Anne Dudley reflects on her career

British composer Anne Dudley was named as the 33rd Fellow of The Ivors Academy last month, joining a roster which includes Sir James MacMillan, Master of the King's Music Errollyn Wallen, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading and John Rutter. Perhaps best known for her film and TV scores (which include the music for the BBC's 2015 adaptation of Poldark, Ridley Scott's 2016 film Tristan and Isolde, and Jeeves and Wooster with the young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie), Dudley's wide-ranging career has also encompassed a stint as the BBC Concert Orchestra's Composer in Association, collaborations with The Pet Shop Boys, Sting and Rod Stewart, and a string of Top 20 hits with the 1980s electronic group Art of Noise.

In advance of tonight's celebration at the BFI South Bank, Anne took a break from working on a new David Walliams project to speak with me about her early musical education, the composers whose music resonated with her as a teenager, learning her craft in children's television, the world of advertising and dance-bands, and delving into Cornish folk music to create the distinctive soundworld of Poldark...

How and when did music come into your life?

My parents weren’t musicians but were very fond of music, and one day my mum bought a second-hand piano for three quid - pretty cheap even in those days! I pestered her to have lessons, and I feel lucky to have been born in a place and time when music education was so accessible: we lived in Plumstead, and the Inner London Education Authority was very supportive of music. 

Every child had the opportunity of having recorder lessons, which most kids hated and I absolutely loved! The school acquired one clarinet, to be awarded to the best recorder-player, and as a nerdy kid who was always drawing treble clefs I was overjoyed to get my hands on it! I had a wonderful, very traditional teacher, and all my lessons were paid for by the ILEA; those times are long gone, and even the most generous education authority only covers half the cost these days... 

My teacher eventually suggested I should go to the junior department of the Royal College of Music, so every Saturday from the age of eleven to eighteen I used to get the train to Charing Cross then the No. 9 bus to South Kensington. Then I went to senior college to do a BMus studying piano and clarinet, where I also got a very solid grounding in harmony and counterpoint. 

Then I did a master's in musical analysis at King's College London, at which stage I decided that academic music probably wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge, but I really wanted to do something a bit more practical…By that time I was playing in various bands because alongside my classical training I’d been having jazz piano lessons too, and that opened up a whole other world to me. 

Which classical composers were you drawn to in your teenage years?

Always JS Bach, who just ticked every box. I was also very taken with Stravinsky and Bartók in terms of the way they used the orchestra and found such amazing colours. I studied their scores avidly and learned how to use instruments, marvelling at how one composer can make the same group of instruments sound completely different from another. 

In my youth orchestra days we didn’t play any contemporary classical music, probably because it was too hard for us! At the time a lot of contemporary music was quite intellectually based – I felt that composers like Boulez were writing for a very elite, small group of people rather than reaching out to the audience…It was all very beautiful, intense and fantastic in its own way, but to me it didn’t really have any emotional heart. The contemporary classical scene today is so vibrant and completely different: I love it.

How did that quest to ‘do something more practical’ take shape?

The first step was down to pure luck. I was teaching music theory to a group of exhibitioners one Saturday morning and saw an advert on the noticeboard from the BBC, looking for a pianist for Play School. I was never going to be a concert-pianist, but I knew I was a useful one: I could sight-read and improvise, so I auditioned and got the gig. You did a session every six or seven weeks and it was very well-paid – to a student that money was like manna from heaven. It took away the necessity to find a ‘proper job’ immediately after graduating and gave me some breathing space.

Around the same time I met the record producer Trevor Horn, who was looking for keyboard players and arrangers, and he started booking me for ad hoc sessions (which paid around fifteen quid a day). He’d produce songs for publishers who wanted to find a better way of presenting material, then in the early 1980s he started having hit records…Art of Noise was the house band which worked with him in the studio, and I was there on keyboards as a regular.

Art of Noise became famous for its pioneering experiments with sound-sampling - did you have any inkling of how influential that would become at the time?

I don’t think we foresaw that it would become such a major part of how people made pop music – it just seemed like an interesting diversion, and we had a lot of fun. I was always fascinated with the way that you could manipulate sounds in this wonderful Fairlight computer and make music from something as abstract as a car starting. The whole studio scene in the mid-1980s was completely different to what it is now, and there was so much going on: record companies were selling millions of albums, so they had a lot of money to invest in studio equipment. There were studios everywhere in those days, often in very unlikely places – including South Molton St in Mayfair, and above the Top Shop on Oxford Circus. In those days you could even park!

Were you already composing as well as arranging and improvising by this point?

Film and TV work came later. Another thing that happened in the 80s is that there was a lot of innovation and creativity in the commercial scene: people like Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne were making commercials which became really famous, and there was a huge amount of money invested in these sixty- or ninety-second adverts. There were several agencies in London who employed composers just to write music for commercials, and I started working with a company run by Jeff Wayne of War of the Worlds fame, who also wrote a lot of TV jingles. I started off as an arranger, and from there I learnt the craft of it and started actually composing. I’d never done that at college: I learned my counterpoint, but I never thought about being a composer. I wouldn’t have the nerve to stand up in front of a group of fantastic musicians and say: ‘Play this, I wrote it!’ That takes quite a lot of courage.

Did your relationship with the BBC Concert Orchestra play a part in nurturing that courage?

By the time that came along in 2005 I was doing quite a lot more film work, which gave me the chance to write for quite large orchestras, and I loved that. Then out of the blue the BBCCO invited me to be their first Composer in Association, which sounded a bit scary: I didn’t even know what that might involve! They said: ‘Just write us a piece occasionally, then we’ll workshop it for you and give you every opportunity to make it work’. 

I spent about three years in the role, and it was a fantastic experience: I still work with them quite a bit and am very friendly with the management. I’m particularly proud of one piece I wrote for them called Northern Lights, because other orchestras play and love it. 

When did your breakthrough into film and TV work happen?

The very first one was Buster (1988), starring Phil Collins – I don’t think it’s a great film, but the music was good because Phil was involved! He wrote some new songs for it and re-recorded others; we did an arrangement of 'Groovy Kind of Love' together, which got quite a bit of attention. Then shortly afterwards I did a film called The Crying Game, which surpassed all our expectations and became a huge success: it’s very interesting and a bit ahead of its time.

Gradually I started to build a bit of a reputation as a film composer, then I was asked to do a TV series called Jeeves and Wooster starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which was produced by Brian Eastman (who’s still a good friend of mine). Brian is so focused in a way that hardly exists these days and I learned so much from him because he produced a lot of things that had great music in them, including Poirot, Shadowlands, and Blott on the Landscape…He was very keen that we’d explore the nuts and bolts of the theme and use it in a witty, unusual way across all five series. Brian came to every single session that we recorded, and I look back on that experience with a lot of fondness. 

Jeeves took up a lot of time and energy while it was running because there were five series with a lot of episodes - and a lot of music for each one. That whole sound-world of jazz, Duke Ellington and swing bands was my bread and butter, because I’d played in a dance-band in my teens. Watching the show felt like a busman’s holiday for years…but my daughter fell in love with it when she was about twelve, so we’d dig out the DVDs together. It’s a very good adaptation and has stood the test of time: looking back on it now, I can really appreciate how great Fry and Laurie were in those roles.

How did you set about creating the distinctive sound-world for the BBC’s 2015 adaptation of Poldark?

My initial thought was ‘This is Cornwall, the Wild West of eighteenth-century England’. It was almost like a country apart in that period because it took so long to reach Cornwall from London, and I wanted to find something that reflected that remoteness. I started looking around to see if there was any actual folk music that I might draw on and discovered that one of those wonderful nineteenth-century country vicars had gone around transcribing Cornish folk singers, like a West Country Bartók. He published this collection called Songs of the West, and the wonderfulness of the internet meant that I could get my hands on them. They’re quite modal, and I couldn’t say that they gave me a great insight into the specific Cornish sound, but they certainly pointed me in the right direction. 

I knew I wanted to incorporate the rugged sound of the Cornish fiddle, so I called up my friend Chris Garrick, who does some fantastic Stéphane Grappelli-type stuff and calls himself a ‘violin operator’ – although that hardly does him justice. He’s more of folk violinist than a classical one, but he can read music and has a fantastic technique, so I thought he’d be perfect. Chris showed up with a five-string violin which has the lower string of a viola, and he had exactly the sound we wanted for Poldark. And Eleanor Tomlinson who played Demelza is a great singer – I recorded an album with her after the series had finished, and it was terrific.

What’s next?

I’m just getting started on Series Two of the new adaptation of The Forsytes…Series One landed on Channel Five a couple of weeks ago. And yesterday I finished the music for a David Walliams film called FING, based on one of his wonderful irreverent books for children: I’ve worked on a few adaptations of them (Billionaire Boy, The Boy in the Dress and Grandpa’s Great Escape), before but this is on a larger scale because it’s going to be a feature film and we have a fifty-piece orchestra. It’s a fantastic story with adventure and comedy and emotion – it’s got everything!