George Fenton says he is a ‘visual composer’ (Image: )<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n He is a five-times Oscar-nominated composer who has penned the music for some of the greatest film and TV themes of our times.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m slightly surprised when George Fenton CBE tells me: \u201cIt would have been the biggest kick of my life to be in a progressive rock band. In fact, I nearly was.\u201d<\/p>\n Growing up in the 1960s, Fenton\u2019s first brush with fame came at 18, playing guitar in a prog rock group called Whistler.<\/p>\n Their 1969 album caused few ripples and they had already split when they had a posthumous number one hit in Sweden with a cover of The Beatles\u2019 Maxwell\u2019s Silver Hammer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Rock\u2019n\u2019roll had been George\u2019s first love since seeing Johnnie Ray cry on TV: \u201cThe idea of the darkened room, a captive audience, and then the per-formance. That\u2019s where the excitement is \u2013 and I feel that when I\u2019m writing for a movie.\u201d<\/p>\n You can hear it in Fenton\u2019s most famous movie scores. From the epic soundtracks for two of the most celebrated films of the 1980s \u2013 Gandhi and Cry Freedom \u2013 to the magical fun of Groundhog Day and the joyously playful You\u2019ve Got Mail.<\/p>\n He describes himself as a visual composer: \u201cI began writing music in the theatre \u2013 I\u2019ve always been very conscious of the role that music plays in relation to other elements.\u201d And he admits he struggles for inspiration \u201cwithout a visual image in my head\u201d. It\u2019s the same for the dozens of hit TV shows he\u2019s composed for \u2013 from Bergerac to Omnibus, Telly Addicts to Newsnight.<\/p>\n However, he reveals his hardest job was writing the jingle for Radio 4\u2019s daily PM programme.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019d written things that had no visual, but the PM jingle, I was sat at home thinking, what am I supposed to have in my head? I don\u2019t think every composer has it. I tend to want to invest in the thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Investing time in interesting and creative endeavours was how he was brought up, he says.<\/p>\n Born George Hawes in Bromley, Kent, in 1949, he changed his name to Fenton \u2013 his mother\u2019s maiden name \u2013 in 1968 to get his equity card, as there was already a G. Hawes.<\/p>\n One of five children, his father was a mechanical engineer. His dancer mother had become a nurse during the war. At home, she would play the piano while his father \u2013 a big band jazz fan \u2013 accompanied her on drums.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Don’t miss… <\/strong> John Lydon says it’s \u2018preposterous\u2019 to think he\u2019s lost touch with roots <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy father\u2019s ambition was that I\u2019d represent England at rugby and my mum\u2019s was that I\u2019d become a great actor. I remember my dad saying to me, \u2018I wish you\u2019d do something at some point in your life that I could help you with\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n His paternal great-grandfather had been a conductor who had sung as a chorister at the funeral of the first Duke of Wellington.<\/p>\n He says: \u201cI also sang in church and played the organ, so I had a great mix of music and some wonderful people who taught me.\u201d<\/p>\n George acquired his first electric guitar when he was seven. That was \u201cwhen music became more important than football \u2013 The Beatles had a huge influence on me\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Privately educated at St Edward\u2019s in Oxford, alma mater to actors Laurence Olivier and Emilia Clarke, he upset his parents by refusing university. \u201cThere was a feeling in the late<\/p>\n 1960s that you could mess around. Life was cheap \u2013 you could rent a flat for hardly any money and live in central London.\u201d<\/p>\n After a series of dead-end jobs, he \u201calmost accidentally\u201d found himself working for director Carl Davis in 1968, in the Alan Bennett play Forty Years On, which he also had a small part in.<\/p>\n He had a recurring role in the mid-1970s as soldier Martin Gimbel in Emmerdale Farm. \u201cI did appear in a few things,\u201d he chuckles. \u201cBut to say that I acted is a bit of a stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n George also worked as a session musician, a driver and musical chart writer, the latter job resulting in him writing the music for a production of Twelfth Night for the RSC in 1974, directed by Peter Gill.<\/p>\n \u201cPeter gave me my first television job and opened Riverside Studios as a theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n He met young director Michael Attenborough on Gill\u2019s 1978 Riverside production of The Cherry Orchard: \u201cHe said, \u2018I need to make a recording of your music and play it to my dad\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Dad being Sir Richard Attenborough, who subsequently offered Fenton the job of co-creating the soundtrack for his next movie, the multiple Oscar-winning 1982 classic, Gandhi.<\/p>\n \u201cI have just gone through the open doors,\u201d Fenton insists cheerfully.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAll I really wanted was to not be part of normality \u2013 I didn\u2019t want a regular job.\u201d<\/p>\n A flood of film and TV scores ensured his reputation, including Dangerous Liaisons, The Fisher King and Shadowlands, collaborating with directors such as Nora Ephron, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Hytner and on 18 Ken Loach films. Along too came the accolades. Five Oscar nominations, three Baftas, two Emmys, three Golden Globe nominations, two Grammy nominations, five Ivor Novellos and five BMI awards.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never taken a project because I think it\u2019s a stepping stone for me.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve only ever done the things I felt I wanted to do for whatever reason. That\u2019s why I came back from America when I did.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the 1990s, the international success of TV shows he had scored like An Englishman Abroad and The Jewel In The Crown made him hot property in Hollywood: \u201cI was being offered work for the rest of my life. I thought, I\u2019m not sure I want to be writing a score for Father Of The Bride Part 12.\u201d<\/p>\n But a call from nature documentarian Alastair Fothergill offered a way out. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019m doing this thing I\u2019d love you to write the music for\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n It was The Blue Planet.<\/p>\n \u201cI put the phone down and thought, \u2018That sounds good\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSo I ditched the movie I was about to do and came home to London \u2013 much to the annoyance of my American agent.\u201d<\/p>\n Now 74, does he ever think about composing simply for himself?<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, I sometimes flirt with that thought and there are a couple of things I\u2019m supposed to be considering doing in that way.<\/p>\n \u201cIf somebody brought me my dinner every evening and I got up in the morning and after a walk around the garden, sat and wrote for the day, I could imagine those ambitions descending on me.<\/p>\n \u201cBut living in London, charging around all the time, I don\u2019t feel I\u2019m in the right space to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] George Fenton says he is a ‘visual composer’ (Image: ) He is a five-times Oscar-nominated composer who has penned the music for some of the greatest film and TV themes of our times. So I\u2019m slightly surprised when George Fenton CBE tells me: \u201cIt would have been the biggest kick of my life to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"George](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/79\/590x\/secondary\/George-Fenton-5297328.jpg?r=1711984496039\" "\\"George")
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