Orchestral manoeuvres
When Britpop superstar Damon Albarn was asked to write the score
for a film about cannibals, no one expected him to turn to classical
composer Michael Nyman for help. So was this strange collaboration
a success?

PHOTOGRAPHS: DAVID GAMBLE / WORDS: MATTHEW SWEET

 
 
Blur's sapphire-eyed frontman, Damon Albarn, had his first major acting role as a cockney cockney gangster in Antonia Bird's British Crime thriller FACE. He fancied scoring the film as well, but Bird declined his offer, worried that it might be constructed as a corny publicity stunt. Instead, she promised him the job on her next movie - which, much to her surprise, turned out to be a gory costume comedy about cannibals in the Sierra Nevada mountains, circa 1847.

 

Damon in the mix
 
Ravenous, is a film with a troubled history. Two directors came and went before its star, Robert Carlyle, sent an SOS to Bird, who arrived like a one-woman cavalry to rescue the movie from disaster. Albarn agreed to help them out with the music on one condition - that the veteran movie composer and celebrated minimalist Michael Nyman help him lose his film-score virginity. "He wanted me as a collaborator and hand-holder," explains Nyman, whose score-writing credits include The Piano and The Draughtsman's Contract. "He'd never done a film score before, so there were lots of things he was totally unaware of. I was both nursemade and work-colleague."
 
Damon directs the choir
 
 
 
Albarn was an apt pupil. "I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice," he recalls. "I'd be sitting at one end of the studio, and Michael would be at the other
watching the monitor, listening to the mix, and writing another piece of music at the same time" Their score for Ravenous reflects the sinister script: hottor chords from an army of Moog synthesisers; bluegrass rhythmns; Native American laments. For his research, Albarn went to a mountain reservation in Oregon: "A week with a guy called Quilt Man, in the greatest state of grass-included sedation of my life"
 

Michael adds a refrain

 
At Sir George Martin's Air Studios in Hampstead, London, the two
composers got down to work. "Damon responded to the film's more
gruesome momets, and I was grateful for that, because my music doesn't really respond to those situations," says Nyman. "I would have done the
Bernard Hermann bit if I'd had to, but Damon had already evolved
a musical language, full of weird sounds and textures." Albarn puts it rather more bluntly: "I really revel in writing music to aggression and bloodshed and gore."
 
Checking sound and vision on the monitors

 

The experience of working with Nyman has propelled towards other film projects. He has just completed the soundtrack for Ordinary Decent Criminal, with Kevin Spacey, and is currently working on Reykjavik 101, a drama set in the Icelandic club scene. The benefits for Nyman have been rather different. "I don't think I'll ever really become a rock musician, but now I can talk about 'me and Damon', it gives me a certain amount of street cred."
 
 
Sir George Martin drops in to say hello