The Art of TV Music with Dominic Glynn

My guest this week is Dominic Glynn, a prolific composer for film and television. Dominic got his start working on Doctor Who, and has provided music for titles as diverse as Red Dwarf and The Simpsons. Dominic tells me how his career began in the mid-80s as a self-taught musician, how incidental music works, what it’s like to write for an orchestra, and more.

Episode breakdown:

00:00 Introduction.

04:55 Member of band transitioned to solo career.

06:25 In the 80s, got obsessed with affordable synthesizers.

10:22 Confidently sought job with Doctor Who in 1984.

13:24 Affordable technology enabled music production from home.

18:27 Editing music reel with time-coded leader tape.

22:00 Working on music synchronization for VHS episodes.

24:50 Luck played a part in minimal changes.

27:40 Excessive music in TV/films can ruin impact.

30:31 Music can enhance storytelling in low-budget productions.

32:41 Cartoon character’s appearance affected by budget constraints.

35:50 Electronic music lover disappointed in orchestral shift.

41:31 Doctor Who‘s evolution from theater to cinema.

44:00 Creating music similar to popular soundtracks for music libraries.

45:29 Unexpectedly finding music in beloved TV shows.

51:06 Creating music that emulates the 50s-60s hits.

54:24 Composer entrusts scoring to orchestra, marvels at musicians’ skill.

Read this week’s article, on why you should make bad art, here.

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Transcript

Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.

Nancy Norbeck: Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. As you may know, I’ve been working on a new one on one course, and it’s here. Reignite your creative spark is a private coaching program designed to help creative folks build momentum that lasts so they can turn their creative dreams into reality. In six private sessions, you will discover how to engage with your creative dreams with ease and joy, feeling both more confident in yourself and your work and more vibrant than you have in years. Want to learn more? Use the link in the show notes to get in touch. Talk to you soon. My guest this week is Dominic Glynn, a prolific composer for film and television. Dominic got his start working on Doctor Who and has provided music for titles as diverse as Red Dwarf and the Simpsons. Dominic tells me how his career began in the mid eighties as a self taught musician, how incidental music works, what it’s like to write for an orchestra, and more. Here’s my conversation with Dominic Glynn. Dominic, welcome to follow your curiosity.

Dominic Glynn: Thank you, Nancy. Really kind of you to invite me.

Nancy Norbeck: So I start everyone off with the same question. Were you a creative kid or did you discover your creative side later on?

Dominic Glynn: No, I think I probably was a creative kid. I used to. We had a piano in the house, so on the musical side, I used to bash around on the piano just trying to make up my own tunes. And I also used to write. I used to love writing stories and making up my own little comic strips and I used to make my own, literally make my own little magazines and I’d staple them together and make, cut out pictures from other comics and make my own stories out of them. Yes. I was always knitting together creative projects in some shape or form. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck: And was your family encouraging or was it just kind of like. Yeah, that’s just what he is.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah. I mean, we were quite a creative family, so quite, quite a musical family, really. My mum used to teach piano. She used to teach piano to young children, you know. My brother ended up being a, he’s actually a piano teacher now, so he, he went a different route for me because I was sort of lazy. I was the lazy musician who just wanted to just play. I wanted to know instantly how to play. I didn’t want to learn how to read music because that seemed so boring. I just wanted to play my own music. And so I went a very different route him from him. He went classical and he became a brilliant interpreter of other people’s. Music as a player. Whereas I can’t really play anybody else’s music except my own. My sister played a little bit. She’s sort of gone through the orchestra, trying different instruments. And she’s currently on the. She’s playing now. She’s tried lots of different instruments. She’s done violin, flute, piano, whatever. My dad played the guitar a little bit. So we. Yeah, we were all creative at home in some shape or form. So, yeah, my family were encouraging to me.

Nancy Norbeck: That’s very cool that I love it when it. You know, you don’t very often come across a family where everybody has their own thing that’s kind of in the same vein, but not the same. And I find that really interesting.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, I think we were. I mean, I’m. Yeah. So two of us ended up in the music industry in the sense that my brother teaches piano. And I write music for tv and film. But even those. Those of us in the family who didn’t, they were music is still or was a very big part of their lives. So, yeah, I’m lucky in that sense.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. So when did it start to seem like a serious thing for you?

Dominic Glynn: I suppose when you start to think when you’re at school. And you have to start thinking about the future, what you’re going to do. And I think probably as a teenager, I always thought I wanted to do something in. Probably television or film. I don’t think I quite knew what it was. I think I thought maybe I’d be a writer. And the music thing almost came about. I wouldn’t say by accident, certainly. I wasn’t really thinking about it. We were. We started a band at school, me and a few friends. And we just did it because we thought it would be a really cool thing to do to start a band. And I don’t ever think at that stage I thought, well, this is going to be my career. We just loved every minute of being in the band. And after I left school, I kept the band going. The sort of membership of the band changed. Different people came and went, but I sort of kept going with it. Eventually we were whittled down from a band of four or five of us. Down to just two of us in the sort of mid eighties, early eighties, kind of 1980s synth pop. We were doing them because we were both. Both keyboard players. And then eventually he kind of dropped out as well. So we ended up. It was just me. And so then I thought, well, how am I going to make a career out of this? And that was the point at which I started looking at other options, which is tv, film and media music. And I just started putting the word out, ringing people, sending off letters to everybody and thinking who could actually employ me to do what I love for a job? And ultimately, for my luck, I got the producer of Doctor who. Who agreed to give me a chance and to let me work on that show. Which, of course, obviously has been an iconic tv series. So I was extremely lucky to have that as my first proper music job.

Nancy Norbeck: That’s amazing. And I’m wondering, since you mentioned, you know, synth pop in the eighties was the advent of the synthesizer. Sort of like, ooh, cool new toy. Nobody knows what to do with this. So we’re just gonna play?

Dominic Glynn: Yeah. I mean, obviously synthesizers had been around a bit. But in the eighties they began to be available to people like me who just had no money. And I was able to use a credit card to buy a synthesizer. And that’s what I did. I had my own synth. Oh, wow. And I was absolutely obsessed with turning the knobs and the switches and the sliders and making my weird noises. And I, at that point in my musical career, I was into electronic music. That was the big thing. Electronics and synthesizers and. And so I was attracted to music where keyboards were a big part of the sound. I mean, as, as my musical career has evolved, it’s. It’s moved on a bit. I still very into electronic music, but I do also other things as well. But, yeah, I mean, early eighties. So the early eighties coincided. My early twenties coincided with synths becoming very big in the pop scene. So obviously previously the guitar was king. But in the eighties, I think synths began to take over. And all the big bands of the early eighties were all keyboard orientated.

Nancy Norbeck: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dominic Glynn: Your Depeche Modes and your Kraftwerk And your Kraftwerk a bit earlier, actually. But, you know, so many the New Romantic futurist bands of the time were all keyboard based. Great for me. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. So when. It must have been a heck of a thing for Doctor Who to be your first official gig.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah. I mean, yes, I think I sort of. I don’t say I took it for granted. But I don’t think I realized fully what a big thing it was to get that as my first gig. And I often look back and think, well, if my first tv gig had been, I don’t know, some obscure police drama or something, nobody would remember it. Nobody would know it. I mean, that’s why I’m. So you asked me a couple of advanced questions before we did the interview, and I know you said what surprised you. What surprised me is how people remember what I’ve done. And I still think, how do people know that I did that? And it’s because, really, the Doctor Who thing is incredible. It’s a show which has got a ridiculously long life. The very fact it’s been going over 60 years now. But people who love doctor who very often love everything about it, and they know the music, they know the individual music cues. So, yeah, I was incredibly lucky to get that as my first job. And really, it got me all my other jobs ever since, because the very fact that there’s the name recognition doctor who meant other people were willing to give me a try at other work.

Nancy Norbeck: I wonder if it wasn’t a good thing that it didn’t really hit you what a big deal it was.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, probably. Yeah. Because I do think it’s very important to, you know, you have to be. You have to believe in yourself when you’re starting out doing this kind of work, but you don’t want to believe in yourself too much or believe that you’re bigger than you actually are because it’s very easy to get a big head and to become quite obnoxious. So I think you’re right. Probably not really quite realizing what a lucky break I got probably helped me, really. Um, yeah, it is a. It’s important that people are self confident but not overconfident.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. And I think you could be overwhelmed by it, too. Could be really intimidating.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah. I mean, there is. There was a little bit of that, in a sense that, um, when I originally wrote to the producer of Doctor Who, John Nathan-Turner, back in about 1984, when I was about 23, I think, when I first wrote to him. So already I was a bit precocious in the sense that I don’t know how I thought I was going to work on a big British national institution like Doctor Who when I had no formal training of any kind and no experience, but I had enough naive confidence to think, well, I think I could do that job. And, in effect, that’s what I wrote to the, to the, the producer. I just wrote and said, I think I can do that job. And fortunately, he was the kind of guy who was very willing to try new talent out and give it a go. And he liked what I sent him in this form of a demo tape. But, yes, I do remember. So when I initially wrote to him, I was only expecting to be offered work writing the incidental music, which is what I kind of thought that’s what? I can do the incidental music. I’ve got a synthesizer. I can make weird noises. And I sent him a tape of weird, spacey noises and spacey music. And what really shocked me is. Yes, he. First of all, he offered me work doing the first couple of episodes. And then out of the blue, he rang and asked if I wanted to rearrange the title music. And that’s where my confidence level began to waver. Because I thought, well, it’s very, all very well doing weird, spooky, incidental, spacey music, which I can do with my synth. But actually doing something which is a national treasure. You know, the Doctor Who theme, international treasure now, the Doctor Who theme. I for a while wondered whether or not I could do it. But of course, at that age, any age, to be honest, you just take any opportunity that comes along, you make it work. And I just. I thought, I’ll make it work. So I managed to overcome the fear and just did it. Fortunately, they liked it and it ended up being the theme.

Nancy Norbeck: So, yeah, that was the part that I thought really would have been intimidating. You want me to what?

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, it was. It was like that. Of course, you don’t let on that’s how you feel. You just confidently say, yes, of course I can do that. Yeah. I thought you might ask. No, but then put the phone down. And then the fear begins thinking, oh, how the hell am I going to do that?

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. And you have me thinking when you’re talking about, I have a synthesizer. I can make strange noises. It reminds me of all of the radiophonic workshop work and how all of the things that they did to make all of those weird noises. And then the shift into, hey, this one thing that I can buy with my credit card can make all of these weird noises.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah. I mean, that was one of the. One of the things about the early eighties where synths became more affordable. So, I mean, I always felt slightly inadequate because obviously the radiophonic workshop had great resources and they had banks of synthesizers and equipment. And I, as a, as a naive 23-year-old, had bought a synthesizer. And then I’d bought another keyboard. And I saw I had maybe three. Since by the time I started working on doctor who. And I was working out of my bedroom and I was thinking, is this actually feasible? Can I do music for a british tv series out of my bedroom? And I think probably ten years prior to that, you wouldn’t have been able to do that. It wouldn’t have been feasible. But technology dropped in price and it became possible to have the equipment on a. On a budget where you could produce music that would be of a sufficient quality to. To be broadcast. And when I did the demos for the show, I didn’t have the equipment. I had. As I say, I think I had one or two synthesizers and a cassette tape, cassette tape recording system, which was awful. It was really awful. And it was only after I passed the demo stage that I realized I wasn’t. If I was going to get the job doing this, I had to up my game a bit, buy some equipment. So at the time I was working, I had a day job in the civil service. I was working in the health and safety executive, taking answering phone calls and filling in forms about people’s accidents on building sites and the like. And I’d worked there. I’d worked in this job for five years. And I earned a bit of pension money, which I immediately cashed in when I knew that I’d got the work on Doctor Who. And I bought myself some more equipment. So I bought a reel to reel tape machine that was, you know, one step towards being professional and a mixing desk and, you know, the equipment that I needed to actually do a tv set series instead of just messing around with demo tapes. But yes, it was a leap forward in the eighties, the very fact that you could afford to do that. As I say, as a 23 year old, I didn’t have great resources. I just was lucky I was able to cash in a bit of money from my job so I could afford to do it.

Nancy Norbeck: So were you editing your own stuff? Since you mentioned the reel to reel, that’s what I’m picturing, yes.

Dominic Glynn: So, I mean, I’d learned all the techniques with a razor blade and for people listening who don’t know how, we used to do it in demo, olden days, we used to cut tape physically, a razor blade, and that’s how you would edit. And I learned that trade for want of a better word, by. Because I. This is odd. I knew that I’d got the work in Doctor Who. I’d been offered the job. And then the panic set in because I thought, I don’t actually know how the act, the physical act of recording and producing a tape that you give to the BBC and say, this is the music for this episode. I don’t really know how it was done. So I rang up the producer again. These sort of things don’t happen anymore because you can’t just ring up producers. But producers at the BBC used to be in house and you were able, if you could get the phone number, you could ring through, you could go to the switchboard and say, could I speak to blah blah blah, producer of a certain program? And if you’re lucky, you’d get put through. And what happened was I rang the producer of a tv show called Tripods, which was another low budget BBC Sci-Fi series aimed at children, but nevertheless, it had a soundtrack that wasn’t that different from Doctor Who in that it was synthesized. And I rang the producer and said, I haven’t got a clue. I’ve been offered the job writing music for Doctor Who. I’ve never done this before. I could do some advice. Could I shadow your composer for a day so I can just watch what he does? And he said, oh, I’ll have a word with him and see if that’s possible. I mean, as I tell this story, it seems ridiculous because I know how difficult it is to contact people now. You know, we’ve got email, but emails get lost in a swamp of hundreds and hundreds of emails, so. But anyway, this is what happened. I spoke to this producer. He said, I’ll talk to the composer and I’ll call you back. And sure enough, he talked to the composer, a guy called Ken Freeman. And Ken Freeman just said, yes, he’s welcome to come for the day and I’ll show him what I do. And that’s exactly what happened. And I went for a day in his studio, which was a lot smarter than mine, because he’d been doing it a few years, and he showed me how you edit tape with leader tape. So you’d have a reel of tape, you put your music cue for a particular scene. You’d start it one point in the scene, and you’d end at another point in the scene, which had been pre decided with your director. And what you had to do is you had to put a bit of leader tape, which was blank plastic tape just in front of where the music starts. On the reel of tape, you’d cut tape and you’d splice it together, and on that bit of blank plastic tape, you’d write the time at which that piece of music starts on the show. So it would say something like five minutes, 10 seconds, 15 frames or something, and that would be the moment that piece of music was supposed to start. I would not have had a clue how to do that if this lovely guy, Ken Freeman, hadn’t given me that opportunity to figure it out that day.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah, it is amazing to think how much harder it is to break into something these days, because it is so much more, you know, gated.

Dominic Glynn: It’s. It’s a mix because it’s much harder to get in because everything’s gated, as you say, correctly. But the other extreme of it is it’s an awful lot easier now because you can make that music on your phone. You know, everybody has got the equipment to do it for ten pounds, $15, 20 pounds, whatever. You don’t need masses of equipment to make the music now, therefore, again, conversely, it’s more difficult because everybody can do it. So you’re competing with an awful lot more people. There’s more opportunity, there are more tv programs being made than they were in 1986. So again, it goes the other way. In a way, it kind of balances out. It’s really. I mean, people now study to do music production for tv. You know, they go to university today. It wasn’t a thing in 1986. You didn’t go to university to learn how to write music for tv or to produce electronic music. Music technology courses, they didn’t exist. The downside of that is it turns out lots of people who are very competent at doing the job, and therefore you’re competing with loads and loads and loads and loads, loads of other people. So it’s a bit like, I always think it’s very close to the acting profession. You know, there are thousands and thousands of actors out there trying to get work, and there are thousands and thousands of composers trying to get work as well. It’s highly, highly competitive.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah.

Dominic Glynn: So I never. I never forget how incredibly lucky I am that I get any work at all. And if somebody’s paying me to do what I’m loving, you know, I’m really. I’m winning, as we say. In that sense, I’m very, very lucky.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. Yeah.

Dominic Glynn: Because there are an awful lot of incredibly talented people who are not getting the work that they deserve, you know?

Nancy Norbeck: True, so true. Yeah. So I’m thinking back to what you said a minute ago about, you know, marking this piece of tape with exactly the moment when that piece of music is supposed to play. And it sounds to me. So tell me if I’m wrong. It sounds to me like you were not actually looking at the episode at the same time. I know I’ve seen documentaries with John Williams conducting the orchestra in front of a big screen. It doesn’t sound like you were doing anything like that. So that must have been interesting to figure out exactly where things went.

Dominic Glynn: No, we were doing that. So what we were doing in those days was we were working to VHS tape so we would be given the episode on a cassette videotape, which I’d put in my home video recorder, play it, and it would have time code at the bottom of the screen with the time and every frame of that episode. And before I started work on it, I’d have a meeting with the director and we’d go through it and work out where the music was supposed to start and end for each scene or whenever the music was needed. So then when I was in my studio, I would then put the videotape in the machine and I would start recording and come up with the basis of what that music queue was going to be. Once it was established, what was going to be. I mean, there was a lot of, a lot of synchronization to synchronize certain points of the music to certain points in the picture. Once those points were in my recording, I might do that initially. I know that something’s going to happen at that point and I need a hit at that point, so I might put that in first. Once those were in place, I didn’t have to continually run the video. I could just work in audio at that point. So we were basically doing that thing where you’re looking at the picture and you’re, and you’re working as you, but as I say, once you’d synchronize the key points of that music queue, I could work independently of it. And part of the time spent working on the show was trying to get the two blooming things to synchronize. So you’ve got the audio on one machine and you’ve got the video on another machine. And I’m pressing play on both of them at the same time, hoping that they’re going to stay in sync. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. And that’s another thing. So now you’re talking about what was easier then and what was easier now. That’s so much easier now because it’s all in the computer. So the video and the audio is all totally synchronized. So you just run the video on one screen on your computer and you run your audio software on the other screen. So it’s all locked in. And I used to dream of it being locked in. Honestly, that really did take a huge amount of time because if you had a long, long music cue that was, say two minutes long, even if you just about got it almost right, it would be okay for about 30 seconds. And then as time wore on, it would gradually drift out of sync with the picture. So you’d have to go wind it back and start again.

Nancy Norbeck: Oh man.

Dominic Glynn: Bearing in mind, we only had about ten days maximum to do an episode. It was quite intense.

Nancy Norbeck: Must have been, yeah. Did you end up having to re-record a lot? Did it turn out that, like, that two minutes was a little bit too long and you needed to trim something or.

Dominic Glynn: Not really, no. No. I was quite lucky. I don’t really remember any major changes that I had to do to a cue. I mean, partly luck would have it that we didn’t have time. So I would finish what. I’d finish all my work on an episode and then the director would come to my studio and we’d sit through it and, you know, we’d talk about. And, yeah, if some changes had to be made, if I was lucky, there might be a day to make a change to something. But probably the very next day we’d have to go into the BBC Sound studios to mix down the final episode. So there wasn’t really a lot of opportunity to change it. And there’s something drastically wrong, in which case, you know, they’d have to reschedule something.

Nancy Norbeck: Right.

Dominic Glynn: There was an occasion which many Doctor Who fans will know about, where one of the stories had a score. The story called Paradise—it’s not a secret—it came out on DVD with the original score, “Paradise Towers,” which was. I think it was second Sylvester McCoy story. Anyway, it was an early Sylvester McCoy story. It had a score by a composer who’d not worked on the show before. And he wrote a score which was quite experimental. And when the producer saw the run through of it, he said, I don’t think this is working. And sadly for the composer, they scrapped the whole score and they got somebody else in to do the scores. And that must have been, you know, really awful for that composer. But that was a very rare thing to happen. And I just guessed probably miscommunication somewhere along the line. There wasn’t enough communication between the people involved to make sure they got what they were after.

Nancy Norbeck: Right.

Dominic Glynn: But, no, I don’t remember too many changes, fortunately.

Nancy Norbeck: So I’m thinking, you know, incidental music, by nature, is sort of supposed to be in the background. It’s not supposed to take over what’s going on in the story and all that. And so I don’t think a lot of us, including me, really have a grasp of how it works and even how much is there in a typical tv episode and how do you. It’s got to be a very different composition process. Maybe it doesn’t. I could be wrong than, you know, writing an individual piece of music.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, it is different. It’s very different. And also it’s changed over time. It’s very different now. An episode of Doctor Who, for example, in 1986 is very different from an episode of Doctor Who in 2024. Generally speaking, there’s a lot more music in shows now than there used to be. And I must admit it’s a bugbear of mine. I get quite angry if I hear too much music in a story, in an episode of anything, not just Doctor Who, but I like the drama to breathe a bit. And I feel sometimes too much music in a story can ruin a film or a tv show, actually. It can actually wreck it because I’m, you know, I suppose I’m particularly prone to it because I listen to music all the time, but, you know, I can hear. Hear the music instead of the dialogue, whatever. And I think, why? Why? I often question, why is music in that scene? You know, what is the purpose of music in this particular part of the program? And I think there has to be a good reason to be there, not just putting it in there for the sake of it. And I believe that sometimes directors are lacking in confidence and they think that the scene doesn’t work without music. And I think they should have more faith in their actors sometimes and let their actors do tell the story, not always relying on the music to do it. It’s kind of counterintuitive because as a composer, you get paid by the second. So I should be encouraging there to be more music in each episode of things I do. But, yeah, I am a believer in less is more. And similarly, I think it’s very easy to swamp scene where you do need music. You know, it’s very easy to swamp a scene with too grand soundtrack. Incidental. It’s in the word, really. It should be incidental to the, to the action or the drama or the dialogue or whatever. And I don’t know, I think it doesn’t mean that it. You can’t notice it at all. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have any melody. You can have melody in incidental music, but it is good if you don’t notice it too prominently. And maybe afterwards, when the program’s finished, you can. You can. I remember that music if you notice it afterwards, almost. I’d be more proud of music I’d written for a show if people remembered the music after the episode has finished rather than while they’re watching it. I’d like to think that the music could enhance the scene rather than dominate or compete with it. You know, let, let the actors act. That’s my, my thinking. So, yeah, I mean, as I say, there was less music in the eighties. And I don’t know, it’s obviously, it’s a, it’s a fashion, but I’m in old school in that sense. I think I, I prefer to work in a more minimal way for incidental music anyway.

Nancy Norbeck: So you mentioned that there should be a good reason for it. What kind of reasons are there for having it in a particular scene?

Dominic Glynn: Well, again, that’s, that kind of depends on what the production is. So when I was working on a very low budget show, as it was then, Doctor Who in the eighties was not done on a high budget, as I’m sure you realize, very often we were asked to produce music that would kind of help to tell the story when the budget couldn’t. So there would be cases where you kind of had to imply something really awful was happening even though you couldn’t see it. So music can. It’s about enhancement. It can give you a bit of expectation when you need the viewer to sort of be led towards something. Music is very good at that. It can enhance emotion. But again, you don’t always need to do that. Sometimes I think the emotion is coming from the actors and you don’t need the music to do it. But very often also, music can really help with that. It can do so much. It can sort of be run counter to the story in a way. Sometimes that works really well when you do something that’s completely counterintuitive to what maybe you might expect. We had, again, just related this back to doctor who because obviously I worked on it for a long time. There was a story called “The Happiness Patrol,” which you may or may not have seen. And it had a, the chief monster in inverted commas was a thing called the Kandyman.

Nancy Norbeck: Oh, yes.

Dominic Glynn: Who was made out of sweeties. Candy. And he wasn’t particularly horrific.

Nancy Norbeck: He was still nightmare fodder for me.

Dominic Glynn: Well. Well, now. Well, hopefully he was nightmare fodder because the music helped to make him nightmare. Now, if you see him on his own, he’s quite. Almost quite cuddly. You know, he’s. He looks like what we had. I don’t know. You have this in other parts of the world, America, Canada. I don’t know whether you have licorice all sorts. We used to have Bertie Bassett.

Nancy Norbeck: Yes.

Dominic Glynn: Was the cartoon character made out of licorice? All sorts. And he looked like Bertie Bassett. And again, you know, the budget didn’t allow for him to look as scary as maybe the writers would have liked him. The writer would have liked him to look. Anyway, I thought if I write scary, scary music, big doomy horror film music, it’s going to look a bit silly because he doesn’t look like something out of an expensive horror film. So I went a different route. I went down the sort of slightly spooky fairgrounds music rather than doom laden horror because I just thought it’s going to work better. And as a result, I think he comes across slightly more sinister than he would. If I sort of put bombastic horror music over the top of it, which then it might have looked a bit comical.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Do you find it. I find it interesting that so many fans seem to be so much more aware of. Oh, that’s Clara’s theme, that’s Amy’s theme. All of the different pieces of incidental music in a show now.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck: I don’t know. I don’t tend to pick up on that as easily. And so I think that’s part of why it fascinates me.

Dominic Glynn: But, yeah, I mean, even I don’t always pick up on that. I mean, I had a few themes. We didn’t work quite in quite such a clear cut way in the sense of everybody having themes. I do remember a few characters when I worked on Doctor Who having themes, but it wasn’t a big thing and I didn’t particularly like doing that either. I wanted the scene to dictate the music rather than the character. We had a character in some of the stories. I did a guy called Glitz. I don’t know whether you remember Sabalom Glitz. He had a. He had a theme. I don’t even. I can’t even remember I had anybody else that had a theme. We had a couple of recurring themes for elements of a story, but not exactly character themes. Again, maybe it’s a fashion thing. I mean, originally it started with Wagner. He introduced the leitmotif, which is the idea of a character having their own theme. And I think that sort of thing goes in and out of fashion. I think at the moment it’s probably quite in fashion. But it wasnt particularly a big thing in the eighties.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah, it’s funny because as we’re talking, I’m kind of trying to conjure up the kinds of things that would come up random little pieces of music during an episode. And so many of them are. The more synthesized things seem to be what stick in my head even, you know, and I’m not even coming up with a full theme or anything. It’s just like, you know, I think it’s more a feel than, than the actual music.

Dominic Glynn: I mean, that’s how it, how it felt as an electronic music person by, by roots. One of the things I loved about Doctor Who was the fact that it was synonymous with electronic music, you know, and obviously, the theme itself. It’s one of the greatest pieces of electronic music ever written, in my view. And it has this otherworldly sound to it. And so when they went orchestral, I was a bit disappointed, really, because I thought it sounds, it makes it sound more like everything else, whereas it used to sound. It was unique, really. The doctor sound of Doctor Who. And I’m a believer in mixing the two. I don’t mind a bit of orchestral music in my. In my electronic scores. I’m quite happy with that. But I think when it went to a bit too generic, really. Yeah, I sort of. I love the feel of otherworldliness. And, you know, outer space, to me, is electronic. You know, it’s not. There isn’t a, there isn’t an orchestra out there.

Nancy Norbeck: Right.

Dominic Glynn: You know, it should be particularly, I say outer space. Obviously, Doctor Who has this wonderful remit where it can be anywhere, it can be under the water, it can be in space, it could be in the Middle Ages. You know, it can. It’s anything but. Particularly in the very sci-fi stories. I prefer an electronic based score because I do, I think it’s more memorable and it’s more out there.

Nancy Norbeck: I just cannot not bring up the original theme tune with Delia Darbyshire’s arrangement, which was so spooky and alien and otherworldly.

Dominic Glynn: And it still sounds spooky. In other words, it’s never dated. And I don’t think it ever will because it was not created with the instruments of the day. It was created with random pieces of electronic equipment. There were no synthesizers in 1963. Uh, it was created with reels of tape and hitting things and recording them and slowing them down and splicing tape together as we were talking about earlier, and using test equipment with oscillators and all that kind of thing meant that there was nothing about it which was of 1963, just as there wasn’t anything about it, as, you know, of 2024. It was just bits and pieces of equipment. And it’s time. It really is timeless. Ironic, really, being Doctor Who.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I like the themes since the series has come back, and they certainly seem to keep, you know, throwing all sorts of other things in there with the choral bits. And I think there’s a whole bit where there’s a, you know, big piano moment in the new one and everything, but it doesn’t have that alien, otherworldly.

Dominic Glynn: It could be. It could be the soundtrack to any, anything, you know, any adventure series now.

Nancy Norbeck: Right.

Dominic Glynn: That’s a shame. I think it’s. I mean, to be fair, the world, again has moved on drastically. There isn’t room quite for experimentation that there was, particularly in the sixties. The 1960s were a period of incredible innovation in the arts and culture and people were willing to accept really unusual, innovative things, including electronic music in the seventies as well. So there was a story in Doctor Who called “The Sea Devils,” which had the most bizarre electronic soundtrack, totally off the wall, which I think nowadays, well, I know nowadays, you know, they wouldn’t get away with doing it. People would have just, they wouldn’t accept it. Whether the public wouldn’t accept it or whether the commissioning people wouldn’t accept it, thinking that the public wouldn’t accept it, I don’t know what the answer is, but there was certainly an appetite for experimentation in the sixties, which has sadly gone, I think so. I think if anyone tried to do something really experimental with, for example, Doctor Who, now it’s so. It’s becoming so mainstream and so part of 2020s culture, I think, you know, there’d be the constant worry that, oh, this is going to end the show. It’s going to be, they’re going to take us off the air, you know, we’re doing something that is not acceptable. And, you know, while there are many pluses with having a big budget and money from Disney and all this stuff, the downside is it can’t be as experimental as it used to be, which is, you know, it’s a shame.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah.

Dominic Glynn: Everything moves on, you know.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. And I think that’s true in, in some of the. I want to say in the storytelling, that’s probably not, not the right word, but, you know, when you, when you think back to Classic Who and the, you know, the comments about, yeah, the aliens were made of green bubble wrap and like, yeah, but they, you know, you knew that the story was going to have to carry almost everything because the effects, with no budget, were not going to be able to do it. And I think that that contributes to that experimental kind of nature, too, sort of like, well, I don’t know how we’re going to make this alien look, but, you know, maybe green bubble wrap this time and maybe something else next time.

Dominic Glynn: It’s almost like the. It’s like the equivalent of the difference between the stage and screen. So I think of almost sixties and seventies Doctor Who being more like theater. You know, it would all be almost on one set and some of it would have to be, you know, imagined rather than seen. Whereas now we’ve got high tech cinema and everything is on c, on screen, and you see it all and it all looks amazing and fantastic and amazing. But. But now, in 2024, you can still go to the theater and you can still see one set and things done on a very small scale and a very, you know, a single, single lighting a scene or whatever, and it still works and still can create the same tension or, you know, drama or whatever from seeing a stage show. I think it’s probably something along those.

Nancy Norbeck: Lines, really, that makes sense. Yeah. So you weren’t on Doctor Who forever?

Dominic Glynn: No.

Nancy Norbeck: So, you know, tell us about where you went from there.

Dominic Glynn: So when Doctor Who finished, I had been, as I had been doing before to get work, sending letters out to people, trying to get work. And one of the things I had done is I’d sent letters. Well, I did a bit of work while I was still working on Doctor Who, actually was doing a few other things, including BBC schools television. So we used to have educational tv for schools. That’s gone now, unfortunately. They made a lot of tv shows for school kids and I did quite a lot of music for those shows. But the big break for me after Doctor Who came when I got some work writing production library music. So I wrote off to one of the music libraries. Now, for people who don’t know what music libraries are, they are publishers who produce music for television and film and advertising and radio and media and all that sort of stuff. And it’s pre written music. So when somebody’s making a production, they need some music, rather than commissioning a composer to do every single bit of music, every time they use some music that’s already written. And it’s a big part of the music industry, writing pre-written library music. So it goes into a library of music. And I got, because I’d done Doctor Who, I got offered the opportunity to write an album of music that sounded a bit like blockbuster tv and film themes. So I was asked to produce music that was in the ballpark of something like Star Wars, vaguely, or Star Trek and Batman, and weirdly enough, Doctor Who. But to avoid copyright issues, it had to sound a bit like them, but not completely like them. And they used to do a lot of this sort of thing. It was called sound-alikes. They believe me, they don’t do them anymore because copyright lawyers exist, and it’s just not worth the hassle. But, yeah, that was the first library album I did, and it did very well. And as a result, I got offered more jobs doing that. Library music, which can be any sort of music, literally any kind of music you care to think of. There is a library album or many library albums doing that kind of music. And every time you hear music in a tv show, if there isn’t a composer credited at the end of the show, there’s a good chance that the music that was used in that show comes from one of the music libraries. And I’ve pretty much been doing that along with other work since 1990. So I’ve got thousands of tracks out there now. They’ve been in tv shows all over the place, all over the world. That’s the thing about it. You never know where your music’s going to end up. And so if you write a piece of music for one of the libraries, you may see it. If you’re watching tv, you may just come across it, or you may not find out about it until you get your royalty statement through. And it says you had the theme to a quiz show in Japan or something. And then you know that it’s been used in a country somewhere around the world or in an advert for nappies in Taiwan or something. You just never know where it’s going to end up, which is amazing. And when it ends up in your favorite tv shows, that’s, you know, quite grat. You know, I feel quite grateful that I hear it in something that I love, you know, so I’ve been watching the odd show here and there, and I see my music. I’ve seen music crop up in the Simpsons, and I’ve seen it crop up in Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and, you know, Homeland and, you know, shows I would watch anyway. So, yeah, so that’s one of the, been the main, one of the main things has, you know, been keeping me in gainful employment ever since Doctor Who. And then I’ve done odds and ends like films. I’ve done some documentaries. I worked on a series of films. The first one was called you’ve been trumped, and then you’ve been trumped, too, and a dangerous game. And they were a trio of films about Donald Trump and his nefarious activities in Scotland, particularly where he built a golf course, um, flouting various environmental regulations and really making their lives a nightmare for the residents who lived near it. And it’s a very involved story. In fact, it’s just been turned into a podcast again, which I’ve wrote the music for. So it’s a BBC Sounds podcast, but that was a series of films I did, and I’ve done some other documentaries and various odd bits and pieces for tv as well over the years and short films, and it’s kept me off the streets.

Nancy Norbeck: It must be an interesting feeling to be watching any random tv show and suddenly hear something you wrote.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, I can remember the first time that happened, so obviously I knew about Doctor Who because I’d worked on it, so that doesn’t count. But when I was doing library music, the very first time, I heard some music I’d written without knowing it was going to come on the tv, you know what I mean? Was a Burger King advert. So it was an advert, yeah. Yeah. It was probably about 1990 again. And then also I went to the cinema with my, with my girlfriend at the time, and it was a film. I don’t think you have him in America. It was a guy called Harry Enfield. He’s a comedian. And they used to use a character called Kevin. Kevin and Perry were supposed to be two teenagers who had just turned 13 and suddenly turned into teenagers, from being lovely, sweet kids to turning overnight to being awful teenagers. And there was a movie version called Kevin and Perry go large. And I went to the cinema to see it because, you know, he’s a very funny guy. And my music was the opening scene in the film, very loud, you know, I went in the sun, and the very first scene was this big piece of music I wrote. And I just turned to my girlfriend, said, that’s my music. And I really had no idea that that was going to happen. So it does happen. It does happen. But most of, most of the usage actually, I don’t hear because it’s overseas. You know, if it’s in America, I’m not watching it in Canada, I’m not watching it because Japan, you know, so I just have to rely on the royalty system working properly so that I eventually get paid.

Nancy Norbeck: Right.

Dominic Glynn: Because that’s how it works, you know, you get paid based on how much music is used.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. And you had mentioned, you know, writing sound-alikes, and I’m curious to know, how hard is it to write something that’s similar enough that it’s in the right vein, but different enough that you won’t get in trouble for it?

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s a very good question. I had to feel my way in. The answer to that is the answer to that. I mean, I also. I have no musical training, as I said earlier on, I just taught myself how to play the keyboards and, you know, sidetrack. I did about a year playing the violin when I was about eleven, but I was just dreadful. And I don’t count that, but I had to not only write it so that it sounded a bit like it, but not completely. It’s just there wasn’t. There’s no rulebook on it. You just have to sort of, kind of figure it out and. But I also had to make it sound like the orchestra, you know, bearing in mind this was 1990 and we didn’t have great equipment. I had a sampler, and then when I actually did the album, we hired in a stack of samplers. Um, so I was able to sort of approximate the sound of the orchestral instruments. But I had to really teach myself orchestration and I had to. And in fact, I. I learned loads because I had to learn how the masters did it, you know, listen to John Williams. How did John Williams produce the music to Superman and make it sound the way he did? So I had to just listen really, really hard and go, ah, it’s okay. He’s used french horns there and that’s doing that, and he’s doing a bit of string underlay there and then that’s. I just had to figure, oh, and timpani. Yeah, that’s really. I had to figure it out just by listening and try and figure out, well, I can say, well, that’s definitely not the same melody, so I can’t get done for using the same melody. It’s a similar melody goes down when it went up in the original or something. But as I say, there was no guidance, really. They just had to. There were a couple of times I did a couple of those sound like things. I did a. It was called sounds of the fifties and sixties, and they wanted songs, instrumental versions of songs that sounded like they were from, you know, hits of the fifties and sixties. So we had to do things that sounded a bit like the Beatles and fats domino and trying to think what else was on there, the doors and all that kind of thing. And there was one track which wasn’t on that. No, I tell you what, it wasn’t on that. It was on another album where they actually decided it was too close and they decided it was too close to the original and they had to take it. Take it down and adjust the album, take the track off the album. And I tell you, I’ll be honest and open about it. It was a sound alike of the X Files and it got used quite a bit because it did sound like the X Files, but I think in the end it was decided it sounded too much like the X Files, so it was wiped from the records and, yeah, it was no longer used.

Nancy Norbeck: The X Files is such a distinctive theme, too.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, yeah, there are a few with a very distinctive sound. So the X Files had a very distinctive sound. Like Twilight zone had a very distinctive sound. You know, it’s got that ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. And then if you get a theme where you have just one distinctive element, you’ve kind of made it really, you know, you can. I wish I’d had the opportunity to write a theme where you can just have one sound where people go that’s so and so. Yeah, but, yeah, the X Files a great theme as well.

Nancy Norbeck: So, yeah, it is talking of an eerie, otherworldly theme. Yeah, yeah, it definitely fits.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck: But, yeah, it’s interesting to think about basically reverse engineering what somebody else did to try to figure out how to do something similar.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah, but it, as I say, I learned huge amount doing that as an exercise, you know, for being able to do the next project where they don’t want to sound like John Williams, but they want something orchestrated. And I think, well, I learned how to do that, so I can now do this. And that’s led on to me doing lots of actually actual orchestral work. So, although I. I am a keyboard player and I work with synths and I’m not trained, I’ve done quite a few projects with a full sized orchestra. And that is awesome. Somebody also. I mean, I get dreadful imposter syndrome because I think, well, how the hell can I be doing this? And I don’t even know how to read music. But actually, there are an awful lot of composers who work in. In the industry who don’t read music. They come from the kind of background I do where they play by ear. And the thing is, it’s all about collaboration. Just as you collaborate with the orchestra, you know, the composer is not expected to play every instrument. You have the great players in the orchestra to do that. So when you’re a composer and you don’t read and write music in the same, in the classical sense, you work with somebody who conducts and, and can, can interpret a score properly. So although I work with a computer and the computer will draw up a score, it’s not 100% reliable. So, you know, you take the score that you’ve written and you give it to somebody who’s a score, score adapter or a score you know the word. Now, the person that works with a score, and they will ensure that it’s playable by the orchestra properly and that the result is that you can write music for an orchestra and it’s the best feeling in the world. You know, I think I wrote this and these wonderful musicians have come in and they’ve just, because they’re so professional, they come into the studio and they sit down in their chair and they pick up their instrument and they look at the music and they just play it. And I just sort of fall over each time. How do they do that? You know, that’s just incredible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen often enough because there was never the budgets. But it’s the story of the world now. No one’s got the budget for anything.

Nancy Norbeck: Right. I wouldn’t have guessed that there would be so many people who are writing orchestral things and don’t read music. That’s amazing.

Dominic Glynn: There are quite a lot, a lot of big names as well. Surprisingly famously, Danny Elfman is a big name composer who’s not a traditional score reading, writing composer. And there are a lot of people. Yeah. Particularly also you think about the tradition of jazz composers who come from a background of playing by ear. Yeah, it’s true, lord, jazz composers have done film soundtracks as well.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. But what an amazing place to end up from where you started.

Dominic Glynn: Yeah. I mean, again, I feel incredibly lucky to some extent. It’s true. You make your own luck. You have to believe in yourself, as I say, but. And not be overconfident and piss people off. But, you know, the key to continuing to work, I think, is to be. Is to make life easy for the people who commission you. That’s. I think that’s the key to it. And I guess that’s what I’ve striven to do. And I guess I’m doing something right because people are still employing me to do work. So, yeah, I’m still doing it all these years later. All these years.

Nancy Norbeck: Yeah. I would say that’s a good sign. You got it right, for sure.

Dominic Glynn: Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. It can all fall apart any day.

Nancy Norbeck: Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. This has just been a delightful conversation.

Dominic Glynn: Oh, that’s right. It’s been a pleasure. Really enjoyed it.

Nancy Norbeck: That’s this week’s episode. Thanks so much to Dominic Glynn for joining me and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this episode. You’ll find a link in your podcast app, and in it, tell us about a time when you taught yourself how to do something. If you enjoyed your conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thanks so much. If this episode resonated with you, or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at the spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free, and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. See you there, and see you next week. Follow your curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like follow your curiosity, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.