Dear Ishtar, Bertrand, Doug, Gaspar, Camila, Clem and Sammie,

I awoke early, Ishtar, to the sound of the cuckoo clock. I ate some Grape Nuts and drank coffee on the patio, watching the clouds churn about the angry London sky. Storm Amy was approaching so the council had closed the park, and I couldn’t swim in the lake that morning. Instead, I headed straight into the studio. Warren and Luis were already there.

Warren, wearing crimson patent leather boots and an AC/DC T-shirt, sat popping Sertraline and picking dog hairs from his yellow Lidl shorts. It was our last day working on the score for the noir TV series, which we had been working on intermittently for months. We had an extended car chase scene left to do.

Here’s how we made the music for that scene, Gaspar. Warren and I recorded some rapid clapping sounds, which Luis, our engineer-extraordinaire, lowered a couple of octaves, then added tremolo, and overlaid with a ticking clock sound, which gave the whole thing a terse, tight rhythm. Then Warren laid down a genuinely evil, old-school bass line. I added some discordant church organ jabs and a circular, chordal pattern on the piano, then screamed some obscenities into a microphone, which we reversed, pitch-shifted, added in a low reverb, processed through a Decapitator distortion plug-in, and sank deep into the mix. Against the car chase scene, this all felt tense, edgy, and perfectly adequate.

But then Warren jumps up! “Put a fucking slow drum beat on it! Boom-boom bam! Boom-boom bam!” “Here we go,” I think to myself. Luis lays the drum beat down. Warren leaps on a keyboard and adds a massive, super-deep, predatory orchestral line, which completely transforms this piece of music. He adds some horns – heavy, punk, and demonic – and the track shifts instantly from small and nervy into something unearthly, powerful and apocalyptic. The scene takes on a dark new gravitas. We are all very pleased with this development. As Warren marches around the studio in his boots and his beard, waving his arms about and yelling commands, it is not the first time, Doug, that I am left amazed by this man’s unstoppable creative force and recognise the profound and terrifying privilege it is to work with him. There is just so much truth in it, Clem, ffs. We eat cheese and spinach pies for lunch.

Earl drops by the studio with a Suzuki Omnichord under his arm. He bought it in New York, where he was recording with his band The Gash. Have you ever heard one of those instruments, Camila? We sit around jamming, Earl on the Omnichord, Warren on bass, me singing and playing synth, and Luis recording. With a big smile on his face, Earl begins stomping his feet and playing old religious songs – ‘Amazing Grace’, which evolves into ‘How Great Thou Art’, and then ends up as ‘Oh Happy Day’, with everyone singing along. Because it was my birthday, like, weeks ago, Malachi, the studio assistant, brings me an iced doughnut with a candle in it. ‘Oh Happy Day’ turns into ‘Happy Birthday’. This all goes on for a couple of hours, and the atmosphere is buoyant,  Bertrand. Then someone looks out of the window at the thrashing trees and says, “Fuck, it’s getting real stormy out there!”

Out on the street, Earl says, “That was so much fun. What a fucking amazing job you have.” “I know,” I say and hug him and kiss him and watch him head off into the storm. Sitting in the back of a cab, on my way home, I open The Red Hand Files, and the first letter I see is yours, Sammie. “Check your privilege,” you say. I close my eyes, lean back, and do precisely that. I reflect on how music, which started as a hobby, became my calling- my avocation turned vocation- as love and need became intertwined, and how profound a privilege it was to be in this position. I think about all of it, my job, my friends, my family, and how it all could have been so different had fortune not been on my side – extraordinary luck, cosmic happenstance perhaps, the kindness and generosity of the world. I take none of this for granted, Sammie, and in the back of the cab my heart flows with gratitude.

At home, Susie and I have Bran Flakes for dinner and watch a couple of episodes of Ryan Murphy’s latest instalment in human depravity, Monster: The Ed Gein Story. We go to bed. At three in the morning, the storm wakes me. Susie stirs and tells me she has had a dream. I ask her what it was about. She says that she dreamed of Arthur. She often does. “I was helping him put his toys away. It was kind of sad.” She falls asleep again, and I lie there in the dark next to my wife, listening to the storm batter the shutters, rattling the windows, the music from the day, like an augury, going round and round in my head.

I awake early to the sound of the cuckoo clock.

Love, Nick

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