Trust. Hubba hubba hubba, who do you trust? In the early days of EHP, in fact, during the company’s genesis, there was an incredible amount of trust going on. Naturally, there still is, but when you’ve got the amount of obstacles to overcome as there were during the making of Sold, the trust issue gets stretched like a mile of taffy. Firstly, this wasn’t the kind of project where we were going to have luxury of constantly going through footage. So, with the music in mind, I started writing some stuff after reading the script, before anything had been shot. Then, whilst I was at some of the locations, it was a case of making mental notes of shifts in tone, seeing how stuff was playing out, compared to how me and Mr. Williams had been discussing the soundtrack at script stage. So, being in tune with each other’s direction was pretty essential, in an intuitive kinda way (which has paved the way for all future projects, which is cool).

Then there’s the whole issue of trusting equipment. I’d advise everyone, on the whole, to simply have the faith. Technology scares the crap out of me, but when you’ve got the entire soundtrack spread over five mini-discs, waiting to be burnt off onto a CD, you can see what I mean. This was the days before I had the luxury of recording things in, well, a recording studio kind of environment. There’s doing things the rough and ready way, and then there’s the Sold way, but I wouldn’t have changed anything thing the experience…

First up, John Stanton from our drama studio is The Dude, bar none. He gave me access, leant me, and trusted me with the newly acquired digital 8-track… which I didn’t have a clue how to use. Fortunately he dumped the manual, several microphones and leads in my arms and let me get on with it. After some big-time reading, things slowly started to click. Over the course of the shoot, I’d go through demo versions of music with PW, to check we were still on the same page, and then the big sessions took place. In a nutshell, they took place all over Portsmouth. Guitars and some vocals were done in my flat, synths in a sound booth in Wiltshire Studio, and drums in a mixture of abandoned rooms (which got the Environmental Health involved – D’Oh!), and Lionsgate Studios… all spread all over dear Pompey, which meant lots of cabs, lots of drum dismantling and re-assembling, lots of pissed off cabbies, and lots more of me panicking about getting the 8-track recorder and the mini-discs (which everything was stored on) wet in the winter rain. Paranoid this may have been, but no back-ups discs were available, so Mother Nature could’ve arsed it all up. Thankfully, she must’ve dug what we were trying to do.

A few straight days and nights of coffee and mixing, and EHP’s (and my) first original soundtrack was born. The big premiere night went (amazingly) without any problems, and bass-man Nik popped down to the coast to perform some electro-acoustic version of some of the musical musings from Sold just after we’d screened its trailer, just to whet the punters appetites before the 30 minute film was shown. Here’s the little beast, track-by-track:

1. Beginnings
– My first flirtings with the whole world of synths, gawd bless ‘em.
– Represented the, er, beginning of it all, the whole Maynard thing, so it’s kinda eerie and a bit out-there.
– PW is on it… blowing (careful!) into the mic for some wind effects. Yes, he even wanted to cameo on the soundtrack!

2. Hollow Days
– Kind of the signature track to Sold. Would’ve been ‘the single’ off the album.
– Pompey blues guitarist Dave Saunders leant me his ‘axe’ for this track, he's a top bloke.
– You can’t beat recording the sound of a striking a match.

3. Quake
– An evil track for an evil scene: someone goes mental whilst doing a spot of painting.
–$1 million to mix a track? Ferggeddaboutit! Multi-track loads of expensive, distorted guitars? Geddouttahere! That’s just my acoustic guit through a distortion pedal, and me playing the crap out of it…on one track. Eat that, SlipKnot.

4. Morning Song
– My first flirtings with the piano.
– Mixed to give it a ‘musicbox in an attic’ weird sound quality.

5. Maynard’s Theme
– Sold’s ‘Jaws theme’ if you will.
– Distorted the bass guitar for extra mania, which sounded ace.

6. Silver Screen Dream
– A little, quiet track for the bookshop scene.
– My old flatmate Claire did the vox for this one.

7. Hand Painted Heart
– A song written a few months prior to the Sold project, but PW wanted it in it, on the radio for the ‘morning after’ scene.
– My good chum Hannah Reese (from The Redlands Palamino Co.) saved the day with lending me a microphone for this session: mine died on the only day I had available to nail the vox for this song.

8. The Silence
– The ‘after the carnage’ gentle-but-ominous theme.
– The name comes from this phrase that a character kept hearing in this multi-media stage production me and PW wrote in 1998 called The Safehouse.

9. Paw Print
– Or, someone’s “signature” if you will.
– The last piece written for Sold and deals with the whole 'signing your life away to a salesmen' part of the story.

Shortly after we’d graduated, we decided to do the Men Behaving Badly thing and get a flat together. PW didn’t waste time in shoving the script for this new short in my face. Which was fine – we’d been bustin’ to step things up, put together a 15 minute short and chuck around the country since the Sold thing was completed. Initial ideas started at script stage once again (something which has become very much ‘the norm’ for EHP stuff), and the beauty of being flatmates meant that the visuals and sounds for Mightier would evolve really organically. It was just a case of kicking my door open, going ‘Oi! Get in here!’ and I got the chance to watch some footage and then play through demos of stuff tom the screen: very handy.

The biggest shift for this soundtrack was that the whole thing (wait for it…) was recorded in the same place… in a studio! Yes, believe it budget-fans, this time we really meant business. The huge upside being that through my legendary buddy Paul Shubrook (yes – another ‘Paul’), I met the dude that is Ben Norris, who had just launched his own business in the form of Exodus Studios in Harlow Town. Being a friend-of-a-friend, this guy did us the amazing favour of charging us a measly amount, per track. What this meant was that we weren’t gonna be charged on a crippling hour or daily rate, and could (within reason) spend as long recording and mixing the tracks as we wanted. Drums and an awesome array of synths (which by this point, I’m desperate to experiment more with) were all living in the studio, too, so all it meant was getting me, some guitars, and my trusty musical compardre Nik down to Harlow Town, which was fairly simple, if you don’t count the shit rail services.

The biggest thing that we wanted to achieve (in a similar vein to Sold) was to not skimp on the soundtrack. Even though it was only for 15 minute short film, loads can happen in 15 minutes of a full-length movie, which can mean lots of different styles/tones of music can crop up, too. Cue: the Mightier OST challenge!

The sessions were great fun, and I even roped in Ben’s lovely missus, Nikki to play the piano break in ‘Simplified Me’. Their 18-month-old daughter, Jasmine, did do some percussion, but due to artistic differences, she refused to let me use the take. The Norris family up-rooted and re-located themselves and the Exodus Studios to Nikki’s home country of South Africa a few months after our sessions ended, so I was very lucky to get to work with Ben and his fam. As I’m certain PW has told you, we popped over to Belfast where PW picked up Young Filmmaker of the Year for Mightier. So who ever said trying to do this independently waste of time? I dunno, but whoever it was, was a tool. Here’s another track-by-tracker:

1. Ed Ode
– Being a comedy, Mightier was going to need some comedic tones, and this piece was the theme for the ‘possessed pen’. I wanted to do this over-the-top, homage to the 50s horror flicks, where women wailed and cymbals crashed to over-egg and over-signpost the impending scares.
– The name refers to this being my ode to Ed Wood films.
– The hardest to record: me and Nik couldn’t do the vocals with each other by the mic, and I was banished whilst Nik did his parts: we kept splitting up every time the cue came up for us to both sing/wail. Nik protests it was all my fault.

2. Home Wrecker
– Part of the ‘Home Wrecker Trilogy’, if you will.
– This version originally had the tag ‘Unicron Mix’ (yep, a Transformers reference to hint at the heaviosity and deranged nature of the track) but was left on it’s own as it was the original version that spawned two further arrangements.
– This one was the theme for Will’s state of mind, and how the pen was unhinging it, hence the massive shifts in mood, unexpected explosions, and psychotic last section.

3. Home Wrecker (Bailey Blend)
– The tag refers to good ‘ol Bill Bailey, as his cockney remixes was the inspiration for this first re-working.
– This arrangement was for the Covent Garden scene, as though someone off-camera was playing it. This scene was inter-cut with the deranged, burial scene (with the heavy Home Wrecker) and the café scene (see track 5), so the concept being that Home Wrecker, in suitably different arrangements, scored the whole sequence. Therefore, as the effects of the pen were being discussed by the characters, different forms of the pen’s theme (the three versions of Home Wrecker) were present.

4. Terminate
– The A-Team esque action theme.
– Arranged and recorded ‘live’, nailed on the third take, taking 30 minutes from start to finish. Cooking on gas!

5. Home Wrecker (Glitterball Cut)
– The tag comes from this being the dreamy, cheesy, glitterball dance hall version… or the Mike Flowers Pops version, as my Dad calls it.
– Was featured in a café scene as though it’s playing on the PA system.
– Was the final part of the HW trilogy, and represented the pen as Jude and Amy discussed Will, whilst he was ‘dealing with’ the pen.
– This version of Home Wrecker also is the one associated with Will’s nightmarish dreams he’s been having of Jude seducing the pen.
– Listen to the lyrics, folks, the themes of the movie are all there!
– Hardcore musos will also note that the chords are exactly the same in all three versions, however different they sound.

6. Simplified Me
– And finally, Jude, bless her, needed a theme, and this is it.
– Represents her thoughts about Will and the mysterious love letters she has been receiving.
– One of my fave pieces done for EHP so far.

After a fantastic year in our Ealing flat… (the set for Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence, no doubt! If Paul W hasn’t already mentioned this bizarre filmic coincidence, and if you’ve seen the film, Joseph Fiennes’ flat/building in it… was ours. Straight up, I tell you no lies!) … it was time for the Terry Williams collective to be relocated back at their parentals for a bit, due to a mixture of: the lease running out, beyond crap estate agents, us having no desire to stay neighbours with House of 1000 Corpses’ less friendly, noisier, and scarier relations, and me losing my job in a spectacular Lego-shaped nightmare (which unfortunately wasn’t related to that cool White Stripes video). Anyhoo, was that gonna stop EHP progressing onto the next bigger project? Does George Lucas think Jar Jar was a mistake? No. Exactly. So as 2002 flew by at 1,000 miles a hour, and Mightier continued to be quite mighty, the seeds and drafts of Paradox began to grow. But this time, we were gonna need a bigger boat. By boat I mean budget, and by bigger I mean, bigger.

So, as the story evolved and coffee was consumed at a fast rate, the plan was formed to shoot enough footage to make some kick-ass ‘calling cards’ – a main trailer, some teaser trailers, and a few completed scenes to help pitch around our first feature film – Paradox. PW’s got the full low-down elsewhere, so let’s get onto the toons. As you know by this point, at EHP we love our soundtracks, and so, were we gonna throw together a piece of music for the main trailer and leave it at that? Were we, nadgers! One of the main objectives was to come up with a theme song that could get into people’s head, but remain synonymous with Paradox. Also, good trailers take you on a mini adventure, and so naturally take you through different moods, which we wanted to capture, too. So, if thought 2003 was The Matrix year, you’re very much mistaken. Only a few hundred people knew it, but it was really the Year of a Paradox.

We upped the ante (by strangely taking a step backwards, then sideways, and then a huge leap forwards) with regards to where the soundtrack for the promo trailers were recorded. With the Norris family firmly in South Africa, and all studios charging the Earth and its neighbouring planets for a minute's recording time, we had to think bigger, and more of the long-term. So, after lots of saving, and gradual purchasing of equipment, it gives me great pleasure to announce that the ‘ears’ of EHP were born in the middle of 2003, ready to record the music. The studio, known as The Safehouse, is in a top-secret location in Middlesex, and the Paradox session christened it with a certain degree of flare – copious red wine and Italian food and the same electronic drum kit that was used for the West End run of Taboo. Here’s how the most recent EHP OST ended up:

1. Flux (Theme from Paradox)
– Represented all the themes of the film: Ben’s continuous fluxing through time with jarred breaks and swirly vocals; love, with a desperate (but hopefully uplifting) chorus and break; and the end of the word, with the charged finale.
– Jim ‘Two Towers’ Bellamy, who was my main man for recording and engineering the Paradox sessions, went nuts when the ‘inverted’ vocal worked and played it back at least thirty times in a row, bless him. You the man, Jimbob.

2. The Walk
– The theme for the Tube Killer, and the infamous Jack the Ripper-type walk, which Norris has made a living out of.
– Inspired from scary tones in films, but especially things like the Silent Hill games.
– The high-pitched ‘riff’ that appears is my nod to the library sequence in Ghostbusters, to add a slight air of comedy to the theme, Paradox being a time travel/horror/comedy an 'all.

3. Puzzle Theory
– Related to Norris’ Schrödinger’s Cat scene and the ideas of change/consequence.
– Turned out quite ‘heroic’ in tone from a darker starting point.
– The kind of adventurous, ‘go, go, go’ theme.

4. Silencio
– The last piece of music written for the Paradox stuff. I wrote this to underscore the ‘Possessed Rabbits’ bedroom scene between Ben (Phil Thomas) and Laura (Karen Fisher-Pollard), as though Ben has put on some acousticy relaxing CD. But this song was about more than suiting the scene, as I wanted to write something for Phil, to represent what he means to us all and how much we miss him. Writing lyrics for something like this is impossible, so I decided to let the notes do the talking instead. This song was the quickest to write and came together one evening, and also, my first take is the one that was kept. I hope that, as well as honouring Phil’s fantastic performance in this scene, that it also stands up in its own right as a piece of music to honour the inspiration and all round fantastic bloke that Phil was.

That’s the musical story so far, folks. Tune in for Chapter Four very soon, when something new will be added… something you might want to put on if you were staying in... PT

Those that know me know that I’m a big fan of straplines – to films, TV shows, whatever. It’s dull, very geeky, but probably comes from my publishing background… and general air of geekiness. So, just before we get to the heart of The Wake’s soundtrack, I wanted to proudly point out that the above strapline to this chapter is also the strapline to the film itself. Yes, it’s very sad to point that out, but this is my ramble, and I’m proud of it. Of course, if you’ve not seen The Wake yet, it really won’t come across as that impressive. But if you have seen it, hopefully you’ll go “Ahhhh, I see!” in a satisfied sort of way. Anyway, too much about words, not enough about music…

So, although Paradox seemed destined to always be our stablisers into the terrifying world of feature film making, I’m so so glad the whole Paradox drama happened. Yes, to this day, it remains, as we like to say, in cyro (as we do feel we will one day make this sprawling epic, but when we have a 100million budget), there is absolutely no way that any aspect of The Wake would’ve happened if Paradox hadn’t – that goes for the scriptwriting, the crew, the cast, and the soundtrack. I’ll let PW take the reins of the story’s germination, but the soundtrack, this was definitely the most ambitious and complicated EHP soundtrack to date.

You see, the thing about the previous films is that, overall, they’ve been short. Sounds daft I know, and regular EHP followers will remind me at this point about how we’ve always approached a short like a feature (in terms of having lots of different mood/score changes). And I mention this because, naivity did rule for quite some time in the prep work to The Wake soundtrack. I thought ‘It can’t be THAT might different to say, the Paradox eclectica, or Mightier’s sounds? Oh. Dear. God. I could not have been more wrong. The challenge/problem became simple the more I worked through the pre-production (at script stage) and into the final demo tracks in post-production – this was a story that was 90-odd minutes long, that never stopped, and more importantly, anything I wrote HAD to keep the story moving; underpin the emotions correctly, etc – which may sound exactly like what every film soundtrack is – but I’ll be honest enough to say that sitting down and beginning to record the music to the screen of The Wake in the autumn/winter of 2005, I could not have been more terrified of messing it all up.

I hope that, if you’ve seen the film obviously, that you enjoyed the soundtrack. The main M.O. became clear the more I just flew headfirst into it: this was a delicate story, or set of stories, where it was about individuals on different paths, crossing. Their tales/historys/destinys were all very personal, emotional and for a better word, ‘small’. So I realized that this was a soundtrack that needed to be all of those things. Oh yes, and “sexy and funny at points” as PW kept requesting during the writing of it…

Here’s the full song-by-song expose:

1. White Room (Donald’s theme, pt.1)
– This was where it all started. This was the first character theme I wrote for the film. It needed to be a mourning song, but also reflective, calm, and full of deep thought. Oh yes, and it needed to be one instrument – this was about an individual, not a hoard of orcs. The lead guitar part came later and really felt like the icing on the cake for Donald’s theme.

2. He Suits Me Fine
– Two of my very talented and lovely friends gave up their time to contribute their skills to this film’s opening song. Actress Joanna Horton provides those stunning vocals, and was perfect for the song. We knew we wanted a jazzy, breezy start to the film, and Jo nailed it one Sunday at the studio. Then a few weeks later, Liz Penney – who was my music teacher and is now the Music Director at the world-famous Brits college – swung by to do some swinging trumpet playing. All in all, I love how this song came together. And listen closely – the lyrics foreshadow several events in the film, including the ending after the credits have stopped rolling…

3. A Reminder (Callum’s theme, pt.1)
– A tiny, but important theme for Callum. This is Callum’s truth – he’s not the person he portrays himself to be, so this needed to be unusually somber and troubled.

4. Another Reminder (Callum’s theme, pt.2)
– A continuation of Callum’s theme, that importantly needed to build towards a crescendo but then stop unexpectedly – because the third and final part was to emerge later in the film…

5. Life in a Box
– The West End legend, my very good chum Dan Carter provides the fantastic vocals for this summery, important track for Callum. It’s almost like when he loses his job, he loses a chunk of the weight hanging around his neck (the ‘Reminder’ theme) – and this song is the soundtrack in his head now. Yes., life is seeming pretty crap for him at this point in the film, but he is definitely channeling change, and just wants to stumble into someone or something that can help him.

6. Schwing Time
– It’s me and bass-dude Nik grooving this one, in a hark back to our drums & bass duets beforehand.
This is very much a Blake Edwards nod. It’s a sexy theme for sexual predator of the story. Oh, yeah.

7. Chronicles of a True Wyrm Hunter (Sir John’s theme)
– Trumpet solo for Liz, and a development of Donald’s theme into his alter ego, Sir John Greystone. Again, the theme of singularity returns.

8. Decisions
– A trippy piece that wasn’t originally going to have my vocals on it, but due to scheduling, I couldn’t get the singer I wanted, but hope you think it turned out okay. This works as a mirror holding up to Hannah, but also to Dave.

9. My Jane Story (Callum’s theme, pt.3)
– The concluding part of the Callum Theme Trilogy: you get to find out, hear and feel where his mind was wandering to.

10. Voluntary Bad News
– A minute piece, for Hannah. A moment’s clarity.

11. Gran Death Bingo
– Fun, fun fun! Breakbeat insanity for an insane break-in. One of my favourite pieces for the soundtrack, and we cut a music video promo for it too.

12. Blanket (Donald’s theme, pt.2)
– The important, fully-formed Donald’s theme. A very personal piece of music for several reasons. Hopefully is makes you have a thoughtful moment about losing someone or something important.

13. Tally Ho (Donald’s theme meets Sir John’s theme)
– As it’s another name suggests, two themes unite as Donald becomes Sir John…

14. He Suits Me Fine (Acoustic)
– A stripped down bonus track version for the album.

15. Life in a Box (Extended Reprise)*
– An extension of the song, complete with the film’s final main scene of dialogue.

16. Gran Death Bingo (Extended Cast Iron Mix)*
– This was the version we cut the music video promo against, after myself and James (mixer) did a remix of the song, adding in several snippets of dialogue from the film, covering pretty much all the main characters. I credit James with the choosing the final strand of dialogue. Listen carefully to it and you’ll understand why James is a very sharp and funny soul…