Words by Ann Lee

Isobel Waller-Bridge is midway through a sentence when she suddenly becomes startled by a strange noise coming from the street outside. “I can be so sensitive to sound,” she says over Zoom while sitting in her tastefully neutral bedroom in Islington. Wearing a black long-sleeve top and jeans with a gold chain hanging delicately from her neck, she looks fresh-faced and youthful. It’s this sensitivity to noise, a keen awareness of its alchemical powers, which has made her one of the most intriguing British composers working today, capable of turning interesting textures and minimal soundscapes into stirring scores. 

The 37-year-old musician is a self-confessed introvert, who describes herself as “quiet” during our chat although she seems anything but. She’s warm, gregarious and thoughtful, talking eagerly about her music and her work. “I'm much happier in a smaller one on one kind of thing,” she admits. “I'll never be the loudest voice in the room ever. I definitely listen more than I talk. I've always been like that, which is why composing soundtracks and writing music has always been a good place for me to be because listening is so important.”

Waller-Bridge’s most well-known project to date has been Fleabag, a labour of love for her and her younger sister Phoebe, who wrote and starred in the BBC comedy series. The composer has worked on a diverse array of TV, film and theatre productions including Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Emma, and the hit TV series, Black Mirror. She was also commissioned by designer Sarah Burton to score an Alexander McQueen runway show at Paris Fashion Week.

The musician’s latest soundtrack is for Munich: The Edge of War, a historical thriller adapted from the novel by Robert Harris and directed by Christian Schwochow. Blending fiction with real-life events, the story is set at the Munich 1938 conference as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons) desperately attempts to negotiate with Adolf Hitler (Ulrich Matthes) to avoid war with Nazi Germany.

Waller-Bridge was brought on board early, which allowed her to dig in and get stuck into the “weeds” of the project. After reading the script, she met with Schwochow, who gave her several themes to work around including friendship, war and loss. “​​It's an interesting film because we already know what the outcome is going to be,” she says. “But there is this moment where we wonder what if it had been different. It was important to me to haunt the film with the foresight of what actually happened in the Second World War. I designed a lot of sounds to feel like sirens, shrapnel, tinnitus, coding and information. That really helped me find my aesthetic for the score. The emotional journeys of the characters, I knew were going to be strings and piano.”

The film starts off on a hopeful note in 1932 as friends Hugh Legat (George MacKay) and Paul von Hartmann (Jannis Niewöhner) graduate from Oxford University, brimming with youthful idealism, the idyllic lull before the destructive storm of war. A few years later, Legat is working as a private secretary to Chamberlain while von Hartmann is a translator and a member of a secret resistance group determined to bring Hitler down. “There's this great potential for a new world. Then instantly both the protagonists are put into very politically critical situations when they're still quite young,” says Waller-Bridge. 

This sense of pressure and tension was fed into the music. “I used a lot of metals. Any sounds that made me feel a little bit anxious, like high-pitched metallic sounds. Repetitive sounds were really important to me. There's a theme that is just woods and metals, repeating. I gathered the sounds from bits of percussion in my studio and bits that I found in the street and then just put them through a load of pedals. I did some workshops with two string players at the beginning, and we got some good textual siren sounds. I knew I wanted to use some solo strings but in a processed way. I had one of the musicians play the viola with a pencil. I only wanted to use lyrical strings when it was to do with either family or home.”

Waller-Bridge has always been fascinated by the unconventional and experimental when it comes to music. The composer grew up in Ealing, west London, and started playing the piano when she was four years old. Her mother, Teresa, works for The Ironmongers' Company while her father, Michael, is a photographer. She remembers bringing some hundreds and thousands to school, transforming them into a shaker for music class. “No surprise that I really love sound design!” 

She studied music at Edinburgh University and King’s College London, before being awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. One of the first avant-garde pieces she wrote involved a trombone and a light switch. “It was about the relationship between the audience and how they listen - in light or in dark.” Waller-Bridge joined an experimental band called Tangent, where she played the piano. “There are a lot of photographs of us in the 2000s standing in a zigzag line in alleyways and leaning up against a brick wall,” she laughs. “It was just really dark music and mainly improvised. It was good being in that band, you learn that everything counts. It was about listening to each other and about making music in a live context that was free, that wasn't stuck to notes on a page. That has really influenced how I make music.”

At university, she looked up to composers like Emily Hall, Anna Meredith and Rachel Portman. Studying music meant she was constantly surrounded by other female musicians. But it was only when she got her first composing job that she realised just how few other women there were working in the same field. “I didn't know what the industry was like,” she says. “I was just writing music in my bedroom and with my friends, so I had no idea. When I started getting these emails that said they were specifically looking for female composers, I was like: ‘Oh, that's a thing! Okay.’ I wasn't comfortable with it for a long time. Then when I really understood what the industry needed, I started to feel the importance of visibility. I did go on my own journey because I never ever want to be referred to as a female composer, but I also want to be visible to young women who want to be composers.

“I never felt at a disadvantage. I've always felt that the jobs that I've got or have been offered, have been the right ones for me and my music. I've never had a bad experience in that way, so that's why I feel really optimistic because I do think that people respond to the music. Ten years ago or whatever, they just couldn't see the women. What's amazing now is that you can see the women, and you can see that they’re brilliant. But I'm also really aware that there were women that came before us who were potentially overlooked.”

Waller-Bridge was in her 20s when she went to Edinburgh Festival with Phoebe’s one-woman show Fleabag. The critically acclaimed play ran at London’s Soho Theatre before being turned into a BBC Three show in 2016. It became an instant hit. The series was showered with awards including several Emmys and Golden Globes. Fleabag blazed a trail for a more realistic and complicated depiction of women and female desire on screen that had been sorely lacking up until then.

Waller-Bridge’s theme for Fleabag, with its crunchy heavy metal guitar riffs, is now so entwined with the show and its closing credits that it’s only when you listen to it on its own that it strikes you just how dirty, grungy and aggressive it really is. Traits that seem incongruous with a comedy but somehow fit it perfectly. “The character is crashing around and she's making all these mistakes,” she says. “But she's following some sort of truth in herself. There was this idea that we didn't want her to be behaving this way, but then apologising for it. We wanted her to just own every decision. When she first steals the statue [from her despised stepmother played by Olivia Colman], it felt like: ‘Oh, this is punk!’ I was thinking: ‘What if it was some heavy metal sort of thing?’ I picked up a guitar and just started riffing. Then I sent it to my sister, the producers and the director. She sent me a video back of them all just headbanging to the music.” 

The musician has just finished working on the score for the new Apple TV+ show Roar based on a short story collection by Cecelia Ahern. The anthology series starring Nicole Kidman, Cynthia Erivo and Alison Brie will be a dark comedy told from a female point of view. She also composed the music for The Phantom of the Open, an upcoming British comedy about an amateur golfer who ends up in the British Open Golf Championship. “That was such a little gem of a film,” says Waller-Bridge. “When I was sent a cut of it, it was so warm, and gorgeous. It was a space that I really wanted to be in. I wanted to live with those characters, live with that film, for a few months. That is the reason why I do a project.”

Waller-Bridge will be releasing her second solo album later this year on the Mercury KX label with plans to start recording in March. Her first, 2015’s Music for Strings, was rousing and, at times, plaintive composition performed by a large string orchestra. The composer’s new offering will be inspired by several artists, she says, including photographer Francesca Woodman, painter Francis Bacon and poet Anne Carson. “I've gone to artists that I find very inspiring to tap into a story that I want to tell about myself.” Focusing just on herself is an unusual place to be for a musician who is used to collaborating with other people. “When the spotlight moves to me, I feel very uncomfortable. It feels almost self-indulgent.”

But she’s always liked retreating into these worlds whether they’re shaped by her own imagination or by other people’s. Waller-Bridge enjoys how deeply restorative it can feel to make music, sorting through the weeds, nurture the flowers, a colourful garden suddenly springing into full bloom. “The kind of music that I naturally write is quite meditative, ambient and gentle. I don't know whether it's because I wrote a lot of things that were quite violent and big last year. Maybe I'm having a reaction to that now. I actually want to be sitting in a more peaceful place as a way to calm my brain. The way I do that is by writing. It’s like a healing space.”