In late May, the BBC unveiled The Gallows Pole, Shane Meadows’s prequel-of-a-sorts to Benjamin Myers’s novel about a gang of coin-clippers in 18th-century West Yorkshire. It proved an extraordinary feat, a wild rethinking of costume drama, in which the Cragg Vale of the early industrial age was dour and brutal and bygone, but also startlingly fresh.
Much of that vitality stemmed from the show’s music. Mingling the traditional and the modern, it created a world in which Jennifer Reid’s take on Roud #503, “The Miller of Dee”, and folk group Lankum’s interpretation of “What Will We Do When We Have No Money?” could happily press up against a squalling theme tune by US garage-psych act The Mystery Lights.
The soundtrack for The Gallows Pole was conceived by Meadows’s long-running collaborator, music supervisor Lucy Bright. Bright is something of a wonder in the world of film and television music supervision. Before The Gallows Pole there was Dead Ringers—the deliciously creepy Rachel Weisz-led Amazon mini-series about a pair of rogue gynaecologist twins. Before Dead Ringers came Tár, in which her musical selections helped to transform Cate Blanchett into a formidable orchestra conductor.
If it seems a particularly ascendant year for Bright, it’s worth remembering that this success is the culmination of a career marked by the breadth and curiosity of her music tastes, and the profound trust she has forged with musicians, directors and writers.
“She has an encyclopaedic understanding of the good stuff, and implicitly knows what works best for a scene,” says Myers. “I always wanted the novel to feel and look like a dark and mysterious psychedelic album that people would want to own, and hoped that aesthetic might extend to the TV series. When I heard ‘Cherry Red’ by The Groundhogs on one of Shane’s early edits, it was clear that Lucy implicitly got that shared vision from the outset.”
One spring afternoon, in a private garden close to her home in the Barbican, Bright is recounting some of her early musical loves—Graceland, Mahalia Jackson, Pulp. The Clash’s “Train in Vain”. Paul McCartney’s “Spies Like Us”. She has an exuberance and delight whenever she talks about music, and her memories of particular songs, albums and artists are interwoven with tales of long nights spent dancing at Britpop clubs, and of trawling her older sisters’ record collections for tastes of Bauhaus and reggae.
Bright grew up in South London, where her father was head of ceramics at Goldsmiths, and her mother ran the college’s halls of residence. She remembers her early years filled with “roaming around the ceramics department and weirdly feeling part of it, even though I’m sure the students were like, ‘Who is that child?!’” It instilled in her a certain understanding: “feeling that both the art and the academic side were being treated as important.”
Before she headed to University College London to study history of art, Bright took a gap year. While her peers went travelling, she answered an advert in Time Out for a receptionist role at Mute Records. It was 1996, a thrilling time to be part of the London music scene. “I was young and energetic and out every night, and I would say yes to absolutely everything,” she says. “I was so happy to be there. I probably seemed quite crazy.”
As the label’s receptionist, Bright met everyone: Nick Cave, Boyd Rice, Moby, Barry Adamson. Sometimes, Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle would swing by and share a packet of Revels. For a couple of weeks that year, David Bowie was at the studio recording demos, and Bright recalls how, every day, at around two o’clock, his wife Iman would call the office from New York. “I’d get this gorgeous voice asking to speak to David.”
It was at Mute’s offices on the Harrow Road that Bright received an intense musical education—exploring the label’s catalogue, of course, but also learning the intricacies of how a record company and publisher operates, from the in-house studio to distribution, and going on tour with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. By the end of that year, she felt somehow changed. “I think what it had totally unlocked was the sense that it didn’t feel like something I was outside of, looking in on. Every profession has its own infrastructure and now I was within it, I was part of it.”
Bright knew that a degree in art history was unlikely to lead to gainful employment and had already made up her mind to work in music. Yet there seemed something golden about spending three years studying something she simply loved, in a rigorous academic setting. “I’m so pleased I did it, because there’s so much you learn through art. And particularly in what I do now with film and music, there are so many conversations that I have with writers or directors where I feel really pleased that I can make certain references. That’s where I think that voracious appetite for culture in its broadest sense really pays off.”
In university holidays, she temped at Mute, and was in her final year when Paul Smith (founder of Blast First records, which had been bought by Mute) invited her to join him and Sallie Fellows (of Rough Trade records) in setting up Mob First, a spoken word label that put out recordings by figures such as Iain Sinclair, Ken Kesey and the Black Panthers.
Again, what she learned at King Mob extended beyond the label’s creative output; she recalls how Smith encouraged her to see how Fellows worked in a male-dominated industry. “He’d say, ‘I just wanted you to see how Sallie is in a meeting, because I think it’s really important for you to see a woman running a meeting like that.’”
After graduation, a series of record industry temp jobs eventually led her to Warner Classics. The idea of working at a classical label seemed preposterous to Bright when she arrived, but her boss, Matthew Cosgrove, saw it as a challenge, playing her CDs and steering her listening. “If there is somebody who knows more about classical music on the planet, I’d like to meet them,” she says. “He’s just an encyclopaedia, but in the best sense—in a way that he wants everyone to fall in love with classical music.”
It opened up, Bright says, a world she had been unaware of. “I think I just saw it all as the same thing, a sort of rather boring group of old white men,” she says. “But once Matthew started telling me the stories around it, those small but significant shifts in how I perceived it, how I engaged with it, started then.” She listened to records, went to concerts, began to understand the stories around particular composers—how Steve Reich’s tape loops weren’t so different to the sampling by 1980s hip-hop artists, for instance. “Or I could see Rachmaninov as this superstar pianist,” she says, “a person who would have the same effect on a crowd of people as Nick Cave.”
It was also during this time that Bright began to make the connection between music and film. “It does sound really stupid when I say it out loud, but I always really loved film scores and music in films,” she says. “And so to have really loved, say, Candyman and then to meet Philip Glass, I was suddenly thinking, ‘Oh, wow! It’s the person that has written that music for that film!’”
Bright stayed at Warner Classics for seven years, eventually leaving to manage the composer Michael Nyman, whose work she had loved since his collaborations with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, including The Falls and The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover. Although she did not relish management, her time with Nyman provided an interesting turning point for Bright. “Michael had just been asked to score Man on Wire,” she explains, “so I got to see the technical side of how a film score is made, and how a music supervisor worked—both the creative suggestions, but also the business side of it.”
The music supervisor for Man on Wire was John Boughtwood, a director at music publishing company Music Sales (now known as Wise Music). When Bright left Nyman, he offered her a job in their film and television department. Music Sales’ catalogue includes contemporary composers and pop artists, but also stretches back to the 1930s, and so Bright found herself variously sourcing music for The King’s Speech while providing sync opportunities for artists such as Gabriel Yared and Alberto Iglesias.
During the decade Bright spent at Music Sales, she began to expand into music supervision herself—working on Samantha Morton’s The Unloved, Lynne Ramsay’s Swimmer and John Maclean’s Slow West, among others. She also began signing a new generation of composers, among them Dustin O’Halloran, Volker Bertelmann and Hildur Guðnadóttir. At the time, it seemed an unconventional move. “But I really felt there was a shift, or there should be a shift, of film directors using non-traditional film composers,” she says. “It made sense to me, so I was sure that it was going to make sense to other people too. And it really has.”
There was, then, a special kind of vindication to seeing Bertelmann and Guðnadóttir win Academy Awards (for All Quiet on the Western Front and Joker, respectively). “Not that I think that awards are everything,” she says. “But it is an acknowledgement that this music has properly been brought into the film world’s mainstream.”
In 2019, Bright became a freelance music supervisor and established her own music publishing company, Bright Notion Music. Among her signings is the cellist and composer Oliver Coates, known for his solo projects, his work with Radiohead and for providing the strings on Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin. “I fell in love with his sound; I think nobody makes a sound like he does. And the way his mind works is incredible,” she says.
Coates is equally laudatory about Bright. “It sometimes feels like the root of collaborative art is empathy,” he says. “It takes time and deep listening. Lucy has a vast knowledge, maybe infinite, of music and its systems, archives and organising principles. How to fix problems. But it is her propensity to listen and consider what is going on in the hearts of other people that makes her unique.”
When they began working together, Coates’s only scoring experience was for Channel 5’s Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar. “But I had no doubt that he was completely capable of making the most incredible film score,” Bright says. She had just begun work on last year’s Aftersun and introduced Coates to the director, Charlotte Wells. The pair had what Bright describes as “a very special conversation”, after which the composer “just went and wrote something, even before he knew he had the job, and it was gorgeous. And that’s it, that is the sound of Aftersun.”
‘It is Bright’s propensity to listen and consider what is going on in the hearts of other people that makes her unique’
Bright prefers to join a screen project when still in its early scripting stage. It allows a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the project. She has been lucky, she says, with the writers and directors whose projects she has supervised. John Maclean’s Slow West taught her, early on, the qualities of a genuinely good script. Some writers, such as Tony Grisoni (The Unloved, Southcliffe) and Alice Birch (Dead Ringers) have already thought about music, making their own playlists, during the writing process. While Sean Durkin (Southcliffe, The Nest and several episodes of Dead Ringers) showed her how a musical relationship with a director can evolve over many projects.
Others work differently. She joined Tár three months before the shoot, when writer-director Todd Field had already set in place many of the musical reference points, “from orchestral parts right down to the song playing in the background while they’re having a glass of wine.”
A music supervision budget can range widely, from £20,000 to £200,000. On smaller-budget projects, it falls to Bright to work out how to replace the music the production cannot afford to license. An average project takes 18 months. “You have to juggle, you have to have a few on the go, and really hope that they don’t all hit at the same time.”
There is always a panic, she says, right before the final mix of a film, in which elements of the score might be suddenly questioned. “Then it depends on how many voices there are in the room and who actually has the power of decision making,” she says. “That’s quite an important thing to work out, especially when you’re helping the composer to navigate it; if you’re getting lots of notes back from a director saying one thing, but the producer is saying another, you’ve got to work out who we really should be listening to!”
Television brings more voices than a film project: “The director, the hands-on producer, maybe the production company, and then the broadcaster and a distributor. Or there could be multiple broadcasters—HBO and the BBC, or something.” She pauses. “Or you have a Shane Meadows thing where it doesn’t matter how many voices, it’s Shane.”
If there is one song Bright has consistently tried to get onto a film score it is Rupert Holmes’s 1979 hit “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”. “I love it,” she says. “I remember reading an interview with Beyoncé where she said it’s her go-to karaoke song, and I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of getting her to cover it.”
It’s a typical Bright curveball. Over a couple of hours, our conversation has brought up a magpie-ish collection of music, from pianist Boris Berezovsky to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun”. She is a consummate record collector and playlist-maker, but, perhaps surprisingly, does not play any instruments. “I learned piano as a kid, so I can read music, but I didn’t enjoy it,” she says.
“It’s almost like I have an academic interest in it, in the way that I’m not an artist but I have an academic interest in art. I think it’s a different thing. And when I see it flowing from someone, I’m like ‘Oh my God, what is happening in your brain to make that sound?!’ I love that. I’m in awe of it.”
