Mojo - The Music Magazine

ANYONE WHO'S BEEN to see Christopher Nolan's current movie Inception will realise the importance of Hans Zimmer's soundtrack and the key role played by Johnny Marr's "churning" guitar. Suitably impressed, MOJO's resident soundtrack nut Andrew Male quizzed the senior Crib about his ever-expanding soundtrack work.

AM: The first obvious question is, how did your role in Inception come about?
Marr: I got the call. Hans is somebody I've wanted to work with for a while. I'd heard a lot from other people who'd worked with him and the way he goes about things sounded really intriguing, and you get a feeling from people's music you like that you're going to like them as a person.

The odd thing was that I'd just been out to the cinema and I'd seen the trailer to Inception. I came home and then I got a call in the early hours from Hans asking me to work on the movie with him. And I'd only just seen the trailer a couple of hours before.

That's like a scene from the movie. But isn't that a bit late to start work on a soundtrack?
I know. Hans had written the soundtrack with these parts played on a keyboard that he thought would be my thing. He's been very generous in crediting me with inspiring that particular sound.

He's said that if you hadn't been able to do it he would've stripped those parts out of the soundtrack. Is that true?
That's what he said. When I heard the parts, I really related to them, and as I started to play them I realised that it was the sort of thing I do.

Was that a bit uncanny, somebody connecting with you on that level?
It was flattering, plain and simple. When I started recording it, my overriding thoughts were just to do the job right, so I went over to see the movie and of course missed 50 per cent of what it was about because I was concentrating solely on the score and the background and wondering how I was going to approach it. I was just thinking of all kinds of technicalities like, 'Do I use 12-string on this bit... this bit would be really good on the 325... this bit would be good if I filter it.' Hans asked if I understood the film and I said '...Yes?' with a question mark on the end.

Then he decided that the only way to do it was to record every single guitar part in real time as it appeared throughout the movie, rather than copying and pasting them. It's a long movie and there's a lot of guitar in it and I wanted to make sure that as well as getting it technically right that it was emotionally right. And I know that every take I did felt exactly right with the action and the emotion I was getting from the characters.

Is that because you're effectively soundtracking Leonardo DiCaprio's character, soundtracking his emotions...
Yeah, I was reacting to it entirely emotionally. And if my connection went while I was playing I would just re-record it. I wanted to be sure that when I saw the film I would know that I hadn't left any emotion unchecked.

Hans wrote these beautiful, very European tunes, which I was very, very pleased about, and it was then three or four days of hour-after-hour-after-hour watching scenes and just playing these parts and pulling out a few different guitars and just trying to do it justice, try and get an overall impression of the emotion of the story, of the environment. One of the things that struck me straight off was that this isn't an American-type film. It's got a real European feel to it, and it's the story of this guy who is just completely churned up. Everyone's making such a big deal of the dream stuff and the heist and the cleverness and all of that, but the thing that really struck me was this guy's quest to be freed of his torment.

Have you now seen the film with your guitar parts in it?
Oh yeah, a few times. I went to the premiere in London, and then I've seen it a couple of times since. The first thing you need to know is, 'Did I do the job right?' Then, if you're satisfied with that you can enjoy it, but it was only after seeing it a few times that I was able to switch the critical faculties off, because I was still listening to the reverbs.

Was it a different sense of completion to play it live with an orchestra, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre?
Well first off you're playing with musicians who are just as good as it gets, and even though Hans has made over 100 movies there's a big part of him that goes back to his days as a live musician [Zimmer was in Buggles - Synth Pop Ed]. He did do the up-and-down-the-M1-in-a-transit-van thing, and a lot of this score rocks and translates very well to big rock guitar. It's not chamber-y by any means. There's an emotional centre of absolute power and intensity. It's quite a remarkable sound [and] we really knew we had to put on something powerful. We only started rehearsing together the day before, but I was working on all my stuff while I was touring with The Cribs - in Glastonbury in my bunk, in a people-carrier on the way from T In The Park to the airport, sat in a lounge at Heathrow before I caught the plane. I had to do that...

Were you also picking up tips? Because weren't you working on your soundtrack to The Big Bang? And there's also the music you've done for David [Mr Show] Cross's new sitcom...
I did the Big Bang, which took me about four months and, it being my first soundtrack, I probably did 30 per cent more music than I needed to. That's turned out well, although after you hand over the music you never know. But to answer your question, I did pick up quite a lot of stuff from Inception and from conversations with Hans, and the main thing I picked was that in terms of composing music from an emotional point of view, I'm on the right track.

So, for example, when Hans did Gladiator, did he research Italian music and the music of Rome? No. He just reacted to what he thought the guy was feeling. And that's what I decided I would do. If a film requires someone to ape the music of 18th Century France then there's no point in me doing it. In the case of the Big Bang, it was more of a noiry, trippy, tense, quirky emotion that I got, and I was like 'Yeah, I know how to do that, and I know what kind of tunes I need, and I know what kind of sounds you get on the guitar to do that.'

It also was encouraging to be reminded that I could do all of this on the guitar. That's what makes me distinctive. So where other people might use an orchestra with strings and a percussion section and woodwind and horns, well, I'll do that with two guitars, because I know how to use effects to get an emotional spread. So what I might, in all modesty, talk of as being a limitation, is actually something that goes in my favour, so that was good to find out.

How different is it working on a TV series? The temptation for an outsider is to think of it as a smaller, easier project...
No, because everything I do is always the most important thing going on in my life at that time, and that includes walking out on stage with The Cribs. So with The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret, I really wanted to do something that was as good as the classic sitcoms that I grew up with as a kid in the '70s and '80s, where, if you're in the kitchen and it comes on you immediately run into the front room. That was important, so I didn't get too hung up on what everybody else has been doing for the last few years. When I saw the pilot I thought, 'OK, I live half the time in Portland, I live half the time in the UK, and this character comes from Portland to the UK. That feels good, but I want for people in the States to watch it and immediately know it's about England, but at the same time have this pathos that I could use. I needed to think about how to write a pop song that could be droll at the same time. It's sort of a bespoke theme tune...

Like Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?
Right. I hadn't thought of that, but I think subconsciously that's in there. That's a really good call, because I'd forgotten about that.

I would imagine from the response to the Inception soundtrack that your phone's been ringing off the hook with offers... What's next, as they say?
Well, The Cribs have a lot of festival shows yet to do. We've been looking forward to Reading and Leeds for quite a while, because we last played it two years ago, which was when I joined the band, so it's been quite significant.

You've gone from newcomer to fully-fledged member...
It was kind of official when I walked on the stage [at Leeds], and two years later we're coming back, and it feels like a nice circle. But I'd like to write and perform some more movie soundtracks without doubt, because there's a whole science to it. I put it off for a long time because I had offers over the years, and it never seemed like the right time, and the films just weren't right. But The Big Bang felt right because the director [Tony Krantz] had been working with the sound of the first Healers album in mind. And I was obviously going to do Inception because I love Hans' stuff and I love [Christopher Nolan's] Memento. And coincidentally David Cross did Todd Margaret, and he and I had played together once before, in New York before a Modest Mouse gig. We did a satirical send-up of this corporate American conference where this Bank Of America conference guy did a version of U2's One.

So everything's connected...
...And it's worked out really well and I've enjoyed it so I'm going to do some more of it.

Interview by Andrew Male