Philip Kay: From Beginner Beats and Band Life to International Composition Success
Renowned composer, arranger and producer Philip Kay is widely regarded as a luminary in contemporary commercial composition, scoring films for brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Puma, Coca-Cola, Sony Playstation, Hennessey, Audi and Nike.
His impressive portfolio of director collaborations includes Garth Davis (Lion), Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine), Rupert Sanders (Ghost In The Shell), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie), John Hillcoat (The Road) and Ringan Ledwidge (The Gunn Report’s most awarded director worldwide).
Before this, Philip co-founded the Manchester band Working for a Nuclear Free City, known for its cutting-edge experimental pop. Their debut record, Businessmen & Ghosts, received ecstatic reception on its release in 2007, and the track Dead Fingers Talking features in the first episode of Breaking Bad.
Since then, he has become the go-to composer for projects which call for a balance between traditional, orchestral scoring and ultra-modern sounds. In this interview with LBB’s Sunna Coleman, Philip talks about music as his playground, his passion for rewatching old ads – and the one question he dreads being asked.
LBB> Tell us about your childhood influences and inspirations?
Philip> Before my teens I was brought up on a diet of synth-pop, blue-eyed soul and MOR pop. Eurythmics, ABC, Robert Palmer, Steve Winwood, Billy Joel, Northern Soul, Hall & Oates… a lot of questionable stuff my parents were into which, for a long time, I thought was terrible but have been revisiting recently and some of it is decent.
I was obsessed with Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, which my dad had on vinyl – it had a lot of interesting Moog stuff going on, and nice bass on a couple of tracks by Herbie Flowers. It was probably my main exposure to orchestral writing, as my parents weren’t really into classical music. And certainly it was my first experience of hearing an orchestral section combined with electronics, something which I now specialise in. I loved Haim Saban and Shuki Levi’s work on animations like Ulysses, Pole Position, and Cities of Gold; 60s Disney stuff; Stock Aiken Waterman stuff… bad things. But from all that I decided I had to be a synth player. Wasn’t interested in guitars. I longed for a Yamaha DX7 like they had on Top of the Pops – I didn’t get one until 25 years later!
Then from about the age of 14, the rave stuff started to filter through, then Jungle and hip-hop. I was a massive hip-hop head all through the '90s, and that was the basis of everything I do today – even the classical music I do relates back to the hip-hop I grew up on in some respects. I started making beats when I was about 15 on a crappy computer. From there I started buying records from charity shops for sampling. All kinds of '60s and '70s stuff, jazz, classical – digging for beats was my musical education.
LBB> I read that you got into composing in an unconventional way – forming a band in 2001 whose track ‘Dead Fingers Talking’ featured in the first episode of Breaking Bad. Tell us about that journey and how you eventually landed in composition?
Philip> So I was making hip-hop beats for five years and during that time I would make weird soundtrack-like pieces using the same principles.Then I started applying those ideas to more of a guitar-based sound with my very talented friend, Gary McClure (American Wrestlers). We started off making instrumental tracks, then later vocal tracks, incorporating shoegaze, indie, folk, electronica, hip-hop.
We formed a band, the pretentiously named Working for a Nuclear Free City, to play the tracks live, with my brother on drums. We had moderate success in the US, did the whole touring thing, made a cliched difficult second album… During that time we had several placements including the pilot for Breaking Bad. I had no idea at the time that that show would go on to be a big deal.
During the writing of our second record I was asked to demo on a Hovis ad. There was no picture, just a storyboard – other than that, all I knew was that a bunch of big artists were in contention for it. So I really went to town on that, I even cut up the storyboard to make a little animatic – and the director loved it. That was Ringan Ledwidge, and the start of a collaboration that continued for more than 10 years until his sad passing in 2020. I’d be nowhere without him – Ringan took a chance on a relatively unknown musician, and it was an honour to soundtrack so much of his work.
LBB> How would you describe your style of music? Would you say you have a signature sound?
Philip> I’ve avoided pigeonholes like the plague all my professional career. Even going back to the band, we were all over the place musically – that’s probably one reason we weren’t more successful! I really enjoy having the whole history of music as my playground and have never really understood musicians who are happy to retread the same ground again and again. I really enjoy the challenge of going into uncharted territory, to explore new things.
But I would say I have a signature approach. Primarily to make music that’s honest and human, even if it happens to be electronic. I encourage and take advantage of mistakes and human error and I like unpredictable, tactile processes. Everything stems from live performance, nothing is ever programmed, everything is played. I like the grit and texture that you get from real instruments and things like tape machines, wonky synths, out of tune pianos. I’ve always been a kind musical collage artist – that’s something that comes from hip-hop. I like placing incongruous elements together; outside of music, visual artists like Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake are influences. Sometimes this can be quite a subtle juxtaposition, sometimes more overt – but it’s always there.
LBB> You have worked on some of the most talked about ads of all time. Tell us about some of your highlights.
Philip> Puma: After Hours Athlete. I love this spot so much. It won pretty much every award going and was a joy to work on. The music and the infamous phoned-in VO work really nicely together and it’s always interesting to write music that feels unexpected against the picture.
Axe: Fear No Susan Glenn. This felt like such a different approach for Axe/Lynx at the time, offering a level of sophistication that hadn’t been associated with the brand’s advertising previously. The arrangement was pretty simple but the challenge was finding the right melody to convincingly convey young love and heartbreak in this tale of “the one who got away”.
Smirnoff: Infamous Since 1864. This was a collaboration with the brilliant creative partnership, Hugo Bierschenk and Dean Woodhouse. I’ve worked with them a lot over the years and it’s always a joy. For this one I got to rework ODB’s 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya' which, as a hip-hop fan, was loads of fun.
Hennessy: The Piccards. An epic spot directed by Daniel Wolfe. I felt it was really important to create a piece that left space for the imagery to breathe, and to focus on capturing the intimate and moving relationship between the characters.
LBB> And what about some of your other work that you wish more people knew about – any personal favourites?
Philip> PlayStation: The King.I have a very clear memory of being about four years old, in the back of my dad’s white Ford Escort XR3i, head shoved between the rear speakers while a cassette of early Eurythmics blasted in my ears. I loved this band as a kid, and it was one of the reasons I became obsessed with synthesisers and electronic music.
Decades later I was tasked with reworking their classic track 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)' for a very unique PlayStation commercial, directed by Martin de Thurah. The fact this is essentially a short period film created an interesting challenge. We tried a few approaches (Elizabethan trap music, anyone?) before settling on my semi-scored approach – in brief, extrapolating the original track’s DNA and reusing those individual basic elements as a scoring tool. I had a lot of fun on this one.
BMW: The Small Escape. A really moving spot directed by the brilliant Alex Feil. This spot feels more like a short film than a commercial and tells the remarkable story of people being smuggled out of Germany in modified BMW Isettas. I got to work with a much darker and more experimental palette than is usually called for..
Nike: The Ball Makes Us More. It was an absolute privilege to work with Catalan superstar Rosalía on this spot for Nike. I’m a big fan of her work. We recorded her improvised vocal in a little studio in Barcelona along with an authentic 20-piece Catalan drum ensemble in one afternoon.
This dynamic, breath-taking spot was directed by Wally Pfister – the acclaimed cinematographer of many of Christopher Nolan’s movies including The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception and The Prestige.
Most commercial scores have a handful of sync-points (points where the music and images have their strongest interplay). This film has more than a thousand – it has a constantly shifting grid of images as its central visual device and every one of these tiny fluctuations had to be mirrored with the music. But this is just the kind of challenge that makes my job so much fun.
LBB> You work quite closely with film directors too. What leads to a successful director/composer relationship in your opinion?
Philip> Being able to communicate the specific tones, feelings, emotions is the crucial bit. It’s quite easy to get caught up in things like genre or instrumentation, but I’m fundamentally trying to either reinforce a feeling already present in the picture, or put a different spin on what you're seeing. It’s a very hard thing to pinpoint a very specific mood or colour, but in the more successful relationships that has come naturally. Sometimes it’s not necessarily a verbal thing – highlighting a specific chord in a Debussy piece might be a way in for example, or a scene in a movie. It’s hard to talk about music, so sometimes we have to reach for other things to describe it.
With Ringan [Ledwidge] he was always clear and concise in what he required – the way he explained things there wasn’t much room to fuck it up! There was just one very clear path that needed to be followed.
Directors like Ian Pons Jewell, having come from a background in music videos, really understand the power of music to shape a narrative or an idea. He trusts me to go with my instinct, which is quite a rare thing. He always wants to push music in unexpected directions so he’ll give me a lot of free reign within a set of parameters.
LBB> You co-founded KO Music during a global pandemic – that must have come with a lot of challenges! What was the experience like and what lessons have you taken forward from this?
Philip> It was quiet for two weeks then it was business as usual. It really proved the resilience and creativity of the ad industry to adapt. I think those bits of work I did during the lockdown will be interesting period pieces in years to come. Commercials, above many other creative industries, have an incredible ability to capture an era of time – more so than films I think. They can distil all kinds of cultural influences in a way that makes for something incredibly nostalgic long after it’s been aired. I have an old 80s TV in my kitchen that I’ve hacked to only play ads from the 80s/early 90s – and the ability for that to transport me back in time is more potent than a lot of films, music or TV.
So yes, I watch commercials out of choice not just for work! I love watching old commercials not just for their time-travelling powers, but because it really allows me to see a bigger picture of how what I do relates to cultural history as a whole. I could waffle on forever about old ads…
LBB> How has the business developed from there? What have been your highlights so far?
Philip> We concentrate on quality and craft over volume, so we’ve been refining where we position ourselves and building a solid foundation from which to grow. We’ve brought in some very talented composers to expand further into film and TV. We’ve won loads of awards… good times!
LBB> As a multi award-winning composer, what advice do you have for up and coming talents that you wish someone had told you at the start of your career?
Philip> Make your own music and put it out by whatever means. Find your own voice outside of working to picture. This should be an ongoing project. Build a network of amazing musicians you can call in to play REAL instruments – get out of the box as much as you can, in terms of getting out of purely computer based music, but also out of the box in terms of ideas. And always, always, always have fun!
