The Red Dwarf Interview

Making Music: Howard Goodall

Howard Goodall has been involved with 'Red Dwarf' since the start of episode one - literally. Subsequently he has composed the music for every programme in the series' run. Somehow managing to resist the temptations offered by a few of the seamier local nightspots, we met up with Howard one evening at his Soho office.

RED DWARF MAGAZINE: How did you get into writing music for television specifically?

HOWARD GOODALL: I had a bit of a lucky break when I was at university. I did a lot of student reviews and the people at Oxford, the people doing reviews at the same time were Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and one or two others. So when Rowan left I was already doing his show and within about a year of his leaving we were doing 'Not the Nine O'clock News'. It really came about by accident, because on the first series of 'Not the Nine O'clock News' there weren't many songs in it - not until the very end of the series when they wanted to do a number where they would play all the instruments themselves. They had a song written by someone whose name I can't remember right now, called 'Gob on you' and they wanted to play it, but didn't quite know how to do it. So in rehearsals Rowan had said, "Well, I know this guy who does music, why doesn't he come along and help us?". So I really just went in to help them play the instruments and arrange it so that it was easy for them to do. Then the week that followed was the week that Reginald Bosanquet left ITN. Myself and Richard Curtis, one of the script-writers, asked if they'd be interested in a song; so we did it and from then on really I was doing songs every week on 'Not'.

RDM: Did you provide any of the lyrics for those?

HG: Sometimes, and sometimes we did the lyrics as a group thing. But mostly they were written by Richard Curtis who later did 'Blackadder'. Because I've done the music for all the Rowan Atkinson stuff ever since then - whenever something like 'Blackadder' came along I'd end up doing it - I'd sort of got to know a lot of people who were making comedy programmes and I got known as someone who wrote music for comedy programmes. So when Rob and Doug were doing 'Red Dwarf' I was kind of one of the possibilities for doing that; I don't think it was a foregone conclusion, I think there were one or two other people being considered at the same time.

RDM: Do you work as a freelance?

HG: Yeah - pretty well all composers do, I mean it would be lovely if someone would pay me a wage just to be a composer, just to write music, but there's never enough work for one organisation to take you on. So you tend to get whatever you can and for about eight years after leaving college I did all sorts of other things to earn a living and just composed when I could. I was a session keyboard player, did a bit of teaching here and there - just anything that would earn money. Luckily in the last few years I've been able to just compose and not have to do other things.

RDM: Have you always wanted to do this kind of music or do you perhaps want to be a pop star or something?

HG: Well, actually I was in a band before I got into all this; it wasn't a very good band, we made an album and a couple of singles which were really crap. The thing I like about doing these sort of things, like 'not', the 'Adder' and 'Red Dwarf', is that it gives you a lot of freedom to mess around with music and do a lot of different styles. Someone might say "let's do something in the style of 'Neighbours' " or this style or that. It's just good fun doing pastiche and playing games with music, so that's one of the reasons I like it. But I do have kind of another life outside doing music for TV programmes, I write pieces for the theatre and I like that very much, though it's very different work from TV.

RDM: Do you do any performing yourself?

HG: Well, the three musicals that I've done - which all found their way to London eventually ­p; I was involved with them as musical director but I didn't actually perform in them myself.

RDM: I believe you did a stage show with Melvin Bragg.

HG: Yes, it was a musical called 'The Hired Man' which we did in Southampton and Leicester and then it was done in the West End, produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This was about 1984, since then it's been done quite a lot - it's a popular piece. It's done the States a couple of times and it's been done by colleges and amateur groups in this country. We did a recent charity benefit of it in the West End for cancer and got a fantastic response, we made a CD of that. I kept up my friendship with Melvin and did the music for his drama series 'A Time to Dance' that was on the TV earlier this year. It was a good opportunity for me because it was a drama and I was able to do a lot of "people having a bad time on a hillside" shots, lots of sweeping musical themes. What I'm trying to do at the moment is get more into drama - TV drama, because that's the route into films, which is where I want to end up. There are very few films made in Britain any more, so it's not quite the career structure that it used to be - rather than work through TV into films, in this country it's work in TV and that's it. To do films you've got to work in the States and I have done quite a lot of TV movies over there, but I've never been asked to do a feature film. The difference between doing drama music and music for comedy is that people laugh over most of the work you put into a comedy programme and no-one hears what you're doing. So it's quite nice to do things where people aren't laughing, but you can have more fun with comedy really.

RDM: How much control do you have over the music in a programme? Do you select the musicians and singers etc.?

HG: It would depend on what it is, but on the whole if it's something like 'Dwarf' or 'Adder' or any of the ones I've done for a while, they'll trust me and say we want this, this and this and I'll just go away and hire the people, fix it all up and make various decisions about what style it should be. It's not just because they think I'm good enough to do that, it's also a practical thing - if everybody made all the decisions it would take forever and the turnover time is often very quick. The music is put on 'Red Dwarf', for example, after the fine cut edit and the difference between fine cut edit and transmission is often very short indeed. They're always behind by then and I come in and I'm given three or four days to get everything done, get the music for the episode done and put on ready for the next one, so it's done under such tight circumstances that you couldn't sit down in a room with six people and say, "well which guy should we have for the trumpet?", it would just take too long. They have to trust me to a certain extent and that's probably for better and worse, because sometimes you get better results from everybody chipping in and sometimes better results from me making the decisions and blasting it through.

RDM: You say that you get the episodes after editing, it does sometimes seem in episodes where there is a lot of music that it's all tied in very well with the timing of things. Are there instances where you have a say at earlier stages?

HG: Well no, by the time it comes to me it's fine cut - usually, but if there's a bit of a panic on they'll give me an un-fine edit and I work to that. Normally what I do is lock it up to the equipment here, synchronise it all up and then write to the picture absolutely spot on. Sometimes that's not possible, if I put the music on something and for some reason it goes back for another edit, say they need to lose two minutes or there's some change they need to make, then they have to do the best they can with the music that's fitted to another cut and sort of refit it again. Often there just isn't time for me to re-do it and in some episodes the music fits better than others. Often I'll do more than they need, I mean there are many more music cues than they'll ever need. Basically what we do is they'll say we'd like music for this bit, this bit and this bit and it's up to me to decide whether it should start under this line or under that line, whether it should take over that cut or where it should come in or out of. And when I've done that it can make all sorts of other decisions necessary, for example if I've done something that's much heavier than they expected me to write then they might use much less of it, or if I do something that's not heavy enough they might borrow a bit from somewhere else that I did and shove it on. Because the final stages are usually done under a certain amount of pressure, time's not really on our side when it comes to doing the music, so we try to do it as exact as we can in the time we've got. In an ideal world you'd have weeks and weeks and you'd sit there with an orchestra and just fit it all beautifully like people do in films.

RDM: What about the theme tune itself, was that just a case of getting the titles and doing the music over them or was there more consultation?

HG: No, actually with that one I can't remember how we did it in the very first instance. I think I saw some rough pictures of the graphics from the beginning and the end, but it hadn't been put together and then they cut that to the music. Originally, in the first series, the opening was more like 2001 which we then abandoned for a more up-beat beginning, from the third series onwards they were using fast cut shots from various episodes - that was cut to the music. But with the theme tune it was a case of us discussing roughly what we'd be going for and I suggested a kind of 'Tamla' sound, then I went in with it and played it to them on the piano, we discussed it and ended up with what we ended up with.

RDM: Who wrote the lyrics to the'Red Dwarf' theme?

HG: I wrote those lyrics and that was really based on one episode in the first series which was all about him (Lister) wanting to go to Fiji - all that stuff about "goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes" was all to do with that,although if you see it now it doesn't bear any relation to what you're watching and I quite like that. That was always the fun of 'Blackadder' - doing more and more ridiculous lyrics that had less and less to do with the programme.

RDM: Did you write all the lyrics to the second series of 'Blackadder'?

HG: Well, there were three of us who basically sat down and wrote those over a few pints, I think we did one every episode. When 'Blackadder' was shown in the States I got this panic fax from the company that was showing it saying "we can't understand any of the words, can you send us a list?" - they wanted to print them in the American equivalent of the Radio Times - and I couldn't find them because, for some reason, I didn't keep a record of them, so I had to go through the video listening to them and trying to work out what the lyrics were. There were all sorts of words - I can't really remember now, but like 'sod' - which don't have the same connotations over there.

RDM: There was just the one vocal arrangement in the first series of 'Blackadder'.

HG: That was when it was more like an adventure epic, more like a "Robin Hood riding through the glen" type feel. We had an instrumental version at the beginning and a vocal version at the end, just like we did with 'Dwarf' - traditional. It's quite fun that, if it's a series and you've got six programmes to go you know that by about the fourth or the fifth one, people are going to get the tune, it's good when they recognise it.

RDM: Getting back to 'Red Dwarf' again, one thing people keep asking us is who sang the theme song?

HG: Well, now here's an interesting thing, her name is Jenna Russell and she's in the Dennis Waterman series 'On the Up'. I don't remember the name of her character, but she's the young girl with blonde hair who lives in the house with them. I've only seen one episode and I couldn't quite work out what her relationship to him was, but anyway Jenna Russell is the person that is doing the tune. She's currently up in Stratford, performing with the RSC and is about to go on tour - she's got a fantastic voice, she did one of the leading roles in 'Les Miserables' for about a year. I've known her for a long time, she was in a musical of mine which is how I got to know her.

RDM: Why has the 'Red Dwarf' theme never been released as a record?

HG: Er, I don't really know actually; the thing is it's not really up to me, if someone comes along and wants to make a record of it then that's great by me. But everybody who ever writes a theme for a TV thing always wants it to come out as a single and, funnily enough, none of mine have come out - 'Blackadder' hasn't, 'Mr. Bean' hasn't, I mean, these are all very popular series and - ask them not me. I don't know why - they never even made it onto any of the BBC compilations of theme tunes. And considering that 'Adder' and 'Dwarf' are, I suppose, two of the better known comedy themes it's funny they never asked me if they could put them on one of those. But they never have and I don't really know why, maybe they don't like me. We've been hatching this plan for a few months now to see whether we might bring out a CD with all the comedy themes I've done and maybe a couple of other people's, so it's like an album of comedy themes. It would be fun, but I just don't know what the demand would be. With comedy there is a demand for videos and books and things like that because basically you can laugh at them but I don't know what the demand would be for the music. There is the sheet music which is the stuff that's framed up there on the wall - and I know that both those sold very well, so obviously people were taking them to performance school, or whatever it was they wanted to do with them, and you occasionally hear those tunes around, but they've never made it onto record. The funny thing is 'Red Dwarf' was a sort of pop song anyway, the 'Adder' would have needed more work to make it playable on the radio, but 'Red Dwarf' just needed expanding a bit - maybe we will do it.

RDM: Which version of the 'Blackadder' theme do you think would have gone down best?

HG: I don't know. The one I always liked best was the version for the Christmas special where we had kids singing and we had some quite amusing words, that would have been fun for a Christmas single because it was so rude. But in fact I think we did a version that was very rude and no-one would allow us to do it oh that's right, we wrote a song about Baldric to come out as a single over Christmas, but the lyrics were just too rude so it sort of died a death.

RDM: Whose idea was it to do the alternative closing themes in 'Red Dwarf IV'? The Hammond organ, etc

HG: Well that came out of the script because, if you remember, Rimmer talks about his love of organ greats and Ed Bye, the director at that time, asked if we could do one that was like a really naff organ sound and I said "naffiness, no problem, I can do that".

RDM: You played that then?

HG: Yeah, but in fact it was on some of this equipment here.

RDM: Not on a genuine Hammond organ?

HG: I had a good Hammond copy at the time. I seem to remember some sampled Hammond.

RDM: What sort of equipment do you use?

HG: Well, for those electro-music buffs who might know about it, I have all the Proteus machines, which are all very good sampled sounds. I have a number of other machines - a Roland, a Yamaha, various sample machines. I use a sequencer as the main brain and I use a PPS 100 synchroniser which synchronises video time code to sequences and I can play along on tape and go backwards and forwards over it and slow it down and speed it up. This reads time code off video tape and what will happen with most of the stuff I do - every job's a little different - is I'll do a basic map of it here then go to the studio and have real musicians work with it. Because, if I can work out the synchronisation, the way it absolutely fits to the picture, it's much quicker for me to do it here, then we go and play along to it. Rather than what you had to do in the old days when the musicians in the studio had to play it a lot of times until it was fitting very well; it was very time consuming and very expensive.

RDM: Do you use musicians in all the episodes?

HG: No, it just depends on what's required, some cues you need it and some you don't, some series need more than others, so it's really pick and mix. It also depends on how much time you've got. If I have to turn it around in 24 hours the amount of parts I can write out, and get down, is limited. If, however, they say to me in advance, "we're going to do a song like this in the show, can you prepare for that?", we'll set that up and you might have a session for a specific number. There was a thing where Kryten was watching 'Androids' and we did a whole 'Neighbours' thing and there was another one, either in the same series or the same programme, where they had a special music cue they wanted.

RDM: Was that 'Tongue Tied'?

HG: Yeah I don't know if that was the same session though, it might have been another one, but again on those sorts of things we'd need to have a separate session and get musicians just for that particular song.

RDM: Did you write 'Tongue Tied'?

HG: Rob and Doug did the lyrics and I did the music, although in the end I'm not sure it came out quite how it was intended.

RDM: It seems to have been rather popular actually.

HG: It was a dead good lyric and a fun idea, but it was one of those things that was such a production number that when it was actually recorded it took up so much time. The original idea for it was that it was slightly longer, but I think it was only about a minute long in the programme. So many people became involved with it and it became such a big thing and took much longer in the studio than expected, it over-dominated the episode. In the end I don't think it worked as well as it might have done, but you can't win 'em all.

(1994) transcribed in 1999 by TJ Vanderstoop & Cathy Mayer on http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/9566/interviews.html