Piano & strings for Graham Gouldman (10cc)
jamiecomposer • October 1, 2018
Away from the film & TV scoring world, I've also had the opportunity of working with a true legend of rock and pop recently - Graham Gouldman, of 10cc fame.
Graham called me as he wanted a jazz quartet sound for one of the tracks on his upcoming solo album, so myself, Chris Hill (Jamie Cullum) and Ralph Salmins (Paul McCartney, George Martin, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Madonna, and soundtracks for movies including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, James Bond...you get the idea, he's pretty handy ;-)) went up and laid down some swinging jazz sounds in HOXA GQ studio, in North London for Grahams fantastic new song "That's Love Right There".
Following the session, Graham asked me to write a string arrangement, which we recorded at HOXA a couple of weeks later.
As well as being a great songwriter, singer and guitarist, Graham is a thoroughly lovely man and great fun to collaborate with. Hopefully I'll get to do it again soon!
Delighted to hear that Treason has been perfoming very strongly on Netflix - we were number 1 on seven countries and top 10 in eighty eight countries! Very proud to be involved with a fantastic team on this show.
Working with Graham is such a thrill - he's a genuine authentic songwriting legend, and there's not many of them about. So many hits and great collaborations, including the Yardbirds, the Hollies, Herman's Hermits as well as 10cc of course. The week before our session he'd written a song with Brian May about the James Webb Space Telescope! We got "the team back together" at Hoxa HQ again - myself on piano/MD, Chris Hill on bass and Ralph Salmins on drums and recorded a couple of Graham's great new songs. Always a joy to work with Graham and I hope we get to do it again soon.
Here's a photo of Nick Harvey and I posing for the cover of our new Boy Band album! Sadly, that's not exactly true, but we did spend two absolutely glorious days at Abbey Road recording 23 of the worlds finest (and socially-distanced) string and woodwind players for a minimalist album for EMI production music. It sounded as incredible as you'd expect, given the heritage of the room itself (Studio 2 - some obscure band called "The Beatles" recorded there a fair bit apparently), the great engineers and the calibre of London's finest session musicians bringing Nick's and my music to life. Simply, an absolute joy.