Writing scores for the scorers

For the first time they have all been signed up to tell their individual stories for television. Their simple straight-to-camera interview, with each man poignantly holding a framed photo, is spliced with footage from their pomp and the glory moment when they strike and send millions wild with delight.

Tim Atack has spent the past five months sitting at his keyboard in front of this stirring stuff on his screen. He has been seeking to compose music that does justice to match sequences engraved in the collective minds of nations. Especially if you are English, the country with a player unique among this select band – the only one to have scored a World Cup final hat-trick.

In his interview, Sir Geoff Hurst recalls noise so intense as the players walked out of the tunnel for the Wembley final in 1966, that it felt like the backdraft of a fire.

Sir Geoff has three minutes to tell his tale to camera, the same as the 33 others. Each will be screened separately and they will also be welded into a single programme. It's so compelling, I could watch it for hours.

Musicianship apart, Tim Atack has another quality which makes him suited for this task. He's not a great football man. He quite likes a match now and again and watches Leeds United with pals who have season tickets. He's not the sort to be held too long in thrall by World Cup stars of yesteryear and the thought of what they and their achievements have meant to so many people.

In the case of Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, our failings since 1966 magnify the emotion of watching their goals go in again. As one who sat in front of the TV that late July afternoon and saw them live in black and white, I seem to recall the response was more matter-of-fact. When Bobby Moore lifted the cup, the nation did not take to the streets for heartfelt rejoicing, impromptu street parties and general falling about as it will surely do in four weeks' time if we pull it off again. In York that night, post-match there was nothing special happening at all.

Football was just another part of life, a deep but narrow current that ran mostly through the male working-class psyche. When the World Cup comes round today, football's social reach is colossal and seems to overshadow everything.

This trend was already well in evidence less than 30 years after our Wembley triumph. At Italia 90, in Sardinia, I watched as what seemed like half the Italian carabinieri, its army and helicopters, turned out on the streets of Cagliari to contain English fans' jubilation. And that was just for us making it through the group phase.

California is where you expect to find a Hollywood composer. This one lives on a farm not far from Ferrybridge power station in West Yorkshire. It's not a rock-star, Madonna type of spread, all thatch and timbers. It's where Tim Atack's wife grew up, and they bought it from her brother when the farm could no longer be made to pay.

Tim's current job, titled I Scored A Goal in the World Cup Final, is sandwiched between two film scores just gone (both Ricky Gervais films) and two more in the pipeline. How did they come to line him up for the football project?

"Originally, they had scored it with library music but it was not hitting the spot," says Tim. "They realised they needed bespoke music, and the challenge for me has been to get in the culture not just the gladiatorial aspect. Each of the players talks about the early days and I wanted to reflect that in the music."

Music has always played a big part in Tim's life. His father, an insurance salesman with the Pru, who played piano and organ in jazz and dance bands at local clubs, insisted Tim take piano lessons as a child.

"I didn't like it at the time. One year when we were really little, dad asked me and my twin, Keith, what we wanted for Christmas. Keith said drums and I asked for a guitar. On Christmas morning, Keith went straight to the guitar and I went to the drums."

That was how it stayed. At school in Pontefract, Tim formed a band and acquired an agent before it was time to leave for the world of work. From the classroom, he moved seamlessly into the music business with his schoolmates and their band called Child. They had several chart hits and appearances on the Top of the Pops. But at 19, Tim looked liked a man who had peaked too soon. "We were crazy kids and it came to an end because the music industry had changed. We didn't fit on the bill with the Boomtown Rats, Elvis Costello and the Stranglers. We'd do a cover of Only Make Believe and we'd be almost embarrassed, we thought 'we're just not part of this'.

"Maybe we should have dug in and reinvented ourselves. There were a few years when I didn't know what to do. We weren't big enough to fall back on being a tribute to ourselves. I was completely broke. The band never made much because they were not our songs. I was a drummer, so it was either find another band or develop something else."

That's where his childhood piano lessons proved invaluable. "When technology changed in the 1980s with keyboards and computers, I really took to that. You could program drums and layer sounds, it was liberating musically. That's when I started writing."

He shared the same manager with Des'ree and toured as her keyboard player while they wrote together. "We would be trading ideas; it's rare to find a collaboration which works as well as that."

One of Des'ree's fans was the Australian film director, Baz Luhrmann who wanted Des'ree in his new film version of Romeo and Juliet. Tim's composition, Kissing You, became the film's theme tune and a worldwide hit.

"This is a strange business. You can be hammering on the door for years, then things happen that are beyond your control. The turning point for me was working with Des'ree which gave me a platform, and Romeo and Juliet opened all the doors. Now at 51, I still feel I'm at the beginning."

The first time he ever noticed the music in a film was watching Star Wars as a youngster where the composer was John Williams. "I also love John Barry's film scores. A piece of music isn't just to go with what's happening on the screen. The people who go to the next level as far as I'm concerned write music which gets into the underbelly of the film, becomes a colour in the film. It doesn't just serve as wallpaper."

His all-time favourite is the score composed by Gregson Williams for a Seventies' film called Man on Fire, starring Denzil Washington.

"It gives a great sense of place. The challenge is to find those colours and get into that space where it's part of the fabric of the film, something which belong to the film rather than just suits it.

"The composer's job is to serve the process. In a sense you are part of the crew, like the visual effects and the make-up and the satisfaction comes in knowing I've served the film properly. It's not making me a household name, the composer is not a credit that the people at the cinema look for. That does not figure in my mind, I've no

desire to be recognised at Tesco."

Tim came into the orbit of Ricky Gervais through Chris Gill, a film editor with whom he had worked.

"The amazing thing about this job is that it's like being a joiner or a plumber – doing a good job gets you recommended. Agents are great for the business side, but it's word of mouth that gets you the work.

"Ricky Gervais is very hands-on with his music, he understands it from a musician's perspective and can do it in the language I understand. With some directors they'll say of what you've written, 'it's a bit blue, we need something more orange'. What's that about?"

For the most recent Gervais film, Cemetery Junction, Tim wrote an hour's music, some of it recorded at Abbey Road studios to get the right feel for the period setting. Sometimes he uses a full orchestra. How daunting is that? "I've never learned to conduct. But it's great for your confidence because London session players are the best in the world.

"Films are made by committee. You can't legislate for the success of a film or get bogged down worrying about that. You just do your job and by the time it comes out you are, hopefully, doing something else. You can't be defined by how the film does. This is a business of extremes – you are either making quite a bit or nothing at all."

In his time, Tim has toured with people like Bryan Ferry and David Cassidy. "I got that out of my system. I thought I would miss it more than I do. That part of my life has gone. I'm in charge of my own destiny and that's a good thing."

So he prefers Yorkshire to Hollywood and does not feel the need to move to where the work is. The state of technology these days means he can download a musical idea for someone sitting anywhere in the world as easily as if they were in the next room. That's why sitting in a shadowed studio on a farm in West Yorkshire is a viable means of putting music to magic moments from the World Cup.

The first footballer in the series is the forgotten (to us at least) Alcides Ghiggia of Uruguay. In the final, at the Maracana stadium, in Brazil, in 1950, Ghiggia, a winger, burst down the right in the 79th minute and tucked the ball just inside the post. It won the game, and the World Cup, 2-1 for Uruguay.

"One of the biggest challenges for the editor was what to leave out," says Tim.

If at a later stage they decide to shave off maybe three seconds from the film, that can play havoc with Tim's music which he has to re-do.

"I have tried to be mindful of the personality of the players; some are soft-spoken, some are brash, and I wanted the music to be in synch with that. Then you have make sure the beat beats to the rhythm of the action sequences and the build-up to the goal.

"The start for me is the palette of the sound – is it strings, guitar? Once you've got that, it will start to throw ideas at you. I want it to feel that it belongs, that it's a part of the visual experience."

England's 1966 hero Martin Peters, it turns out, was one of the trickiest subjects for Tim to do because he's so softly-spoken.

"A lot of things I tried with him didn't work. The music was too grand."

So it's hard work putting music to film? "I've never done one

that isn't intense. Arriving at the right music can be quite

a journey."

I Scored A Goal in the World Cup Final is being screened on the ESPN TV network.

www.timatack.com

YP MAG 12/6/10