The amazing Mr Mowat: Composer reveals his screen double on Christmas Eve
Musician unwraps the story behind his festive film success
For many of us, our seasonal soundtrack is one of uplifting carols and songs about snow and Santa. For composer Blair Mowat, however, Christmas offers the chance to create musical scores of spine-tingling scares and a sense of dread.
The composer has written the music for the last three editions of the BBC’S A Ghost Story For Christmas series, working alongside Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss, who writes and directs the films.
This Christmas Eve, however, Mowat will have a double bill on our screens. As well as Gatiss’s The Mezzotint, the 35-year-old Bafta nominee has scored Sky’s big-budget original, The Amazing Mr Blunden, which he recorded with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) in Scotland’s Studio, becoming the first to use the custom-built film and TV recording facility.
With more than 200 scores already composed for a variety of mediums, prolific Mowat is following fellow Scots, Craig Armstrong and Patrick Doyle, to become one of the most in-demand screen composers.
But, as a child musician growing up in Edinburgh, Mowat did not immediately seem a future star when the only sense of dread he instilled in his teachers was the likelihood he would once again turn up to practice without having actually practised.
“I was in no way a child prodigy,” he laughed. “I used to dread lessons, because I didn’t practise and then I would get this anxiety as I went to my lessons knowing I hadn’t done enough. I was six when I began learning the clarsach and I think the teachers were expecting great things from me because my auntie was Sanchia Pielou, who taught harp and Celtic harp at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, but I just wouldn’t practise. It was the same when I began piano lessons.
“Only when I started writing my own material did I really become grabbed by music. I remember my piano teacher went to the bathroom, and when she came back I was playing one of my own compositions. She said I played it much better than I played Beethoven, and that I should become a composer.”
A school trip to Glasgow to see Oscar-winning film composer Elmer Bernstein – who wrote the music for classics like The Great Escape, The Ten Commandments and The Magnificent Seven – conduct the RSNO was another important
moment in Mowat’s journey, and one which came full circle when he conducted the orchestra for The Amazing Mr Blunden.
“I didn’t realise at the time the significance of who Elmer Bernstein was, but to hear this iconic film music played by an orchestra, and to hear what that sounded like in person, was hugely inspiring. Bernstein composed the original 1972 score for The Amazing Mr Blunden, so when I got the gig for the remake, I immediately called the RSNO to see if they could record the score. It felt like a beautiful connecting of the dots using the orchestra that inspired me to write film music as a child.”
Mowat, who also composes the music for ITV series Mcdonald & Dodds, was hugely impressed by the facilities and believes the studio can help Scotland in its growing role as a major player in movie and TV production.
“It’s great to see the Scottish film industry opening up to a commercial avenue, with hugely expensive shows like The Rig being filmed here, with people coming from all over the world to work on it but also Scottish shows like Guilt, which are benefiting from the influx of talent and enthusiasm. It was only in 1981 that Abbey Road began recording film scores such as Raiders Of The Lost Ark and, while it was already a huge institution, it has become very famous for its film scores. That has only been in the past 40 years, so there is no reason why Scotland’s Studio can’t become the next Abbey Road.”
While Scotland is fast becoming a film and TV hub, that wasn’t the case when Mowat was starting out. After studying at universities in Durham and Bristol, he relocated to London in 2008 in order to get a footing in the industry and make the necessary contacts.
One of those was with The League Of Gentlemen star Gatiss, who also stars in The Amazing Mr Blunden alongside Simon Callow and Tamsin Greig, with the pair bonding over a joint love of Doctor Who. “There was a screening at the BFI in London of an old Tom Baker episode and we were sitting beside each other and began chatting,” Mowat explained.
“I sent him some of my music and I was young enough to get away with being pushy and saying we needed to work together. He later had a couple of projects for Radio 4 that didn’t have much of a budget, so I think he thought I’d be cheap enough that I’d do it.
“He seemed impressed, so when he started working on the Christmas Eve ghost stories for TV, the relationship continued. It was a classic case of getting in there early when he was beginning to direct, and a creative relationship formed where we work so well together and have similar sensibilities.”
Mowat’s love of Doctor Who has seen him become a part of that world, working with series composer Murray Gold for a period as his assistant during the Peter Capaldi era, and then becoming the composer for 2016 spin-off show, Class. He also does the music for the Torchwood audiobooks – another spin-off – and hopes to one day compose for the main show.
He continued: “Getting to work on eight episodes of Class, which was a quite expensive sci-fi drama, felt like I had really broken through but my first break was working on a low-budget movie made in Edinburgh called Electric Man, which was about two comic book store owners obsessed with superheroes. I scored it with superhero music, a big orchestral score done through the computer, which was a calling card to show I could work on a long-form project on a very tight budget and deliver something professional.”
The next stage of Mowat’s ambitious career is just about to begin, after moving to Los Angeles and setting up a recording studio there six weeks ago, as he looks to break into Tinseltown.
“At university I had a poster of the Hollywood sign above my desk where I worked,” he added. “It’s one of the best places to be for film and TV music, and it feels like a natural progression. My parents are coming over for Christmas, so I hope the producers send me a link to watch The Amazing Mr Blunden while they’re here.”
He added: “A lot of scores are recorded in London, and hopefully now in Scotland, too. So hopefully I’ll be back and forth to work on more material.”