5. Michael NymanCarrington OST

There’s a scene in Michael Nyman’s film Wonderland where a boy puts on his headphones, and it sounds like he’s putting on the Michael Nyman soundtrack. He walks from South London on fireworks day, he’s just looking at the fireworks and listening to the soundtrack, and it’s got that sense of London desolation – if he kept on walking, he would probably be a lost boy. You can trace that scene to my work. From that soundtrack, I became obsessed with Michael Nyman’s work – that thing with soundtracks, you take it from the film, then you apply it to your life. Carrington is an incredibly beautiful film about the life of Dora Carrington. While I was making Crying The Neck I bought the CD, and I made a pilgrimage to the Isle of Sheppey with it. I’d promised myself that when I learned to drive, I would drive over the bridge from Medway to Sheppey, and have a windows-down, soundtrack-up moment. I had it, and it was perfect. It feels like a beginning. It soundtracks the second chapter of life: learning to drive, being sober, making my first album of this next period of time.

It also gave me comfort when I recorded my string parts. A lot of the strings are out of tune with each other on the soundtrack, it’s not very well polished. I don’t know if it’s intentional, so there’s a feeling of a folk version of Michael Nyman. It’s a little bit rough, things slide over each other. you can hear elbows being knocked on cellos and things like that. That really helped me with my work, because we only had a day to do it and some people were out of tune. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s okay, because that’s Carrington’. It’s very human.