Words by Ann Lee

“The ‘60s have informed everything I've ever done because that was the stuff I grew up with,” says Steven Price. In fact, the composer was so obsessed with the sounds of that era, that he used to pinch records from his parents. Years later, he gave them the Oscar he won in 2014 for scoring Alfonso Cuarón’s meditative sci-fi blockbuster Gravity as a gift. “They put up with me playing music too loud all the time! If there's any way of saying thank you, I try and take it.”

The 44-year-old composer got the chance to revisit his favourite musical decade when he created the original music for Last Night in Soho. Director Edgar Wright’s latest film is an audacious psychological horror about a young fashion student named Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) slowly unravelling after she moves to London. 

She has a connection to the Swinging Sixties that goes beyond just loving vintage clothes and vinyl. Soon, "Ellie" starts to have nocturnal visions that she’s an aspiring singer called Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is trying to make it big in the days when Cilla Black was still ruling the airwaves. But beneath the heady glamour and fun of the ‘60s, lurk some shocking secrets. 

“There's something about the ‘60s. It was thought of as this glorious, amazing cultural highlight,” says Price. “It's very easy to look back and assume that it was fantastic. London seemed to be the epicentre of that but it’s always been this dangerous place.”

It’s the fourth time that Price has worked with Wright after The World's End and Baby Driver. The composer started out as a music editor on films like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Batman Begins before finding his true calling. He recently won an Emmy for his score for Netflix’s David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, which he will be bringing live to London’s Eventim Apollo in early 2022. Price has also worked on Attack the Block, Suicide Squad and The Aeronauts.

“My dream when I'm starting a project is that the music is going to feel bespoke to that film. It should feel like it's totally bonded with the imagery. Stylistically that's led me to do quite a lot of textural work, a lot of stuff that combines sound and feeling in hopefully interesting ways. In my head, I'm trying to write emotionally and to find a unique identity for each score that I do.”

How did you first start working on Last Night in Soho’s score?

Edgar sent me the script before they started shooting. The way that the whole film was going to be built on this rolling sense of the music, that's what set me off, really. We had a couple of chats early on when we discussed the kind of films that he’d been watching - a lot of ‘60s era London set films, but also ‘70s horror. 

I started writing and sent him a track called Neon, which is basically my first batch of ideas. It's this strange ever-building thing, full of little samples of sound and Mellotron loops, but gradually building into a John Barry-esque orchestral piece. That seemed to get him excited and I know he played it on set quite a lot. 

I kept writing these little suites all the way through the shoot and I'd send them. It was really funny when they started sending me the film to actually work on. There’d be these little snippets of score that I'd already written but in places that I never would have imagined. That would make me write the next bit or go back in and change things. So it was a really nice collaborative back and forth process.

The film has a fantastic soundtrack of ‘60s songs that Wright put together. How did they inform your score?

The score has a few different roles. Sometimes, it’s literally joining in with some of those songs and supporting or slightly changing the way they would work. We worked a lot on those techniques on this film - there's all sorts of moments where you may not realise that things are happening with the score until it's gradually taken over. 

There were moments when we would re-record elements of the song like in the opening Café de Paris sequence when Ellie first goes into the ‘60s. Everything in the film up to that point had been very close stereo and we didn't use the surround at all. Then as we went through that corridor into ‘60s London, you hear the record but all around it is a re-recording of the full orchestra that would go with that band. We wanted to make it feel like a live performance, like you're in the middle of the ‘60s yourself. 

There are other places where I was just influenced by the sound of those records. There are a lot of band influences going on in the instrumentation, there's a lot of guitars, a lot of bass, a lot of keyboard, a lot of Hammond organ, a lot of drum kits. A lot of Mellotron as well which captured that sense of looping time. 

You’ve worked with Wright several times now. What do you like about working with him?

It’s a great phone call to get when he's got a new project because it's always going to be unlike anything you've done before. It's going to be very challenging and rewarding because music is so important to his films. He's so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about music and the possibilities of what it can add, so alert to how music can give his films this rhythm and this sense of momentum. 

It’s this great ride that you go on where you start off with these relatively rough shapes and gradually you finesse and find all these little details. This tapestry develops and gets more sophisticated as you go through the process. 

What were the main instruments that you decided to use on this score?

 A lot of the influences were ‘60s techniques. Where there was a string section, it's quite a small string section that’s tightly mic’d and it's got that woody sound that you'd get from some of those ‘60s records. There's a lot of woodwind in the score, which came from listening to stuff like John Barry. There's lots of tuned percussion, which was me listening to a lot of Ennio Morricone. 

There's a huge amount of voice in the score, which was something that Edgar and I talked about early on - the idea of having almost like a siren song that would call from the 1960s into the present day. There's a moment in the film where Anya’s character does an audition and sings live on stage. We got together quite early on to record that moment and I realised what a great voice she has. So this idea was planted that she could also be the vocalist in the score. She sings all over it. 

Every time we go into Ellie’s flat, we hear these echoes of this voice from the past. We spent a lot of time putting these little tapestries of overlapping vocal parts that haunt her as the film goes on.

How did Soho act as a source of inspiration?

I have these memories of walking through Soho early in the morning and there would be all the market traders there on Broadwick Street. But around the corner, the red light district is just there and there's a children's school over here. All of these noises are kind of piling on top of each other and that felt like something to play with within the score. 

There are Mellotron loops that were recorded back in the day, a sound effects tapes for theatre, which sound like these market stalls and children's voices. Those things would become part of the texture. Textures were really important to this score, to make it feel like it had lived a life.

How has being a music editor helped your composing work?

It definitely gave me an appreciation that we're more than the music department, we're filmmakers too. That’s really crucial to remember. We're not just there to do the music, we're there to support every aspect of the filmmaking and to collaborate with all those different departments to make the moments as strong as you can. I’m grateful I spent that time doing that. I learned a lot from being in a different chair to the one I'm in now.

You won an Oscar for your score for Gravity. What did that Academy Award win mean to you?

It meant that I got to work again. There are no guarantees in this industry. It was very early on in my writing career that I was lucky enough that it happened. That was a fair few years ago now and I've been lucky to stay pretty busy. Some of that is the incredible shop window that film gave me. People hadn't heard of me or my music at all at that point. Suddenly, it was a very successful film thanks to the genius of Alfonso. It meant that I got to meet filmmakers and share music with them and just become part of a conversation that I always hoped to be part of but had no idea how to do so. 

Why did you decide to include David Attenborough’s voice in the music for A Life on Our Planet? 

That film was his witness statement. It's him for the first time talking about what he's seen, how the world's changed and how he feels about it. So with the music, I was really determined that it had the same dignity that he has and it supported every word. Ordinarily, I wouldn't put dialogue on a score album. But with this, you can't separate the music from the man and the message. It felt like the right thing to do.

You worked as an assistant for South African composer Trevor Jones when you first started out. What was the most valuable lesson you learned about composing from him?

It’s never too late to have an idea. It's never finished until it's finished. I used to get so worried, you know, that everything's got to be ready for each stage. He'd been doing it for so long at that point, he was just very aware that something good could happen at any point. You don't stop. 

Even now, there are things that I've worked on, where there's a cue that's kind of tricky. There's always one that doesn't land when you want it to land. Sometimes that might not happen until the final mix. Suddenly, you’ll go: ‘Oh, that's what was missing all along.’ Sometimes, the music just happens when it's ready to happen. Every day is an opportunity to do something that might really make a difference.