobacco” and resumed again at six also learning the violin in paral- lel. In his teens he flirted with rock music and played at school in various bands, including one alongside a youth- ful Andrew Rankin who would later drum for The Pogues.
By the time he got into the sixth form he had decided rock music might be a bit precarious for real life so with a long-time interest in theatre decided to read drama and French at Bristol University where he was soon writing music for various productions
in his year.
After a year in Paris, where he played for dance classes to help subsidise his study, Warbeck landed his first proper job as musical direc- tor/actor at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. From 1977 to the mid-80s, it was pretty much all theatre for the composer who
Warbeck is happy to the contribution of the
er and director of a schools’ episodic TV production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle commissioned him to rework his music from an Oxford Playhouse staging. Film – espe- cially European cinema - had been an ongoing interest ever since school and university. As many of his stage collab- orators began moving into film so he went too.
The nature of the collaboration can vary wildly. John Madden’s Mrs Brown, for example, was written in just 10 days. “It was”, he admits, “a very
squashed period of writing. Luckily, with the intensity of the characters’ relationship, it’s a very focused film.”
On the same director’s Shakespeare In Love, he became involved much earlier on in the project. “Stuff had to be composed for the dancing. We then decided that some of the material written for the
acknowledge
director: “Often I don’t think the direc- tor gets enough credit for the music; it can be a wonderful collaboration,” he says, citing his recent “very rewarding” work with Philip Kaufman on Quills.
Photos from top: Stephen Warbeck; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; Jamie Bell in Billy Elliot
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