"Doctor Who is the hardest job I've ever done"
Britain’s top TV composer Murray Gold invites you to a solo recital in his attic
Patrick Mulkern
- Patrick Mulkern
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For a longer version of RT's exclusive Murray Gold interview, click here.
Murray Gold wears his success lightly. “I’ve just been lucky,” he shrugs, and adds without a hint of swagger, “I’ve always been the composer of the northern poets.” He means the great TV dramatists: Paul Abbott (Shameless, Clocking Off), Sally Wainwright (Last Tango in Halifax, Scott & Bailey, Gentleman Jack) and Russell T Davies (It’s a Sin, A Very English Scandal and, of course, Doctor Who).
All those shows bear Gold’s stamp, but an even greater accolade is that he must be the only living composer to have had five BBC Proms dedicated to his work – concerts so popular that, even with two performances in one day, seats sold out within hours of release. It helps that three were Who extravaganzas, with a fourth coming this Monday. But the organisers might just as easily fill the Albert Hall by programming his other hits. Indeed, a highlight of the 2015 Proms showcased his score for David Attenborough’s Life Story.
An engaging blend of laid-back and intense, Gold has invited me to his north London home to see where all the magic happens. His recording studio is a padded attic, kitted with five Apple Macs, synthesizers, an analogue reverb unit and a plethora of guitars. Is he ever stuck for inspiration? “No. I feel the music is invented just by watching and listening to the story. I block out any sense that I’m composing and just put my hands on the piano like an old-fashioned theatrical organist. I play along and record it.”
Murray Gold in his home recording studio, London 2024. Photographed by Patrick Mulkern.
Under the eaves is a play area for his two daughters, aged five and seven. This must act like a sound bath for them? “Yeah, I let them listen and sometimes they say, ‘That’s really good, Dad.’ But they’re not allowed to watch Doctor Who yet. It’s too scary.” Now 55, Gold came to fatherhood late. His wife Gemma (an actor and dancer whom he met while working with Ballet Leront in Newcastle) is “in charge of things as far as children are concerned – the day-to-day producer, while I’m more like the executive producer”.
His own childhood was spent in Portchester, Hampshire, in a close Jewish family, with his dad an accountant and his mum a homemaker who also worked in education for people with learning difficulties. Describing his young self as “a short-sighted geek”, he was the eldest of three sons and always showed a talent for music, even if his career took an unconventional path. Piano lessons as a boy led to him being put in charge of school bands, but when he went to Cambridge, he took history. “Corpus Christi was a lovely college, but I still dream about how I f***ed up there. I just did music and theatre and didn’t focus. I remember lying in bed the day the results came out and shouting to my friends, ‘What did I get?’ They said, ‘You’ve got a 2-2, Murray.’ I carried on sleeping, surrounded by the broken mirrors that had fallen off the wall around me. A fitting end to my academic career.”
Who were his musical influences? “I used to love Haydn, who has a lot of folk influences, and I’ve always loved the harmonic minor. I found major-key stuff incredibly boring in the classical repertoire. It’s hard to get away from Bach because everything modern and everything ancient is in there all at once. It’s atomic and spiritual and goes looking for a kind of trippy, druggy place as you ascend the mountain looking for God.” He chuckles as he exults.
This Prom isn’t going to be a jukebox musical. There’s a lot of new stuff
“David Bowie was my idol. From an early age I started dressing like him. My relatives used to say, ‘Oh, here comes little Bowie!’ ” One day in America they had a chance encounter. “I accosted him out buying an ice cream for his daughter. He was polite but didn’t want to talk to me. I’m glad I did it because he wasn’t much longer for this world.”
Work as a session musician in his 20s led to Gold composing the quirky score for the BBC’s 1998 Vanity Fair. That brought him to the attention of Russell T Davies, who needed an ace for his ground-breaking Channel 4 series Queer as Folk. Gold will never forget a meeting at his flat with Davies and fellow executive Nicola Shindler. “I put some toast on in case they were hungry, but they said, ‘Let’s go for a pizza,’ so we went straight out. My toaster was malfunctioning. When we got back, there were three fire engines outside. I’d burnt down the flat!” But it marked the start of a fruitful association.
A quarter of a century later, Gold is crazily busy. He’s scoring Sally Wainwright’s punk-band series Riot Women and Stephen Frears’s new drama about Margaret Thatcher. Fine-tuning his Doctor Who Prom, he promises fan-pleasing favourites but cautions, “There’s a lot of new stuff” – cues from the recent Ncuti Gatwa series that haven’t been released yet. “This isn’t going to be a jukebox musical. People aren’t necessarily coming in already humming the pieces.” He aims to capitalise on the vocal power of the London Philharmonic Choir and Russian soprano Aida Garifullina. “That’s a coup. She’s quite a star of her world.” He’s thrilled Catherine Tate is hosting the event. “Oh God, she’s great.”
Murray Gold at his keyboard. Patrick Mulkern
We’ve been talking for a couple of hours when he says, “Are you interested in hearing some music?” Not half. He fires up his computers. “I’ll open the templates. I have my family of instruments here, so there’s strings, arpeggios, every instrument under the sun.” He adds a metronomic beat and some reverb. “I’ll play a nice lyrical legato.” As he adds layer upon layer, what begins life echoing the score of a Scandi noir evolves into a Time Lordly anthem. “Multiply this process by about a million times and you’ve done a season of Doctor Who,” he says.
Then he hits delete. “It no longer exists. It was just there for that tiny moment.” I have to remind him I’m recording this interview so those few bars may one day be a Gold rarity.
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On impulse, he launches into the jaunty 2010 theme for Matt Smith’s Doctor. It’s thrilling to hear the composer play this in his creative space. “I haven’t played that for a while,” he sighs. “Whisper it to Russell, but the chord sequences behind Doctor Who are very 1950s melodrama-ish but orchestrated in a way that gives them motive power.” He finishes by playing – and singing – the opening bars of David Bowie’s Changes. Gold indeed.
Authors
Patrick Mulkern
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