MARK THOMAS
A Voice from the Valleys

Interview by Jonathan Broxton

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The opportunity to observe a composer at work in his natural habitat - the recording studio - is one of the greatest honours a film music journalist can have. Away from the media and the critical gaze of the studio executives, the scoring stage is where composers feel most at home, where they can be their true creative selves. After all, the studio is where all the work finally comes to fruition, where the months of writing and spotting and creating click tracks is left behind and the music takes shape as a living, breathing score. It's hard work, make no mistake, with sharp-eared engineers buried behind mammoth mixing desks and reams of paper, listening out for the slightest timing discrepancy or the tiniest orchestral flub in the performance. But, observing the process as it unfolds, you get the feeling that the composers are in their element here, doing what comes naturally to them - making music.

Welsh composer Mark Thomas brings a unique perspective to the recording sessions, because despite now being the man behind the baton, he was once one of the top session violinists in London, and performed on many of the most important scores of the 1980s for composers including John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, John Barry, Alan Silvestri and Michael Kamen. Having been involved in film music since the early 80s, Thomas is steeped in its traditions and its heritage, and anecdotes about recording sessions over a decade ago roll off his tongue as easily as his lilting accent. Thomas keeps a relaxed and informal studio - most of the players are his friends and contemporaries from years ago - and the mutual respect and admiration between them is obvious. The only person making cheeky remarks is Thomas' agent Ian Amos who, after a rare but quite enormous mistake by the orchestra, instructs the performers to "pick it up again from bar 14, just before the Grieg rip-off." Hearing this, Thomas shoots Amos an amusingly withering look, who then retires to the comparative safety of the control room, laughing.

Mark Thomas was born in the small village of Penclawdd near Swansea, South Wales in 1956, and took up the violin from a very early age. He was the youngest member of the National Youth Orchestra when aged just 12, decided not to become a doctor after briefly dabbling in science, attended Cardiff University where he attained an Honours Degree in Music, and eventually joined the Royal Ballet Orchestra in London, where he became co-leader. "Playing in a ballet orchestra was a great apprenticeship for me, especially being a violinist" Thomas says. "The ballet repertoire is very difficult music, and of course you're playing all the time, especially when you've got things like the big Tchaikovsky ballets, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, and of course Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (his favourite piece), which are all are mega works. They last for hours! It's great experience to be involved in those. It gives you great stamina to keep performing."

"I got my first film assignment after the Royal Ballet company went on a tour of the Far East, but didn't take the orchestra, so I was faced with two or three months of unemployment" Thomas recalls. "My wife, Mary, and I were lying in bed one morning and she said to me 'Why don't you go freelance today?' and I said 'That's a good idea!', so I went off and embarked on this freelance career, thinking that if it didn't work out I could always go back to the RBO."

"Within a few weeks of going freelance, I'd been asked by Sid Margo, one of the old school, gentleman 'fixers' (orchestra contractors) to work with John Barry on A View To A Kill, and that experience really opened my eyes. To see this brilliant, genius composer working was incredible, and so I used Barry as my yardstick to learn how to go about doing film music - not mimicking his style or his conducting, but more his way of working and his professional ethos. So I went on the A View To A Kill session on the first day - a Monday - played the music, went home, and Mary said 'Well, how much did you make?' and I said 'I dunno, I haven't been paid yet!' I had no idea how much it would be, and you can hardly go up to John Barry and ask, can you? This happened to me for the rest of the week, and then on the Friday I came home with nearly £2,000. Real money! So, as you would imagine, I never went back to the RBO."

"Looking back, going freelance as a session musician is no different than trying to eke out a career as a composer, because you've got to make people aware of the fact that you are there, that you can do the job, that you can be relied upon to get everything sorted, and that you're temperamentally au fait with what is required by directors and producers."

From then on, Thomas's regularly performed with some of the greatest orchestras in the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. During the time, he was also given the opportunity to work with some of the industry's finest composers and conductors. "One of the highlights of my freelance career was being the principal violinist in the orchestra that performed on the London opening night of Phantom of the Opera, for Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was a real eye-opener to see him at work, and to work with great orchestrators, and to actually be there, on the receiving end as it were, of those occasionally very experimental orchestrations. It was a magical experience."

After five or six years as a much sought-after session musician, Thomas then made the unusual transition from performer to composer, a progression which rarely takes place. But, for Thomas, the change seemed a natural one. "I studied composition as part of my degree, so I already had a writing background, but being freelance, and being able to work with some of these amazing composers, inspired me to go out and do more. Plus, in the crudest and most cynical sense, session musicians are very much the 'hired help' and, although the work is wonderful, and the variety of the music you play is always challenging and inspiring, you are still very limited in terms of time. It's a very cut-throat business, freelancing, because if you are unavailable on a particular day because of a family commitment or whatever, then there are a couple of hundred other guys who are jumping up and down ready to take your place. I wanted more stability than that."

Much of his early writing was for television and theatre in the UK, although he was given the opportunity to score some slightly higher profile projects, including Welsh-language features Daisies In December, The Making of Maps and The Sea Change (which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival), the low-budget British thriller Wild Justice, and the highly successful documentary series Raging Planet, which received some of the Discovery Channel's highest ever ratings.

However, Thomas' breakthrough score was for the 1994 comedy thriller Twin Town, written and directed by Kevin Allen, and starring Rhys Ifans (recently seen as Hugh Grant's hygienically-challenged flatmate in Notting Hill) and Dougray Scott (Deep Impact, Ever After). The film, which followed the hilariously drug-fuelled exploits of two juvenile delinquents in modern-day South Wales, was a critical and commercial success in the UK, and won Thomas a BAFTA Cymru Award (Welsh Oscar) for Best Original Score. "Kevin hired me after he heard some music I'd written for a TV series called The Final Passage for Sir Peter and Christopher Hall, and he said 'This guy can't live in Swansea if he's worked with Sir Peter Hall! It's too good to be true!' Those were his very words."

"When we started scoring, it was obvious that Kevin wanted his film to reflect his own musical tastes, which are very eclectic. Because the main characters are these two twins who are trying to be big-time crooks, and there are all the various plot elements of bent policemen and cocaine and sex and everything, he wanted me to introduce a kind of quasi-gangster motif into it, with a semi-Italian influence, kind of like Nino Rota and The Godfather. Then we combined it with some easy listening, Mantovani-type arrangements which I wrote for a jazz combo with strings. It's lazy and laid-back, and a bit suave, but which would come across as being funny in the context of the film without being 'funny' music."

"The Twin Town score also served to cement the more eclectic elements of the film together, which is another skill you need to be a successful film composer. There is a tendency today to use lots of cheesy retro songs and source music as well as a score, especially in comedy films, and so you have to be able to come up original music which marries the styles together and creates continuity. But, as well as that, you also have to be able to come up with some kind of familiar hook which keeps returning and is synonymous with a certain character or emotion, which serves to remind the audience of the situation. Something like that, though is ephemeral. It can't be described. It's just pure emotion."

"When I first start writing any score, I tend to look for the more poignant moments and try to find the emotion in the scene, the unique thing about it that makes me laugh more, or cry more, or love more. Then I apply that to the music I'm writing, whether it be the melodies and harmonies, or the combinations of instruments, or even the idiom you choose to write the music in - western, or French costume drama or whatever."

His successful follow up to Twin Town was Up 'n Under, a working-class comedy based on the John Godber play of the same name, which follows the Rocky-style fortunes of a misfit Yorkshire rugby team hoping to win a prestigious tournament. The film attracted the cream of British small-screen comedy talent, including Gary Olsen, Neil Morrissey, Samantha Janus, Tony Slattery and the late Brian Glover, and reached number 2 in the British box office charts, despite opening the same weekend as Titanic.

However, Thomas's biggest hit to date has been the BBC drama Aristocrats, an epic mini-series in the tradition of Brideshead Revisited and Pride and Prejudice. Adapting the incredible true story of the Lennox sisters, wealthy landowners in Edwardian London whose marital and extra-marital exploits with the cream of British high society became the talk of the town, director David Caffrey allowed Thomas the freedom to compose what is surely the finest music of his career, and arguably one of the best British TV scores of the decade.

"We had the perfect collaboration on Aristocrats," says Thomas. "Myself, David Caffrey, producer Christopher Hall and editor Neil Thompson. It was a fun project, but I knew that once I'd accepted the job I'd be in for the biggest challenge of my life. That's a good feeling, though, especially when you are working with people who inspire you, and won't settle for second best. You have to embrace it, and although it may sound like bull, you almost have to become a conduit for them, and let their ideas flow through you. It's like being a marriage, but one in which you're all polygamous!"

Unlike many composers, who find constantly demanding directors more of a hindrance than a help, Thomas actively encourages his collaborators to get involved in the scoring process, whether they are musically literate or not. "I love to work with directors. I welcome them being with me as much as possible when I'm composing the music, right through the whole process. The more hands-on they are, and the more they can get out of me, the better. There were slightly different circumstances with John Godber, because he was working in the theatre a lot of the time, and we had to sort of collaborate from afar but, generally, I have found that the best directors want to be there, on your case the whole time."

"I like to work this way because, for me, writing the music itself is not the difficult part. What I find the job is really about is making the music work for the film, and for the project, for the drama, and for the emotions. It's about taking the ethos of what the director can describe to you in words and trying to turn that into music to heighten the emotions. The closer I can get to the director, and the closer I can get to his vision of what the music should be doing, the better. The thing I love the most is when the music starts to somehow become intrinsic with the project, when you find that musical voice, that little niche that's unique to every film. When you find that, aided and abetted by the director, with the director's complete collusion, then you've got to the starting point of what the film needs."

"The only problems I sometimes have are when the directors are married to their temp tracks but, in another way, that actually doesn't bother me, because I see that as the director throwing down a gauntlet. You can try to pastiche it, in a safe and legal way copyright wise, but personally I feel that doing that is a waste of time. If they want a particular piece of music, they should find the money and pay for it, not expect me to pastiche it and run the risk of being prosecuted in the bargain. If someone came up to me and said 'we've got this film and we've laid all this music in, we just want you to ghost it and just do something close to it through the entire film', I wouldn't be interested."

"On the other hand, if you are working with really talented directors and editors, who haven't picked their temp track simply because they like the music but because it really works in the scene, or because they have structured a whole scene or a montage around the music, then it's an even greater challenge because then you've got to try to find something that does the job even better than that. At the end of the day, people come to me because they want me to come up with something new and fresh that hopefully lifts the film and becomes part of it."

One of the most interesting things about the Aristocrats score is the way in which Thomas utilises the mesmerising vocal talents of Irish singer Méav in his central love theme, the evocatively-named 'Adagio Amoroso'. "I felt that the score was crying out for something which would link all the Lennox girls together. Although they all had individual motifs, I needed something else which would musically represent their heart, and their emotion, the thing which made them as wonderful and as outrageous as they were." "In those days it wasn't particularly frowned upon for men in the higher echelons of society to have mistresses - in fact it was almost common practice - and a lot of the infidelities were kind of brushed under the carpet and never mentioned. So when these Lennox women came along, very forthright, articulate, well educated, they sort of became the It Girls of their time. So my theme sought to capture their uniqueness, and their spirit."

"To be completely honest, I didn't think of Méav right from the get-go - I just had in mind some kind of wordless solo voice with a timeless, almost ethereal sound. I knew I didn't want it to be too classical or operatic, and that it shouldn't draw too much attention to itself by the virtuosity of the singing, but I wanted it to have a haunting quality which could be many things: evocative, seductive, erotic, but innocent as well. The heart of the whole thing. We had open auditions, and Méav came highly recommended, and she was just perfect for it. She is an astonishingly accomplished singer."

"The rest of the score is quite classical sounding, but the thing about Aristocrats is that it covers such a long period in history, both in terms of time and music - Mozart was born, lived and died within the timeframe of the story. So what I tried to do was reflect the music that the people would have been listening to at that particular time, and then complement some of the baroque source music with original music in the style of the period. The brief was not to datestamp it with authentic pastiche, but to come up with something which exemplified the characterisation and the emotion."

"After I wrote the Adagio, I went over to the set in Ireland to meet with director David Caffrey and some of the actors, to sort of get a feel for the production. David is a warm, witty, but very sensitive man with a great affinity for things of elegance and import, especially for a man so young, and considering that his previous film (Divorcing Jack) was all about terrorism in Northern Ireland. But working with David and Christopher Hall was a truly wonderful experience for me, and I think the results show in the finished score."

With his small-screen credentials firmly confirmed, and with the British market cornered, the final months of 1999 should finally see the emergence of Thomas as a truly international composer with the opening of his two latest films, The Big Tease and Mad Cows. The Big Tease is Kevin Allen's follow up to Twin Town, and stars Craig Ferguson as a hilariously camp Scottish hairdresser who believes he is finally about to hit the big time when he is invited to Los Angeles for the Platinum Scissors competition, the biggest prize in the hairdressing world. With his crimping iron safely packed and a documentary film crew in tow, the intrepid coiffeur heads off to the States to win the crown for Bonnie Scotland, only to be told that he is not actually competing in the gala - just watching it. However, this little setback does not deter the hero, who sets about obtaining the necessary "hairdressing green card" by any means possible.

With a supporting cast including Frances Fisher, Mary McCormack, Chris Langham, and with cameos from David Hasselhoff and Drew Carey, The Big Tease promises to quickly become a cult hit on both sides of the Atlantic, especially after its rapturous reception at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival. During the production, Thomas worked with legendary record producer Nellee Hooper, the man responsible for William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet in 1997, who was the music supervisor for the film. "I think Nellee made some great choices on The Big Tease. It's a very rich score, both in terms of my original music and Nellee's songs. It's very eclectic and very modern, and will make for an excellent album." Thomas's original score is a mixed bag of textures and styles, ranging from Welsh male voice choirs and people whistling, to the familiar orchestrations associated with spaghetti westerns. "The guy whistling through his teeth on the cue 'All The Little People' is actually Kevin Allen, the director. That's his cameo appearance. I think it's a really funny cue, but it is actually written for a very poignant scene."

Ironically, a lot of Thomas's music might not be immediately noticeable because of the abundance source music, but when heard apart from the film it is apparent that Thomas was on top scoring form. "I was given a couple of good romps where I was allowed to through-compose to the picture, almost in a Carl Stalling style, but with a Scottish black-watch element drumming through it, and bagpipes droning away like a Scottish soldier. Then there is the finale, where I was alluding to the spaghetti westerns, but also injecting some Japanese influences and trying to make it a little more expansive, to give it more of a John Wayne feel. Hair dryers at ten paces!" Mad Cows, directed by Sara Sugarman, is based on the hit novel by Kathy Lette and stars Anna Friel, Prunella Scales, Joanna Lumley and Greg Wise, who played Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. "It's a good film that alludes to the halcyon days of British comedy," says Thomas of the film, "but it has its own spark of really vibrant modernism. In a way, the film is a little too complicated to try to explain what it's about, but in a nutshell it's about the lot of the single mother. If you know the novel you'll know exactly what its about. It's funny, its ironic, it has something for everybody - even if all you're looking for is Joanna Lumley in a basque and fishnets!"

Thomas's current projects include the British TV series Jack of Hearts, for which he wrote a theme song for Welsh pop diva Bonnie Tyler; a 26-episode BBC children's series called Home Farm Twins; and a film called The Last Unicorn starring George Hamilton and David Warner, directed by Paul Matthews for Peak Viewing Transatlantic, which will be ultimately shown on The Disney Channel. Thomas describes his score for The Last Unicorn as "being inspired by all those wonderfully lush scores like E.T. and Field of Dreams."

In addition, Thomas is involved in a big Millennium project in Wales in conjunction with the BBC and S4C, for which he has been commissioned to write a new arrangement of the Welsh national anthem which will involve just about every single Welsh musical act there is, including Cerys Matthews of Catatonia, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Super Furry Animals and Bonnie Tyler. "I'm very proud of my Welsh heritage," Thomas says, "and I love the country and the countryside. There's something the Welsh call 'hiraeth', which means the longing to return home to your roots which is very strong in me. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Wales, first of all for my musical upbringing, and also in latter years for providing me with wonderful experience and a springboard into feature films in Britain and abroad." This high profile, prestigious role in his homeland's celebrations of the new millennium is ironically appropriate, as it seems to foreshadow the impact Thomas will surely have on the film music world in the year 2000.

Note: Since this interview took place, Thomas written three new scores: the British comedy House!, which follows the fortunes of a Swansea bingo hall; the drama The Testimony of Taliesin Jones, and the medieval fantasy adventure Merlin: The Return, starring Rik Mayall and Patrick Bergin.

With thanks to James Southall, the team at Angel Studios, The Marriott Swiss Cottage, and especially Mark and Mary Thomas, for giving up their valuable time, talking so honestly and openly, and plying me with alcohol.

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