The New Cue #250 December 19: The Story Behind The Christmas Song with Andy Burrows and Ilan Eshkeri
December 19, 2022
Hello,
It’s Christmas week and we’ve got the perfect thing to get it rolling, as Andy Burrows and Ilan Eshkeri tell us all about the making of their Bafta-nominated soundtrack to The Snowman & The Snowdog. They are celebrating its tenth anniversary with two special live performances. The first took place in Birmingham over the weekend and the second is happening tomorrow (Tuesday 20 December) at the Theatre Royal in London - there’s still some tickets available here. If reading about it is the perfect thing to get your Christmas week rolling, then surely going to see it is the next logical step? Andy and Ilan will be joined by a live orchestra and some very special guests.
Before we get onto the chat, we’d like to say that this is our last edition of the year and thanks very much for reading The New Cue, especially if you’re a paying subscriber and not just a freeloading bum here for the free Monday editions. Yes, that’s right Mr Cheapskate, you’re a bum.
Enjoy the edition and have yourself a Merry Christmas, see you in 2023,
Ted, Niall and Chris
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The Story Behind The Christmas Song
How we birthed a Christmas classic
Light The Night by Andy Burrows and Ilan Eshkeri, 2012
It’s been ten years since Razorlight drummer, singer-songwriter and Ricky Gervais collaborator Andy Burrows and prolific film composer Ilan Eshkeri were tasked with coming up with sequel music that could live up to iconic 80s animation The Snowman. With a score led by the stirring anthem Light The Night, though, they did a cracking job. Taking a break from rehearsals for this week’s live performances, they told Niall all about it over Zoom.
What are the first things that come to mind when you think back to taking on the soundtrack?
Ilan Eshkeri: The first things that come to mind are the weight of the idea of doing it, how do you do a follow-up to The Snowman and how do you take on the responsibility and then how do you deliver on a follow-up to Walking In The Air? Once I decided to take on that responsibility, it’s bringing Andy into it, and the warm feelings around that being able to work with my pal. Andy had this little dog called Rufus, who was like a little snowy cloud of a dog, it was kind of perfect and everything seemed to fit together. I remember talking about it with Andy and we just decided, ‘you know what, we can’t be better than or even as good as The Snowman, so we’re not going to try, we’re just going to do our thing and see how that goes.’
How has it been revisiting it?
Andy Burrows: It’s been amazing to be going back into this magical Snowman and Snowdog world. it’s incredible. It was off the scale first time round, I couldn’t believe we were doing it, the film itself and then the live show. I also can’t believe it’s been 10 years. That’s nuts. There’s something very warm and fuzzy about the Snowman and Snowdog, it takes you back to your childhood and having that huge screen above us while we’re rehearsing at the moment,, there’s something very comforting about it. It’s like being in your living room in the 80s watching the original.
I guess it’s not just that you have a task to live up to the music from the original, it’s the weight of nostalgia too.
IK: Absolutely. Also, what helped was the filmmakers had decided that the story was set 30 years later. At the beginning of that film, you see the field being filled with construction and houses being built. In the original it was a house on its own in a field, now it’s the same house but has loads of houses all around it. The new kid moves into the old house, the same house from the original, which is why he finds the old picture in the floorboard. With that in mind, we were able to very legitimately contemporize the music, it’s not straight classical, it’s got contemporary instruments, we were allowed to have an electric guitar, because it’s taking place later and it can feel more modern. That gave us a really good reason to bring our own voice to it and to do something different.
What was the biggest breakthrough moment?
IK: The first time me and Andy were in the studio together, there was a sequence of notes that I had always wanted to use that felt magical and sentimental to me, and that became that sequence of notes in different forms, but faster or slower, it’s a long, slow form at the beginning of the film and a groovier short form is the beginning of the song. That group of notes set everything going, and it’s funny how that works, all you need is a tiny little germ of an idea and then things blossom from that, we got lucky with that. Andy and I have collaborated on a few things over the years and typically when we get together, we have good energy and the work flows easily.
How did the dynamic work between you both?
IK: It was one of our first collaborations in terms of writing. I think I’d done some strings for Andy and he’d played some drums and other bits and pieces for me. And so we’d worked on each other’s projects, but we hadn’t actually collaborated together. It was unusual, because Andy was living in New York at that time. So the germ of the idea started and we then went away separately, and worked on the things that we knew best. Andy started working on the song in New York and I started working on the score over here. We reconvened and then started exchanging the ideas and, and saying, ‘Oh, that bits going to be the theme for the dog, and this bit is going to be the theme for the snowman, or we can incorporate this element of the song and that bit of the song can go into here and bit by bit we started to piece it together.’
AB: It was a real exercise in collaborative work. My collaboration experience previous to that was working with Johnny Borrell on Razorlight songs. Before that, I was just always just a drummer and learned to shut up and play the drums. It was a real learning curve because I was collaborating with someone on a level pegging but, at the same time, it was a world that I was nowhere near as familiar with. I was very aware that I was essentially an indie-rock drummer and I’m suddenly in this world of film, soundtrack and orchestral stuff and it felt like I was back at school. I had to learn to listen a lot, and sit back and watch and learn, but at the same time, be confident enough to really get stuck in and realise that I had been tasked with something and I had to step up. It felt like a very grown up and real collaboration whilst at the same time as being warm, fuzzy and dreamlike.
Tell me about the creation of Light The Night.
AB: Light The Night was really early on. We were living in New York and, as you know, the summers in New York are very muggy. It was funny to be working on a dream Christmas project in the sweatiest July in Williamsburg.
How did you get yourself into the Christmas spirit in the middle of a New York summer?
AB: Well, Chloe, my daughter, who’s now 14, she was three. Obviously I was on cloud nine, I was so excited, I was like running around like a child myself but once I calmed down a bit, I sat her in front of the original Snowman - I was basically trying to put a bit of the responsibility onto her. We watched it together and I tried to tune in with my inner child. It was a very instinctive bit of writing, I was so nervous about writing a flying sequence song as a sequel to something as iconic as Walking In The Air, and nothing was ever going to come close to that magical bit of music. I was like, ‘Well, I think I just need to channel my inner child and have a chat with my own child and trust that I’m doing something that I believe in’.
Light The Night just sort of appeared. Writing songs is sometimes very difficult and you sit around and you’re trying to write and nothing’s coming, and sometimes they just sort of fall out of the sky. I had this little blue Wurlitzer keyboard and the opening riff, which then went on to inspire a lot of the score that Ilan did all through the film, and I just went for it. It was really lovely, because so rarely you’re able to actually genuinely trust your instinct and go, ‘You know what, I’m really nervous about all of this because it’s a big responsibility but I believe that this is the right way.’ I just kept checking in with Chloe, and she seemed to be digging it and she’d sit next to me and shake some sleigh bells, and then we’d watched the original Snowman. Then we’d start to get clips of the new film, little sort of half-drawn pencil clips, they were moving at that point but they weren’t coloured in, and I felt so privileged and so lucky to be able to have a peek into what they were doing. And to do that with Chloe as well and to sit in that hot, sweaty flat and write the song. Thank goodness, when it got to the stage of playing it to them in Ilan’s shed/studio back in London, they all dug it. That was a very scary moment. It seemed like everybody got that it came from the heart. It came from the same place as me watching the Snowman as a kid.
How did the rest of the score unfurl from that point?
IK: There were a couple of things that were just very, very simple that we ran with, and so we were able to start making the song and the score quite early on. The other set pieces were more difficult. We spent a long time creating the building the snowman bit, which is basically a song without lyrics. And then the one that was really difficult was the downhill ski race. I remember us agreeing that we wanted to be inspired by Ski Sunday, because I remember Sunday afternoons bored at home, 10 years old, watching the skiing but the most exciting bit about Ski Sunday was the brilliant music at the beginning of it. We took great inspiration from that, but it was really hard to make that work and to keep it because stylistically, it’s a bit different from the rest of the film. It was really hard to do that but not take it so far that it felt out of place. It ended up being my favourite track because on the album, there’s an extended version of it, double length, and the reason for that is we invited friends to perform on the soundtrack. We had Dom Howard from Muse playing some drums, we had Tom Odell playing keyboards, we had Hayley Ecker from Bond playing solo violin, and Tim Wheeler from Ash playing guitars. In this extended version of the downhill ski race, everybody has a solo, Andy and Dom have got a big drum off in it and there’s a Tim Wheeler guitar solo in it, everyone’s got a moment. I suppose partly for my own nostalgic memories of being in the studio with your friends and doing something cool, that’s my favourite album track.
How did it feel when you saw the finished film?
IK: There was a premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square and it was really special. I remember one of the things that Andy and I were aiming for was, ‘let’s just make it not shit, if we could just make this without people going, ‘Oh my god, you’ve ruined The Snowman and spoiled Christmas!’, that will be a good result. I remember watching it at the Odeon Leicester Square and thinking, ‘yeah, okay, that’s not shit.’
AB: Man, when we saw the finished film, I genuinely had a little tear. The bit just before they take off for that flight over London and Brighton and all that bit, the goosebumps were off the scale. It’s cheesy to say but I still get that when it gets to that bit because I can’t believe that it’s us that did it and then it’s my funny voice that suddenly comes out of nowhere and it’s the only thing you hear from a vocal. I’m like, ‘how the hell did this happen?!’. I feel forever in its debt but at the same time, I also feel like we did a really good job and I’m proud of it. It’s almost like I was on some weird snowy autopilot. And that’s lovely, you feel like you’ve been guided through by a Snowdog higher power, you trust it and you go, ‘Yeah, wicked, something worked there!’.
ND