The art of noise
Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley has lived her life in music, from classical to TV scores. But she knew to stay silent when Poldark took off his togs
Alamy
- Michael Hodges
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If the composer Anne Dudley has one regret it’s that Aidan Turner’s shirtless scything in Poldark, a scene that set the nation a-quiver and which she calls “one of the most famous moments in television” is almost entirely dialogue-free. That means it didn’t require her to write any extra score – a creative process that would have required multiple viewings. “So, I didn’t get to see it about 50 times,” she says, “like I usually do.”
Otherwise, the 69-year-old has a lot to be happy about. She has provided music for many television shows and films as well as Poldark, including American History X, The Crying Game and The Full Monty, for which she won an Oscar. Other awards include two Brits, a Grammy and an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.
These are remarkable achievements for a woman who came from an ordinary household in Plumstead in south London where she loved the soundtrack to the 1960s children’s series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, listened to her dad’s 78s – “He liked classical music with a tune and quite frankly, who doesn’t?” – and absorbed 60s and 70s pop on the radio. “I don’t want to sound like an old fogey going, ‘Pop music was much better in my day’, but the thing is, it’s true.”
Now Dudley is receiving one of the greatest accolades that the British music industry can give, becoming the 33rd Ivors Academy Fellow and joining the ranks of Kate Bush, Sir Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Dame Judith Weir, Sir Paul McCartney and Sir James MacMillan. “Just to be mentioned in the same breath as those people is a huge honour,” she says.
Dudley is being recognised for body of music that stretches from composing the shimmering 2022 cantata One Touch of Nature to arranging for Rod Stewart and Tina Turner. But her career began inauspiciously one night in the late 70s at Tiffany’s nightclub in Wimbledon when, fresh from the Royal College of Music, Dudley arrived for a gig with her electric piano.
Music has been devalued in the national curriculum
“At the time I just thought it was a way of earning £17.50,” she says. “It was a discotheque, but they had a live band because the Musicians Union insisted on it. The bass player came in and said, ‘Oh, I like the sound of your piano. Would you hire it out?’ And I replied, ‘No, if you want my piano, you have to hire me.’ So rather than a hire company, I became a professional musician. It was probably the right choice.”
The bass player was Trevor Horne, soon to be one of the key figures in British pop. Through him Dudley would arrange the strings on one of the defining albums of the early 80s, The Lexicon of Love by ABC, and then join the experimental, and highly successful, electronic pop group Art of Noise.
In truth, it’s quite hard to keep up with all the things Dudley has done. The first person to be appointed BBC Concert Orchestra’s Composer in Association, she has also worked with Robbie Williams (“So funny and full of life. The Ivor Novello of his time”) and the Spice Girls, seemingly equally happy in classical or pop. “To me, musical barriers don’t exist,” she says. “Duke Ellington said there’s good music and bad music, and that’s it. But I’m not even sure that there’s bad music. There’s sometimes quite weird music, or music that maybe I don’t like, but I would hesitate to call it bad.”
She went on to score television commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Guinness, then got her first big TV series commission, the soundtrack for Jeeves and Wooster, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Looking back over her career, the obvious high point would be an Oscar for 1997’s The Full Monty, beating Hans Zimmer’s score for As Good as It Gets. “I had no expectation of winning,” she recalls of the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. “I do remember just being shocked. I was wearing quite high heels, and my main thought was, ‘Don’t fall over.’ When I’ve seen it back, I appear to be quite calm. I’ve no idea how, really, because it was all a bit of a blur.”
Aidan Turner as Ross in Poldark. BBC
It was an important moment in her musical life, but not the most important. That had come much earlier, when she was 10. “The school acquired a clarinet and because I was the best recorder player I got the clarinet and free music lessons. Soon after that, I realised that all I ever wanted to do was music.”
She would go on to win a “life-changing” junior exhibition at the RCM. Acutely aware that she was “born at the right time”, Dudley remains ever grateful to the Inner London Education Authority, which provided her free music lessons. “Those days are long gone, so I do feel blessed. Since I was a child, music has been devalued in the national curriculum. It’s not seen to be as important.”
But, of course, it is and we tend to find out just how important in moments of personal and, sometimes, national crisis. At the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020 it was Dudley who arranged the socially distanced performance of Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms. “There was no audience at the Royal Albert Hall except me and Errollyn Wallen [now Master of the King’s Music] rattling around up in the gallery. It was a challenge to reduce Elgar’s magnificent orchestration, but also a joy to delve into the score. On the night the BBC Symphony Orchestra played the arrangement magnificently. I found it very moving.”
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And so she plays on, immensely respected by her peers and utterly dedicated to making good music, whatever genre we choose to call it. “The composer Elisabeth Lutyens said, ‘I write two types of music. I write my own music and film music.’ I thought that was rather a terrible thing to say because, really, you have to put yourself into everything that you do.”
Authors
Michael Hodges
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