Tuesday night, England vs Scotland, great game. It’s been a long day in the studio and my ears and brain need a rest because I’ve just started work on a new film. Time for a brew before turning in. But wait, a post-match interview with England’s talisman Wayne Rooney. Asking the questions is one of my bosses for this job – Gabriel Clarke, erstwhile director, in his other role on ITV as the voice of an inquisitive nation. His nose intrudes into the shot as he tries to prise something more than a mixed-metaphor out of the scouse striker. No joy, Wayne is bound more tightly than a terrified Oyster…we knew that he knew it’d be a difficult game. Frankly, I’m due a rest, but this sets me off again. Back to my studio. Gabriel’s still working, so am I.

Starting a new score is a bit like getting Rooney to say something other than a pre-rehearsed platitude. It’s easy to make noises, easy to find a tune or two, but finding THE noise or THE tune can take some coaxing. Fortunately, experience has honed my coaxing skills to a level more incisive than a scimitar. If you Google ‘coaxer’ the top hit will almost certainly be Clarke, with me a close second. If the bottom falls out of my career – as my teachers assured me it would – I’ll head down to the Jobcentre and declare my availability for immediate coaxing.

As my family took to their beds my post-match challenge was to coax the beautiful out of the formidable scream of a Porsche 917. This 917 in particular was engaged in the savage destruction of a section of French asphalt in 1970 Le Mans. This is me coaxing. Making a mark on an otherwise blank canvas. Within the wails and screams of this most astonishing engine I find a section where the car must have been flat out – the home straight perhaps? A brief moment where the pitch of the engine retained a degree of stability, the diabolic whine of a machine at the limit. In I go with the scissors and some sophisticated software and set about crafting the sound into something musical…maybe even something useable. With some careful looping and tuning I’m able to create a sustained sound that I can actually play with my piano keyboard as I would any other. It’s morphed from a machine at the edge into a unique instrument.

You see, it’s easy with a computer and a bundle of posh software to make things that sound like music very quickly. But often those things are not music at all, just a sequence of pretty notes. A glass bowl of M&M’s on a receptionist’s desk.

Coaxing gets you deeper, asks questions of you and throws up the unexpected. Like metal detecting. Mainly you find a few old coins and a ring pull. Occasionally you dig up a Roman hoard.



Ring pull or Roman hoard? Season’s greetings performed entirely by a Porsche 917:



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