Rough Trade East, November 20, 2018

The Possum director and three members of the Radiophonic Workshop took time out from their whistle stop promotional tour of the creepy new spider puppet horror movie to talk about creating decidedly unnerving sounds and textures.

Those in the audience were clearly fans – what else would bring you out on wet night to a dark corner of Spitalfield’s Brick Lane? – but with the promise of Garth Marenghi, two of Doctor Who’s most popular 80s composers and a drummer from The Prodigy, it was never going to be a dull session.

Mark Roland from Electronic Mag welcomed three of the Radiophonic Workshop’s members to the stage – Peter Howell, Roger Limb and Kieron Pepper – alongside Possum director Matthew Holness. The latter revealed that he had originally temp tracked the movie with various classical pieces as well as vintage Radiophonic Workshop and Delia Derbyshire tracks. He was looking into licensing the Radiophonic tracks for use in the movie and then serendipitously he was introduced to their manager and they were engaged to create a new score.

This was the collective’s first movie soundtrack and it was created by the individual artists submitting their compositions via Mark Ayres, who served as the hub and direct contact with Holness (sadly he couldn’t make it tonight due to illness). Across the 45-minute session we learned from Peter Howell how the group had learned to play each other’s work in their recent gigs, that Kieron Pepper always keeps his sound recorder to hand to capture everything from twanging knives to thuds coming through the wall from his neighbour, and that Roger Limb once wrote some music for Macbeth that was so terrifying he couldn’t listen to it!

Howell spoke positively on behalf of the group when asked if they’d like to do more movie soundtracks, and Holness teased that he is working on a new horror movie that’s even darker than Possum(!) but understandably wouldn’t be drawn on the sub-genre that it sits  in. Inevitably for a session held in a record store the subject turned to the renaissance of vinyl, with the director revealing that he’s an avid collector of obscure 70s soundtracks, including cop movies scores by Ennio Morricone. I spotted Mr Holness at the recent John Carpenter gig, and (like Carpenter) his previous short film work required self-scoring in the absence of a budget. To have the Radiophonic Workshop score his first full feature was clearly a thrill for him – let’s hope they return to inhabit our nightmares with more disturbing soundscapes.

Verdict: A great chance to get up and close with electronica pioneers and a fascinating voice in abstract horror. Oh, and you could get your CDs signed too. Good work, Rough Trade! 9/10

 

 

You can read our review of the Possum soundtrack here now available from Room 13.