Breathing Life into the Score of ‘Adolescence’ with Composers Aaron May & David Ridley

Adolescence has already become a smash hit on Netflix. It’s one of the hottest shows on Netflix, and critics and subscribers alike have given it rave reviews. We recently had the chance to discuss the haunting and spine-tingling score of Adolescence with series composers Aaron May and David Ridley.

Adolescence is the talk of the town right now. An incredible four-part Netflix Original crime drama created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne. Under the astonishing direction of Philip Barantini, each episode of the harrowing and heartbreaking drama is filmed in one continuous shot. It stars Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller and newcomer Owen Cooper as Eddie’s son, Jamie Miller, who is arrested after the suspected murder of his classmate, Katie. A masterclass in television production, the series is accompanied by the haunting score of composer duo Aaron May and David Ridley. 

Before composing the score of Adolescence, Aaron May and David Ridley previously composed the score of Boiling Point as a short; it’s feature-length film and television series, which Adolescence creator Stephen Graham starred, wrote, and produced in. The composer pair also worked on the sports documentaries When the World Watched: Brazil 1970 and Arséne Wenger: Invincible. 

 

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Jacob: How did you first become involved with Adolescence?

David: Well, we worked with Philip Barantini on a few projects before this. In fact, we started on his first short film, Seconds Out, which is made by Robbie O’Neil, who plays the stroppy teacher in Adolescence in episode two. He’s the one who’s shouting, “I’m going to hand out detentions like its confetti.” But he [Robbie] and Phile made a film together in 2018, and we started working very closely with Phil from then on. We worked on Villain in 2019 and Boiling Point the year after that, which was a little bit of a game-breaker for Phil and that collaboration with Stephen Graham. Those two are old mates, going back 20 years ago when they met on Band of Brothers, but Phil only began directing around five or six years ago.

We’ve also been growing as a duo, but also alongside Phil, through projects like working on the Boiling Point short, its series, and another feature film. But we already had a good working relationship with Phil, and so he approached us with Adolescence and told us that it was going to be a one-shot series, and he wasn’t really sure what role the music was going to play at that time. But were we interested? We were like, “Obviously, we’re interested! It sounds incredible!”. 

But we had to wait until they had almost finished shooting, to the point where people were rewatching things and getting a feel for what it felt like to watch, before they figured out that they needed a score in all the episodes because there was no editing. And because Boiling Point didn’t have a conventional score—like you had music on the PA system in the restaurant, but it doesn’t have a forward lyrical score. So, no one was sure what it needed.

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Jacob: How would you describe your score for Adolescence?

Aaron: It’s quite an interesting one because we’d come off a few projects where there was a lot of music. So, prior to Adolescence, we were working on a feature doc, which wasn’t wall-to-wall music, but there was music through much of it. So, as a product of that, the music, at times, needs to say a lot, but at times, it just wants to bubble away. And it has quite a conscious effect on the drama and the narrative. 

In episode two, when DI Bascombe is walking towards that conversation he’ll have with his son–

David: –Just before, he’s decided that it’s time to arrest Ryan, and that chase has just happened, and he’s walking back to the car, and you’ve got this long tracking shot. We saw that as a real opportunity for the score to be more forward to help comment that he’s digesting the emotions of what he’s been through the day. Then there’s the score, which is bubbling away, which adds just a little touch of tension, and then there are some moments where it really comes to the forefront. It really gave us the opportunity to ram home the emotion of everything we’ve just seen, give the audience a break from all the dialogue, and allow them to sit with it. The audience at home is doing the same thing as Bascombe, digesting what we’ve just seen.

Jacob: It felt like the score helped drive home some of those emotional points. The series is already intense, especially given the topic it’s covering, but the song playing over the drone shot is a cover of Fragile by Sting, right?

Aaron: I can’t remember exactly how they achieved that shot, but it involved getting a camera, attaching it to a drone, flying it across the town, and landing in the car! From a technical standpoint, that was insane, like an incredible shot.

From a practical level, that leaves a lot of space. This was done in collaboration with the music supervisor, Mark Kirby. He and Phil had the idea of doing an arrangement of Fragile by Sting. That all stemmed from a Canadian music teacher in the 1970s who had his students sing covers of all the biggest pop songs of the time, which was made into a record. But this was pre-cd, so the project went into oblivion, and then someone found it 10 or 15 years ago, and it’s simply stunning.

 

There’s something about it, like the wonderfulness of the children singing and making music in this really naive sort of way, and it’s just a beautiful record.

David: It’s so full of mistakes, as it’s just kids singing enthusiastically. In that instance, it’s Space Oddity and God Only Knows. But Phil wanted that sound, that sports hall choir sound. He wanted the splashy weaver, the slightly jangly piano. Still, most importantly, he wanted the song because of the lyrics, because it resonated so well with what the series is about.

Thanks to Jo Johnson, the series producer, an absolute legend, and an actual genius who pulled everything off, the school was able to put forward the school choir, which was about 15 children, but that wasn’t quite enough. We needed a sound of about 35 or 40. So a shout-out went around the school, and we ended up with around 35 or 40, but loads of them had never sung in a choir before. So there we were, in a village hall in the middle of Moorthorpe, just down the road from Minsthorpe Community College. We were initially going to do it in a school library, but the glass windows presented their own challenges, as kids would be running up and down the halls and probably heckling through the windows.

I have a background as a choir leader in the past, as I founded a children’s choir in China somewhat randomly in 2013, which was my first job straight out of university. So I had to pull a few old tricks out of the bag, as we had to get these kids engaged for two whole days and for them to get really into this song. We must have recorded it about 15 times.

Aaron: Oh, at least 15 times. I would actually say closer to 30. It was really cool, as during David’s warm-ups, we recorded them doing a lot of textures, singing scales, drones, and whispers, and things we could then pepper throughout the rest of the score. Our only worry was if Fragile came out of nowhere, we didn’t want it to feel out of place with the rest of the score, so by having the voices of the children not hidden but as part of the broader sound of the rest of the score, it became cohesive with the Fragile arrangement. But the Fragile arrangement is different enough that when it happens, you notice it.

David: At the end of Fragile, you get this little spotlight moment on Amelia Holliday, and she’s the actress who plays Katie, the victim. It was really a genius idea of Phil’s to have us have this working relationship with her, because obviously Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie in the show, like everyone’s talking about him, he’s an incredible performer, he’s such a star in the making, but in terms of the story everyone was quite conscious that we don’t get to hear from Amelia, because obviously at the start of the series her character, Katie, is already dead.

So Phil’s idea was to use her voice, and he asked her to send a recording of a song she knew to him through a voice note on WhatsApp. So we got sent those, and I think it was an Adele song she was singing, but we were stunned by how beautiful her voice was. You could tell she’s untrained, as she’s only 14 or 15, but she’s got an instinct and ear, so we knew we wanted her to do a solo at the end of Fragile. And then we were like, okay, where else can we get her into the score? So we recorded close mic’d, and after a session when all the other children had left, we asked her to record and sing a bunch of notes, and the vulnerable and adolescent sound of her voice became the backbone of the rest of the score. 

Jacob: I had no idea that Katie’s [Amelia] voice was in the score. 

Aaron: It’s one of those things where musically, it’s beautiful, but I think conceptually, it’s really beautiful. 

David: I wish we could have had a little slide at the beginning of each episode to let everyone know that was it actually Katie singing.

Aaron: It’s kind of that really nice little easter egg that’s there, and we wanted to give her a little shout it because, conceptually, it rounds it all off and gives her character a voice.

At the beginning of our process, when we start projects like this, we’re thinking about the sound of the world. And we mean that on a literal level, what sounds will we use? What instruments are we going to use? We’ve covered that with Amelia’s voice and the choir, and we matched that with a lot of breathy sounds. Like a couple of years ago, I bought David a bass recorder for his birthday, and we used that, and then I bought an old Victorian wooden pump organ from a lady in Western Supermare. The thing was huge, and it was a logistical nightmare–

David: But if you hadn’t got it, then the score could have been entirely different! It’s an amazing old Victorian organ that’s completely out of tune, by the way, as the whole thing is a semitone flat.

But with the Bass Recorder, we were playing long notes but also singing through it, so what you get with that is a competing wave. So you get the wave of the note, plus the wave of your voice, and so you get this competing wave and weird juddering effects. So if you mic it up really close, you can hear all this breath and stuff. It’s all imperfect, breathy, and weird.

Aaron: It’s all about finding the drones that are alive. It’s essential for us that every sound we use is alive, not just a template found on a synthesizer. So, with the process, what was clear from the beginning was that we wanted the sound to be very organic and a real-sounding score, but we also needed it to be quite cinematic. There were a lot of challenges we encountered at the start, creative ones, as we wanted to have this sound that was sort of cinematic and vast in scale but also close, organic, and personal.

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Jacob: What was it like working with the producers? Was there any instruction on what they wanted? 

David: To be honest, we got the impression that everyone was super behind Phil and Phil’s vision. We were pretty much liaising with Phil, and then once we reached a certain level on the score, he’d show the other execs, and then there maybe would be a couple of notes. 

First, A huge conversation happens during the composition process, as we’re a 50-50 duo. I don’t know who wrote which specific parts of the score because we have this philosophical process workflow called laddering. That’s us working towards a goal, and working with each other and taking the other person’s idea, working with that, maybe sort of redo that little element of it, and try and take it to another level. It’s like a series of remixes. So we have that process, get to a particular stage, show Phil, and then have a back-and-forth with him. And honestly, by the time that process is finished, certainly with this project anyway, there wasn’t really anyone sticking their oar in. 

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Jacob: Did the episode order of how it was shot impact or change the way you composed the score? I believe episode 3 was shot first?

David: I actually did watch it first.

Aaron: Yeah, because it was the first one that was shot. It was also the first episode we were asked to score, which was interesting, as it’s actually the one that needs the least music. I’m sure we watched it first, but we started scoring in episode one. The third is just such a fantastic episode. For us watching, we are wondering how we can make this better. On a technical level, it’s the simplest one, but it’s just an amazing conversation that takes place over an hour that you’re completely engrossed in.

So there’s a bit of scoring at the beginning, a bit at the end, and a smattering in the middle, but it was always during the transitional scenes when Erin Doherty’s character first arrives at the facility when she takes a break and then when Jamie leaves the room at the end. We would have experienced at points of putting music at various places, but it just felt like everything was there. We didn’t want to pierce what they had going on in episode three.

David: We did try a few things, and it made it into the sound mix, but then at that point, they’re like, you know what, it doesn’t need it. If you don’t need it, there’s absolutely no point in having music there.

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Jacob: Whose choice was it to use Through a Child’s Eyes by Aurora in the final scene with Eddie?

David: You know what, I’m not sure, but that was pretty much always there. From the very first spotting session we had, and went through the entire series talking about music and the role of music, Phil spoke about the song they had for the end. We watched it, and we were trying to fend off tears. It was probably Phil and Mark Kirby, the music supervisor, who also worked on Boiling Point with us. 

It is slightly different from the role that we play.

Aaron: I feel like with needle drops, sometimes I we think we can offer just a bit of score, but with this, like, no, this is perfect. I’m not even going to suggest anything. It just works absolutely perfectly.

David: In a sense, we got to work on something halfway between score and needle drop with Fragile and working with the school kids. It’s a really rare opportunity that you get to do that kind of thing.

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Have you watched Adolescence on Netflix yet? If so, what did you think of the score composed by Aaron May and David Ridley?