Name: Craig Armstrong
Nationality: Scottish
Occupation: (Film) composer, producer, arranger
Current release: A re-issue of Craig Armstrong's As if to Nothing is out as a luxurious super deluxe version via Hydrogen Dukebox. Also available now is the recording of his opera The Lady From The Sea on CMA. 



What was your first studio like?

It was a tiny little room off the side of a building in Glasgow called CaVa Studios which sadly isn’t there anymore. It was one of Glasgow’s main recording studios at the time and I was there in the late 90s early 2000s.

It was lined with keyboards and Akai samplers, you could hardly get in the door. It was a really happy studio, very creative and although it was tiny it had a great vibe!

What was the process of working with Massive Attack on the Protection album like?

They were one of many bands that I worked with at CaVa. As small as that place was, it's also where I wrote Romeo and Juliet, The Bone Collector, The Space Between Us and many, many U2 and Madonna arrangements. You’d bump into Simple Minds, Belle and Sebastian and other Glasgow bands at reception.  
 
The process of working with Massive Attack was very much the band, Nellee Hooper and myself either talking about the album in Bristol or trying to record some of it in Olympic Studios in London.

It was a very exciting time to be working with Massive Attack.

Some thought that the instrumentals on Protection were interludes at best. To me, they were always highlights. They're deep and immersive, and they hold a feeling of spontaneity.

I remember with “Weather Storm”, a track that we wrote together, it was already more or less done in one day at Olympic studios. My part being the piano improvisation … and of course the backing track sounded amazing.



As if to Nothing is an album of great scope and ambition. But it still feels very cohesive. What, at the time, connected pieces with Mogwai and Photek to a cover version of a U2 song with their lead singer?

I think although the tracks are quite different they all share the same tone. It was a fairly reflective album at the time and I think there is a feeling of logic to the running order of the tracks and also in the choice of musicians.

Remember that there was a really large orchestral element with these tracks which gives the album a large, integral part of its sound.

The blending of orchestral / acoustic parts and electronic elements has been a recurring aspect of your work. The way you make this fusion sound organic is remarkable – as, for example, on “Ruthless Gravity.”

“Ruthless Gravity” was the first piece I wrote for the album. In actual fact at first I thought the entire album could just be ten other variations of this piece.  

The only technical problems with “Ruthless Gravity” were that firstly after I sampled the electronic sign wave at the beginning, I did it very badly and it had a clip on it. But I decided to use it anyway.

The second thing was the size of the piece as the orchestra and the electronics got bigger and bigger. It began to feel like the speakers couldn’t contain the sound.

How and for what reasons has your set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear for you?

I think with my film career taking off it became more important to have a bit more space, not only for the gear but also for the collaboration that film often is.

My most important pieces of gear are my Pleyell piano and my collection of vintage synths and vast array of samples which have been collected throughout the years.

How different was your process for your movie scores like Moulin Rouge, or Elizabeth?



When I start a film usually the first thing I do is a rough play through at the piano watching the film. I do a rough for the whole film, as a first genuine musical reaction. And from there, these first ideas can be developed and worked up for the director to hear.

I would say each film is a slightly different process depending on how the director likes to work.

I suppose Moulin Rouge was more than just a little different …

Yes, that one was the exception as being a musical film it was a very different process. Baz very much liked to have me on set at the very start of his process which is incredible as you can imagine. Recording the songs at this stage and developing ideas.

After he’s finished editing we then have another phase of intensive working whilst we finesse the score and prepare to record the large orchestral and choral sessions.

Working with Shekhar Kapur was great too, he’s very involved and knows what emotion he wants to create within his scenes strongly.

I was there when As if to Nothing came out and remember it as a time of intense creative impulses and enormous confusion for the industry.

It may be an unpopular opinion but very true is that people still paid for whole albums at this time. There was no possibility to stream so that meant the income was there to pay musicians, choirs, programmers, singers and really fulfil the creative dream.

Today, that’s a very different story. There is so little income generated from streaming back to the artist, it makes it very different in terms of budget to make anything.

How do you think these financial possibilities reflected in the music?

I think we were at one of those rare points in time in music where everything just slightly shifts and although the shift is small it creates a wave of change that becomes bigger maybe.

The possibility with technology to be able to create the music demos at that time had changed drastically. So it was much easier to play with ideas and what I was imagining for the album.