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Manners McDade Composer Oli Julian Scores Sex Education Season Two

17/01/2020
Music & Sound
London, UK
636
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Oli has scored a number of TV series along with his first feature film 'How To Build A Girl'

Oli Julian is known for his score to 'Motherland' (BBC), 'Catastrophe' (C4), 'Josh' (BBC3), 'Cockroaches' (ITV2), and season four of 'Episodes'. Oli recently completed a new BBC pilot starring Martin Freeman, 'Breeders', series five of both 'Plebs' and 'Cuckoo' (with Nick Foster) and series two of Sky One’s comedy drama 'Living the Dream'. Most recently, Oli finished scoring his first feature film 'How To Build A Girl', an adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s book due for theatrical release this year.

Starring Asa Butterfield, Gillian Anderson, Ncuti Gatwa, Emma Mackey, Connor Swindells and Kedar Williams-Stirling, Netflix’s Sex Education is a coming-of-age comedy-drama. After receiving great critical acclaim on the first series, the series was renewed for a second season.

In season one, Otis and his fried Maeve set-up a sex clinic at their school, using advice from his sex therapist mother. The new series will see the return of favourite characters as Otis (who must now master his newly discovered sexual urges in order to progress with his new girlfriend, Ola), Eric, Adam and Aimee. However, Moordale Secondary is experiencing a chlamydia outbreak, which highlights the need for better sex education.

Manners McDade speaks to Oli about his approach to composition and Sex Education Season 2


Q>The visuals in Sex Education feel nostalgic yet timeless, what was the brief like for this project and how did you approach it?

The approach to the score in Sex Education was to create something that was both a nod to the 80’s John Hughes aesthetic of the show, but also had space for more modern elements, since the show is not period and aims to have universal appeal. I started sharing ideas at script stage with the director Ben Taylor, and once shooting started we began to get a feel for what kind of instrumentation palette might work. We wanted to keep the vibrancy and peppy spirit of those 80's high school movies and as such there are a lot of fast, tight drums, picked electrics, sax and synths for the more upbeat, optimistic and comedic moments. However we knew we needed a broader palette for the more emotional and dramatic scenes so we played around with adding more orchestral instrumentation in certain places. We ended up using a lot of woodwind as it could sit well in amongst our more bandy elements and be foregrounded for both emotion and humour where necessary. During the early stages I wrote score as well as songs, a lot of which has ended up in the show.


Q>How does your work fit in with Ezra Furman’s tracks and how does this influence your score?

Having Ezra collaborate on the show was a masterstroke as his music fits in so well with the show. We knew early on that he was going to be involved and would be writing new material especially for the show, so i tried to keep that in mind when composing the score. Ben knew from script stage that he wanted to use his song “Love You So Bad”, which ended up featuring heavily in Ep1; its chamber-pop instrumentation complementing the score palette as well as lyrically dealing with the show’s themes. We tried to blend songs and score as much as possible by working with the stems of Ezra’s new (and old) material, working them under dialogue wherever possible and adding new arrangements where necessary. For this season we tried to develop this process even further, and I went to work with Ezra and his band in Boston to help work the tracks to picture.


Q>You’ve scored some great comedies (including Catastrophe, Plebs and Motherland), how do you approach scoring this genre?

I find every show is different and requires a unique approach - especially in comedy. Often the style and instrumentation of the music can be determined by the period or simply the attitude of the show, but also the tone of the comedy is so important in determining what the music should do. Increasingly shows are blurring the boundary between comedy and drama, and often the hardest thing is to navigate that line, emphasising one with without doing a disservice to the other. Catastrophe and Sex Education in particular are good examples of shows that deliver as many jokes as they do serious dramatic beats, and the score needs to be nimble or versatile enough to navigate all of it.


Q>Can you tell us about scoring your first upcoming film How To Build A Girl?

I starting working on How To Build A Girl in February last year after having met the director Coky Giedroyc. It is an adaptation of the eponymous Caitlin Moran book that charts the story of a young woman trying to forge a career in the cutthroat world of music journalism. The film is set in the 90’s so we knew we wanted to reflect that to some extent in the score, which would complement the period commercial music that was used. In addition the central character, Johanna, has an incredible optimism and energy that we wanted to capture, so the score really needed to soundtrack her journey. We settled on the idea of foregrounding a female vocalist (Tori Beaumont), and a home-made but energised acoustic band sound, which would deliver the attitude and rawness we wanted. There are also cues in the film that lean more toward the character of John Kite, a fictional singer-songwriter, so we created a more folky, emotive sound that would link nicely with his story and the original songs that were written for the film by both Guy Garvey and myself.

The new series of Sex Education is out 17th January on Netflix.

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