Michael Price: ‘Music when I started as a kid was baked into communal activities’

Titled Whitsun, it’s an evocation of Price’s own childhood through piano and pared-down accompaniment of voice, trumpet and analogue synthesiser.

Where photographs offer a more “concrete” link to a specific time and place, the Emmy Award-winning composer, who was born and raised in Batley, is a firm believer in music’s ability to communicate on a different level.

“Music is so evocative and can bring up emotions very quickly and it’s then an amazing experience to make a record with a certain frame of references and thoughts and feelings and memories in mind,” he says, “but when it goes out into the world it’s not as literal. You won’t be able to know exactly what was in my mind at the time. But hopefully on a good day listeners will have their own emotional reaction to it which might be about things that they’re remembering as well.”

Track titles such as The Five Rise hint at Price’s close connection to the subject matter – Five Rise Locks at Bingley being a place he visited often while going to see his maternal grandparents Ernest and Hilda Cropper who lived in the nearby village of Micklethwaite. The use of trumpet harks back to the composer’s childhood playing in brass bands.

While making the album was an “emotional” experience, Price, who is best known for his work with David Arnold on the music for the blockbuster TV series Sherlock as well as scoring several Hollywood films with Michael Kamen, hopes Whitsun is “not self-indulgent”.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say they will write letters to someone they’ve lost or write their feelings out even if the person on the other end isn’t necessarily in a position to receive that letter,” he says. “Because I express myself through music, it is a sort of love letter to Yorkshire and to my parents and my grandparents as well.”

Price’s Yorkshire roots are deep. As well as his parents, Pauline and Alan, who met while studying at the University of Sheffield – “my mum was doing biology and my dad was doing physics”, his grandfather Ernest “came up through the mills” after serving as a fireman during the Second World War, ending up as a manager at Arkwrights. “He was very much a self-made auto didact who took himself off to college in the evenings to learn all about textiles,” the composer recalls. Even in old-age, Ernest would still do “huge amounts of gardening” and his “party trick” was doing press-ups in his seventies. He lived to 96.

The composer’s first musical memories stem from church. His parents were keen Methodists. “All the social and community activities that we used to do as kids seemed to have an element of chapel or church in them,” he says. “I was in the Scouts when I was a kid and there was always some parade or something involving the local church. I was lucky enough to go to Saturday morning music centre in Batley. It felt like every little town had a music centre, the schools music service was just amazing at that point. I can remember being given a trumpet when I was about eight, after playing recorder like everybody else. Then this integration of music within the community felt incredibly natural. There would be music at chapel on a Sunday and when I went to Batley Grammar School there would be a hymn.

“To be honest, it was never tied up with religion for me; I think it was tied up with community and these shared activities. I don’t have a Christian faith myself but I can still remember the smell of the school hall or the chapel, whether it’s Christmas or Easter, all those high days or holidays.

“It’s always been an ark for me. Music when I started as a kid was baked into communal activities, it wasn’t seen as something that was professionalised or that was a job or a career. There just seemed to be music everywhere. It was what we did.

“The school brass band went off and did competitions at Ilkley and if we won we got to stop at Harry Ramsden’s on the way back for fish and chips. Literally we wouldn’t stop if the school band hadn’t won, we just sailed past.

“When I left and went to university and later on started a career in music, there’s a certain detachment then from music as a community activity because it’s now a professional activity. In a professional environment you’re striving for broadcast quality perfection, you’re trying to create something effectively flawless, whereas when we all made music as kids at school it was never going to be flawless but that wasn’t the point.

“The point was that we were all playing together or singing together. Music was part of the fabric that gave us these shared experiences. I wonder whether it is a Yorkshire trait because then you don’t have to talk about your feelings too much. It’s all in there but you don’t have to embarrass yourself by explaining how you’re feeling.”

Whitsun continues a theme in Price’s work over the last decade about “coming home and making my peace, renewing my relationship with where I came from”. He explains: “Seven or eight years ago I did a piece called Easter which was based on some bells that I’d recorded in Venice, I created a piano collage that reminded me of that. When I was coming round to thinking about doing this album, I thought it was nice to go to Venice, it’s a lovely place and they were lovely bells, but actually the specific sound world that really resonates with me is this one of high days and holidays.

“Some of the occasions like Christmas or Easter feel like they are now as they were 40 years ago, but it feels like some of the days that were marked have slightly fallen out of fashion and Whitsun I think is one of those. In brass band circles there were often open air competitions around Whitsun and because of where it falls in May, it’s the seventh Sunday after Easter, consequently it was one of those holiday weekends that was the end of spring and going into June was the start of summer.

“The title of The Stopped Horse is taken from a Sylvia Plath poem called Whitsun in which she slags off the British seaside, but I viewed huge beauty in that. The Scarborough seaside was where we all used to go and the pictures in the album are of my grandparents and my mum on the beach at Scarborough in 1939. I’m so lucky that my mum’s baby book survived. It’s a set of photos of my mum with my grandparents when she was one year old. These terrific photos on the beach at Scarborough are marked July or August 1939, just a couple of months away from the start of the Second World War. There’s this extraordinary sense that the most normal family outing down to the beach at Scarborough is framed in these world events that are figuratively and literally just over the horizon.

“So specifically Whitsun seems to have a memory attached to it because it’s not often celebrated now.”

As we’re speaking via Zoom, Michael Price is starting work on the soundtrack for series five of Unforgotten, the ITV crime drama starring Sanjeev Bhaskar.

“What I’ve been doing on Whitsun is telling some of my own story but when you come into Unforgotten it’s a similar language and a similar process but you’re telling the stories of the characters on-screen,” he says. “I think I’m making slightly different choices in the projects that I do in film and TV these days just so that gear change isn’t too extreme. I’ve loved this gear shift into Unforgotten, I don’t know if I would enjoy it so much if I was to shift into an action film or something. I’ve done them, they’re great fun, but I quite like the story-telling side now.”

His next solo project will, he says, be based on the theory of deep time. “My musical life feels quite integrated now, all the things I’ve done or participated in or been a part of right through from when I first picked up an instrument when I was a kid feel like they’re part of a stream now, there’s nothing that’s blocked off or disconnected, and that feels like a great point now to expand out from this very small, intimate world of Whitsun where every noise on that is me to then look at deep time,” he says. “From a musical point of view, just to serve the idea it’s going to be much bigger.

“My idea at the moment is about different layers of music, like rock stratas. You can see the different layers of music but they can be performed separately or together. It could be just a solo instrument or could be a small group, but to create this musical world where if you like you could put them all end to end and play a really long piece in that sense of time or you could stack them vertically on top of each other so they come together to form this massive great weight in the sense of geology, where there’s an inevitability to the music and a timeless quality. Hopefully we’ll get there.”

Whitsun is out now on The Control Room.