Transcription

• Speaker #0

  The original.

• Speaker #1

  For his film Breaking and Entering, Anthony Minghella offers Gabriel Yared the creation of the original band with the electronic music group Underworld. During the recording of the music which takes place in the studios of Abbey Road in London, Rick Smith and Carla Hyde explain the way they managed to collaborate together. Despite their respective very different universes, this original experience will be more enriching.

• Speaker #0

  The reason we accepted it was we were insane. And we just woke up one day and just blew fuses and said yes. Yeah. Yeah, and we've been regretting it ever since.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. And Gabriel Ponca.

• Speaker #0

  He's awful. He's terrible. I hate working with him.

• Speaker #2

  From the moment we met him, we thought, he's insane. Yeah. This dude's just great.

• Speaker #0

  This is wonderful. Another insane person. You can come in.

• Speaker #2

  Why did we? Why did we do it? I think you'd probably agree. It was, we decided. Within the first two meetings, we first off met with Anthony Minghella, who asked to see us, and we were very surprised by what he had to say and what he asked us to do to collaborate with Gabriel. We were expecting perhaps a request for a couple of tracks or something for his new movie, and so when he expressed such an interest in us collaborating deeply. with Gabriel particularly and himself. That was the first surprise and sounded very intriguing and challenging. And then immediately, a week or two later, we met with Gabriel and then that was it really because we connected together very, very quickly. You can just tell when you meet people and you think there's a great spirit here. we may We'll work together and we may fail, but we'll certainly all give everything that we've got to it. And I think it was a done deal then, really. Actually, we decided, yeah, absolutely, whatever, contracts, whatever, you know, we'd like to do this. It's come at a great time in our lives as well, because we were looking to collaborate more with people outside of just of the two of us working together, which is how we've handled ourselves for a long time now.

• Speaker #0

  and again very good timing for us this is something we wanted to embrace how lucky have we been there's a point too with with collaboration where it's um it's not very interesting to us to be the archetypal electronic group with the uh great composer working on strings i don't know if we're working on strings today um and we've left the master in control thankfully but um when When you For us to work with people, you want the edges to blur, you want people to cross over, and you want to learn and teach. You want to see somebody who's familiar in one territory open enough to go into unfamiliar territory. and caring enough to bring you from your familiar surroundings into their territory. And so this has been a lot like that. The work that we've done together in the studio has crossed over between areas that both parties are very comfortable with and the other one is not, is the new boy. And that's really nice to see, the kind of openness of spirit. that something can evolve out of. And whatever happens with this particular project, it's evident that the three of us want to go on and continue to write because of the experiences that we've had in that kind of open-minded sharing of each other's experience.

• Speaker #2

  I think what I was trying to say was that there are great successes in something that aren't always apparent on the surface. And very quickly, I think Gabrielle would agree, we realized that we wanted to work together beyond Anthony's film. And that was a success in itself, you know, for us to meet a kind spirit, somebody who was polite and could conduct themselves and was open to some bloody weird, you know, I'm looking your way.

• Speaker #0

  Of course.

• Speaker #2

  Some weird ideas. You know, what we hope is that by the end of this film project, breaking and entering, is that a lot of that is apparent in the actual score. We'll see if that's true, but we feel, as I'm sure Gabriel does, that it's already been a success. We've spent very little time together, very, very little, which I think, I'm pretty sure, is not something that he originally planned or wanted. but it's the nature of Anthony's life at the moment, with his many responsibilities. This is Anthony's film that we're working on together, and he generously opens it up to the people that he works with. But we felt from the beginning, you know, Anthony has a story to tell. That is really the final point of... what brings us together on this particular project. It's not been something that we've dwelt on very much, you know, with Gabrielle, because, as I say, very early on, I think we all felt, this is a really great thing to do together, Anthony Minghella's film, but we couldn't imagine ever saying goodbye at the end of the film and shaking Gabrielle's hand and going... Well, that was really great. It was fantastic to work with you. And we'll see you later. You know, we kind of laughed about that within probably about a month or six weeks. There's something else happening here that intrigues, I believe, both Gabrielle and Carl and I, that would make us look for another project to work on together. And of course, where we come from, we make our own projects. And so this was quite exciting. to think with Gabrielle, we don't have to wait for anybody to invite us to work together now. We can just choose to make stuff and that's very liberating and exciting. And we're very grateful to Mr Minghella for giving us that opportunity.

• Speaker #0

  The way we've been working, Rick and I, for a few years now is the exchanging of files by internet as well as synchronising machines. And so Gabriel came into a system that was already working and was perfectly set up for... three people that couldn't always be in the same place at the same time. And there was plans for us to travel to Paris at one time as well. It just unfortunately didn't come off. But again, working in different spaces, working at our studio, working down at Gabrielle's writing room and setting up here at Abbey Road, something we hadn't done since the early 80s, when we were last in here in this studio. And being able to get out. not only the electronics but acoustic instruments and to move around to see one person in another person's shoes. It was fascinating for three of us to sit down and improvise. We had a piano player come in and play some Bach for the film and as she was leaving she was asking leaving she was asking about what the three of us were doing. And we said, �We�re we're coming together and we're improvising ideas and she was fascinated because it was a strange concept for her to how did three people improvise and write at the same time. And you know the strange thing is it's very difficult with the wrong people. It's impossible with the wrong people. You're dragging people and pushing people in directions that they find alien sitting down with the three of us. It was quite natural. I think that's been another great find for us, is the preconception of Gabriel as a string composer for films. It's like, that's that part of him. There's all this other stuff. And it was just really easy. It was like being in a band, really. Well, it was. It has been being in a band. and we just sit down and we play stuff and... and move around each other's instruments and play some stuff and throw things at one another and improvise and then somebody will take a theme and respond to it in their own space, alone, in twos and threes. You work as however you can given that we all can't and don't desire to be in the same space at the same time. Sometimes you just need your own space. and you can work quicker and more focused and be sometimes more inventive. And other times you're completely lost and you need to fire off a piece of music by the wonders of the internet or get together in a room and go, we're completely lost. That was lovely. There were occasions when we would look at Gabrielle and go, don't know, we're stuck now. And he'd go, oh, this is easy. And just do it. And there were other times when you could see there was... It wasn't quite as extreme in the opposite direction, but there were other times when it was like, don't quite know how to get around this one, and we would be, oh, this is fine, this is fine, we know this, and we can do this, and we can direct things. It's been great that way, you know, falling in a hole and the other one gets the team out. You work within the mystical realm of music, film, the arts. There is a certain amount of tragic demystifying of something which you've grown up just being transported by. And, hey, you know, we've just... We can see how the magician pulls it off. And I don't mean Gabrielle specifically, you just see stuff. We know stuff. We know stuff from 25 years of working together that somebody coming to it for the first time or from the outside doesn't know. So there's a certain magic missing for us. But you move on and you replace that with a different kind of magic. That's why when we're talking about is it film or is it music or is it making albums or going on tour, it's kind of not relevant what's relevant is that we've met i don't i don't want to make it sound too drippy and say we've met kindred spirits and we're all going to go off to to the mystical land together yeah that's right and we'll all be great that was like quite a good idea quite nice idea so yeah but uh but when you know you meet people along the along a journey and you go on and you're going to make something what are you going to make i don't know i don't know we actually never get up in the morning unless we're working on a specific piece of work like this film. We never get up in the morning and kind of say, well today I am going to make blah blah, fill in the dotted line and then go off and make it. You have a feeling and sometimes the feeling is I'm not going to work today. I'm going to phone my fellow composers and we're going to go and drink coffee down by the river and just say what a lovely day it is. It's a more interesting journey to that but, you know, go and... going back to it yeah it's kind of changed of course of course it's changed we've seen things ah i was sat in a film the other day and went oh i wish i didn't know what i know now because that's just just that now you know it's just that but then you kind of have to look around and go well no one else has no noticed in the theater so maybe it's just me and what i know

• Speaker #2

  The film business, the music business, the TV business, they're all business. And I think in a certain context, you question, you know, actually, I think Carl's answered it, really. you know, the tragic demystifying, the illusions that are shattered. I mean, we had these experiences years ago in 1989, you know, a dream of a lifetime for young lads to go on tour in America and tour ice hockey and football stadiums, you know, with a band. This was a dream come true. And within, what, 24 hours? It was... Oh my god, is this all there is to it? Is that it? Is that it? You just stand there and instead of 200 people it's 25,000. Is that it? And actually in that instance, in that case as well, it was a pivotal point in our working careers really to realise that a shattered illusion was not a disaster. It was actually the start of something new. And so I've had a lot of illusions, naive and otherwise shattered about working in film. But I don't like to dwell on them really, because they're not the bit that I expected to work out great when I approached the project. That's not the gifts that we've been given and the great opportunities. It's not to do with that stuff. That's just shit, you know. it's the way life and business is you know marrying business and art it's not easy