Hi, I’m Hannah and I’m a workaholic
...who’s also OBSESSED with music (which is just as well as she’s hardly office material!)
‘If you love what you do it’s addictive and hard not to work on it and think about it’
Hannah Peel
Hannah Peel is a highly respected composer of mostly electronic music. The versatile Co. Down-based musician has also orchestrated strings for Paul Weller’s last three albums and is a member of experimental rock band The Magnetic North. However, Hannah, 38, is best known for providing the musical scores to such TV dramas as The Midwich Cuckoos, for which she won best TV soundtrack at this year’s Ivor Novello Awards, Lisa McGee’s post-Derry Girls project The Deceived and the HBO documentary Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch for whose soundtrack she was Emmy-nominated.
Born in Craigavon, her family moved to Yorkshire when she was eight. At 18, Hannah enrolled in Liverpool’s prestigious Institute for Performing Arts, co-founded by Paul McCartney.
In her early weeks there she attended a concert than influenced her career.
‘After I started studying at university in Liverpool, I saw the Cinematic Orchestra do a live performance of the music from the [Russian silent] film Man With A Movie Camera [from 1929]. I watched it and got shivers up my spine and that’s when I said, “That’s what I want to do – I want to write music for film”. I had to do loads of different music jobs and then made my own albums but that was the means by which I navigated by way into it.’
Hannah now balances soundtrack composition with her own albums such as Fir Wave, which in 2021 earned her a Mercury Prize nomination. She will perform the entire album and other highlights from her career at the National Concert Hall on October 1. Subsequent to our interview it was announced that the Cinematic Orchestra are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their performance of the score to Man With A Movie Camera with a tour that includes the National Concert Hall the night after Hannah’s show. Will she be there? Well it’s a relatively short drive to Bangor, Co. Down, where Hannah now calls home.
‘Apart from my accent, which is very English, I finally feel like I’m home,’ she says. ‘We left Northern Ireland in the early 90s and the experiences that I had were very different to what they are now. If I had lived here longer in to my teenage and adult years I probably wouldn’t be back. I wasn’t influenced negatively so I’ve come back and love living here.’
Her father plays guitar and sings and she has fond memories of watching him play at folk sessions around the whole of Ulster.
‘My grandad actually was classically trained as a kid in the 1920s. He was a conductor and choirmaster and taught singing in Northern Ireland. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was growing up. I just knew that I was good at music. But after school in Barnsley the only opportunity I had was to do work experience in an accountants and from walking through the front door on my first day I said I never want to work in an office. I spent that whole week trying to get out of that office… I couldn’t cope.’ Like many artists, the fear of having to do any job at variance with their given talents is a motivation to be constantly working in their chosen field.
‘I think I’m part workaholic and part obsessed with music,’ she says. ‘If you love what you do it’s addictive and very hard not to always think about it and work on it. I keep getting offers where I think, “Oh that would be amazing”. Then I do it and then I’ve got about three or four more jobs on… so I end up working very long hours but also having a lot of fun.’
Hannah Peel, National Concert Hall, October 1