NIGEL BEAHAM-POWELL & BELLA RUSSELL: TV Composition

This duo can take the the credit for an amazing range of TV themes and scores, but how did they get into such a fiercely competitive industry in the first place? Paul White learns about the ratings game...

Nigel Beaham‑Powell and Bella Russell are one of the most prolific, and certainly the most successful independent composing teams working in the UK television industry today. Their credits include over 60 incidental scores for BBC and ITV dramas, as well as such high‑profile series as The Chief and Wogan. Their music has also found its way onto numerous documentaries, amongst them The Plague for Channel 4, and the BBC's Natural World. One of their more recent projects is the childrens' comedy drama, Harry's Mad, and earlier this year, they won an award for 'Toadskin Spell', part of the Natural World series. You've probably heard their title sequences for Saturday Night Clive, The Full Wax and The World This Week, which will give you some idea of their versatility.

Late Starters

I arranged to meet Nigel and Bella at Nigel's Georgian house overlooking the Avon Gorge in Bristol. Though their studio is in the basement, most rooms in the house have been pressed into service for recording at one time or another, and the more popular rooms are permanently connected to the studio via tie‑lines.

Nigel and Bella have known each other since their schooldays, but Nigel was keen to point out that they aren't married; I suggested they might be the musical equivalent of Torvill and Dean! I was curious to find out how they broke into film and TV work, so Nigel filled me in on their background, while we waited for Bella to arrive. Considering that Bella was expecting her third child at any moment, I felt honoured that she turned up at all!

Nigel: "I was rather a late starter, and came to music at around the age of 15, playing acoustic guitar and piano. I think I managed to get somewhere out of stubborn determination rather than any inherent creativity. I formed a band at school, and then after university, Bella and I played in a band called Streets Ahead, which later sank without a trace. But we did get a couple of TV appearances, and on one show, because they didn't have a theme tune, they asked us if we wanted to write one. It took about 30 seconds to write a 30‑second tune, for which we received the magnificent sum of £25!

"Next, the BBC in Bristol had a slot after Top Of The Pops for cut‑down versions of the Natural World programmes. It was quite politically sensitive; we were lucky enough to get the job, but in the process, we discovered that we were much better at writing music for films than we were at playing pop music. Gradually, the other band members disappeared, but Bella and I have continued to work together ever since. We'd spent a lot of money going in and out of studios, so we bought a Tascam 8‑track and a Studiomaster desk. The studio we are in today is a Mk V or Mk VI version."

I know that a lot of our readers are interested in how you get TV work in the first place. Is it all down to personal contacts?

Nigel: "We were appearing in, and writing music for a network ITV series, as well as doing the wildlife series for the BBC, and after 15 or so episodes, we had enough of a track record to branch out into wider areas. I think it's a combination of luck, talent and energy. When you're writing music for television and films, you can't be good at just one thing — you have to cover lots of different styles. This is one business where it pays to be a jack of all trades rather than a master of one. If you look at top film composers like John Williams, you'll find that they are enormously gifted in lots of different areas."

How do you come to terms with writing to picture rather than writing stand‑alone music?

Nigel: "It's a very interesting medium. If you have a series of pictures that lasts for 1 minute, 36 seconds, your music has got to be exactly that length — it can't be a few seconds over or under. There are two approaches: one is to write the music largely independently of the picture, in which case it is likely to be more musically coherent, and the other is to do something that follows the pictures in a more supportive role. This way, you can use more minimal compositional styles, where the crescendos and so on match the action on screen. Writing to a drama is always easier than writing for a documentary, because you have the actors' voices to work to. With a documentary, the music will often be done before the narration, and you don't really know where the voice is going to go."

"At the moment, we're working on two projects, one of which is the childrens' series, Harry's Mad. It's a comic series, full of gags, and the joy of it is that it's handled like a drama, so what you write is what you're going to hear. On the other hand, we're also doing a series of wildlife films where they haven't decided who's going to do the voiceover yet, so we have no idea when we write the music where the voice is going to be. That means we write to the pictures, to try to capture the mood, but certain changes may be made in the edit suite when the voice is put on. There is, however, one advantage with documentaries, in that if you write a good piece of music that the director really likes, they may reduce the amount of dialogue and allow the music to carry the scene. Often, you can tell a story just as effectively with music as you can with dialogue."

The Real Feel

What kind of setup do you have for working to picture?

Nigel: "The picture comes up in three places — one monitor in the small live room, and two screens in the studio. The picture syncs to an Atari ST running Notator, though we are planning to change over to Logic on the Mac as soon as we get the time to do it. The multitrack is a Fostex E16, also controlled via a synchroniser."

"We tend to write all the music in the computer, and then get live musicians in afterwards. Budgets are often the significant factor, and the more money you have, the more musicians you can employ. We like to use as many live instruments as possible, because of the warmth — the human element. I feel that there's so much purely electronic music about, that it's hard to be individual enough without using live musicians. Even one live instrument can be enough to give an electronically‑generated piece a human feel. In fact, the instruments don't even have to play notes — hitting the side of a violin gives a very nice effect. These are solutions you don't think of when all your sounds are coming out of a box."

So, would you create the impression of an orchestra by overlaying strings on sequenced samples, or would you record the strings first, then add the MIDI instruments?

Nigel: "When you're working with conducted music, you don't have a rigid bpm, which means you get more ebb and flow in the music, which is wonderful. In the past, we've tended to do the sequencing first, but in future, we may well try recording the strings first. Interestingly enough though, we have worked on news themes where it was necessary to add electronic instruments, to give the acoustic sound enough dynamism."

Do most of your jobs combine both electronic and live instruments?

"Yes, that's generally how we work. We very rarely have the budgets to allow us to employ 30 musicians. Right at the top of the scale is Hollywood, where you've got a million dollars to spend on the music, and where the composer gets $350,000 for a score — and right at the other end is television. The big dramas like Pride and Prejudice get relatively big budgets, but much of the music only has a budget of two or three thousand pounds, and there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Once you've paid for the musicians, paid yourself, covered studio costs and taken into account the inevitable last‑minute changes, it's pretty tight."

Studio Design

I guess that having your own studio must help with the studio budget, and because you have a house with large rooms, high ceilings and wooden floors, you must be able to do a lot of your live instrument recording here too.

Nigel: "When we built this version of the studio, we wired the house for sound by running cables along the heating pipe ducts. In the drawing room, I have my Steinway piano, which I record using a Neumann mic, but last week we recorded 16 string players in there. We have been known to record in the bathroom from time to time for particular effects.

"The drawing room windows are not double‑glazed, but noise is seldom a problem. We just close the shutters and hope that the traffic is not too loud, or that car alarms don't go off while we're recording. What never ceases to amaze me is the volume a string orchestra produces — it's very unlikely you'd hear any traffic rumble over that.

"Down here in the studio, there is a double window system, and there's a certain amount of acoustic treatment, but I think it's true to say that the studio has evolved rather than been designed — and that often produces the most comfortable working environment."

Even so, you've obviously gone to some lengths to make this room acoustically suitable for mixing; for example, there are absorbers and diffusers on the ceiling.

Nigel: "The person who did the acoustic design is Neil Perry, who originally worked at Real World, but is now a private acoustic designer with a lot of project studio clients. He tries to solve problems in an interesting way — he never wants to make the same studio twice. Because we didn't want lots of things on the walls, his solution was to use high‑density foam traps fitted to the ceiling, as well as a central reflective diffuser. It works incredibly well.

"I'm keen to cut down on the noise from computers and such like — I hate the whirring of hard drives. We've looked at putting the drives into an isolated cupboard, but unfortunately, the cupboard is at the other side of the room, and the SCSI connections won't work properly over that distance. There's another recess in this wall which we may end up adapting.

"Our Atari hard drive has a little box built around it with a foam lining, and that works quite well. You can still hear it, but it's a lot quieter than it was."

Working Methods

Bella, what aspects of technology do you feel make your work easier?

"I love Notator on the Atari, and because I know that a lot of what we do will be replaced by real musicians at a later stage, the sounds themselves become less important. Five years ago, when nearly everything was electronic, you really did want the best synthetic or sampled strings available. What is so nice now is the ability to write in so many different ways; to improvise. Both of us learnt traditional music at school, so I rely heavily on the score side of the system — I can't make any sense of the piano‑roll display which shows the notes as blocks. It's nice to be able to move notes around on the score, and then hear the changes."

As you've got so comfortable with Notator, you must be viewing the move to Logic on the Mac with some trepidation?

Bella: "Well, we've played around with it a bit, and providing we can get at the score page it should be okay. It's more a case of finding the time to get into it. Just as you think you've got a week or two of free time to learn a new system, a new project comes along, so it keeps getting put off. I did quite like Logic, although it is a different way of working, and I think we will need to bring in somebody for odd days over the course of a couple of weeks to get us up to speed."

Nigel: "Because we're working almost continuously, what we don't want is to be faced with a deadline at the same time as we're learning a new computer program. We keep starting on Logic, and then putting it off again, but we will get around to switching to it!

"Bella is particularly good at improvisation, though her playing isn't quite so precise as mine, which meant that before using computers, I tended to do most of the playing. Now that we have the computer, we've converged, and what happens is that one of us starts a piece, then the other takes over. You can't do that with a manuscript — you'd spend all your time rubbing out the notes."

Bella: "Nigel might be at the computer doing one thing, and I'll sing a counter melody — it's a very collective process. The computer has provided us both a with a common musical playpen."

As a classical player, how do you get on with a computer that's beeping a rigid four to the bar at you?

Bella: "I think we just got used to it — it's not that different from using a conventional metronome, though when it comes to handling tempo changes, I think Logic is going to be much better. In the brief time we have played with Logic, it seems possible to make things flow much more naturally."

The computer is obviously a great help to you, but are there any aspects of modern technology that you find counter‑productive?

Nigel: "As the studio has evolved, I think we've managed to iron out most of the wrinkles that get in the way of writing music, but it's still not as simple as I'd like it to be. I'd like to be able to come in here, turn everything on and have all my sounds patched into their own mixer channels, ready to go. What we both hate is when things go wrong."

When you are writing to picture, do you run with both your multitrack and sequencer sync'ed to the timecode track on the video you've been sent?

Nigel: "We actually adopt a rather weird process, in that we nearly always write everything on the computer to start with, then we lay it off onto the multitrack — unless what's required is more of a reaction to the picture, in which case we might work straight onto tape. Going via computer, there is a temptation to fuss too much and make tiny changes that aren't necessary. A lot of what we do is thematic and includes several variations, especially in dramas with lots of episodes. Where the computer is brilliant is that when a character from early in the series turns up later on, you can call up the original piece and then tweak it. Because of the pressures of time and deadlines, you don't have enough time to write a completely fresh cue every time — nor would you want to."

Bella: "The computer is also good for welding different characters' themes together. You might think that two pieces of music are very disparate, but you decide to have a go at putting them together anyway, and sometimes something quite interesting comes out of it."

Sounds And Vision

Do you get any of those creative accidents where you switch on, and the wrong sounds come up, but it sounds wonderful?

Bella: "We have used a drum track to drive an instrument: it sounded completely wacky, but it happened to fit."

Nigel: "You have to continue to surprise yourself in the studio. If you do the same things all the time, your music becomes stale. The happy accidents are terrific when they happen: like the grungey effects you get as the multitrack is coming up to speed, when it's locking to the U‑matic."

Are there any secrets to getting a professional sound?

Nigel: "We often have a live microphone lying around in the studio, so Bella can try out ideas as they occur. Instead of going into the vocal booth, we might just record using the mic where it is, track it six times and use it. It's not a big fuss to do that, and it allows us to be spontaneous. It doesn't matter that there might be a small amount of noise on there, or that the acoustics aren't perfect. It's a really quick way of solving a problem, and you can't hear any noise on the finished mix.

"I know there's a whole world of sample CDs, but when it comes to percussion, for example, I still think it pays to bring in a percussionist and do your own. That way, you retain your individuality. The most important thing is to do right by the musicians you use and pay them properly, otherwise they won't want to come back again.

"When it comes to getting the right sound, it pays to bring in another set of ears. We have a very good engineer, who mixes all our stuff so that we can sit back and listen to what's happening, without worrying about the technicalities."

Bella: "I've said already [see the 'Creative Emus' box — Ed] that we aren't interested in wading through banks of sounds, but that doesn't convey quite the right impression. I think that we have come to know what the right sound is, which means we usually select the appropriate sounds at the outset. Sometimes, when I hear other peoples' work on television, I think that they've got a really good piece of music, but the sounds might not be quite right: they don't do themselves justice. We try and make sure that whatever we do, it sounds as good as it possibly can when it comes out on television."

Nigel: "That's another reason for bringing in another pair of ears. After all, our last film is our next calling card."

"When you're writing music for television and films, you can't be good at just one thing — you have to cover lots of different styles."