James Hannay

I began an exciting collaboration with an amazing luxury brand in the first Lockdown whilst the film industry was on shutdown. Pragnell Jewellery.

www.pragnell.co.uk

Its one of the rare products that it is a pleasure to score for. And these are beautiful gems. I did a series of 5 ads/promos in 2020 and then I have another series of 16 coming up. See some of the edited vids below…

Again I will post more in the videos page when it is all done.

In the height of lockdown – January 2021- I did a couple of short films for a great young Canadian director called Jacqui Drager who is definitely going places! There are a couple of comic shorts called Irish and Ash.

I worked with Antonia Pagulatos for both films as i needed an expert fiddle player that could really capture the Irish vibes needed for both films. It was my first experience working remotely with a session player and if it hadn’t been anyone else but Antonia who knows what the results would have been. But you don’t become Damon Albarn’s go-to violin (and viola) player for the last 16 years (in ALL his many many projects) without being able to deliver. So I was delighted with the results. In fact in Ash she went way beyond the call of duty and I offered her a co-composer credit. She was that good!

Here are some of the musical moments in the films

For the past 4/5 months I have been worked hard on my first feature film: Burn It Down!

Perhaps I should qualify it as a feature length documentary, but one that had its premiere at the Prince Charles Theatre in Leicester square on the opening night of the BFI London Film Festival. Which was last Wednesday – Oct 6 2021…

It’s produced by Dorothy Street Pictures and is about the somewhat disastrous reboot of the Woodstock festival which took place 30 years on from the original in 1999. I worked closely with director Tim Travers-Hawkins and editor Mike Rolt, creating a score based around the musicality of the times. Lots of guitars then, but also a fair amount of tweaked and twisted electronic as well as poignant pianos and strings.

I also, managed to get permission from the Pixies to cover one of the most iconic tracks – Where is My Mind and it was great to get some of my favourite session players in to help me do it justice. We went as far from the original as possible with a piano and strings version. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Frank Black after all.

It was a really fun few months and am really happy with the result. It was also a thrill to see it play out in 5.1 on a big screen in Leicester Square!

The film is not yet out on general release but when it is I shall post details and of course some of my work.

In the meantime here is a link to the pre-view of the film

http://whatson.bfi.org.uk/LFF/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=61607DAA-EB27-46F6-A256-4C7D36DDB520&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=B3E91B5D-7B9B-4FE2-8002-5B2B687EA434

I have been pleased to be sending in regular work into a great Lift Music Library who are based down in Brighton. They have published a load of my world music pieces which is really cool.

They have also been taking some of my orchestral and guitar pieces and I hope to continue our partnership. You can find my stuff with this link:

http://search.liftmusic.co.uk/#/search/track/relevance/min-max/min-max/main/k_james/k_hannay/

So I finally moved from the old studio in March of this year into a beautiful new space at the end of the garden that i had custom designed. It took a while…it went from

to

With a bit of these in the build.

I have started collaborating with this incredible company Celestial that make spectacular creative light displays from drones. http://celestial.show/about/

I teamed up with my pal and synth wiz Jonjo Grisdale (last seen providing keys for the final Pink Floyd concert at a charity gig in 2007!) to provide the music for their featurette. Hopefully the start of many more collaborations.

Hello again.

Safe to say it’s been some time since i have posted. 2 Years! There’s a pretty obvious reason: our industry was crippled during the pandemic -so there was little work out there. And a less obvious reason. My website got lost in the cloud for 6 months without access. I won’t go into why – way too dull and infuriating- but after much huffing and puffing from me – someone at the hosting company managed to scoop it from the ether!

This notwithstanding, I have also been super busy in this period. I can safely say that i have done more composing and learning in the last 18 months years than in any other period in my life. Plus a few other life events to mention. In short since the first lockdown:

I built and equipped a new studio

Had my first child, Henry- 7 months old.

Did 6 x 3 month online music courses with Berklee Online…including two piano courses and orchestration course and a mixing course

Started regular work with 2 very exciting new brands and wrote the music for two short films

Had 20 odd tracks written and accepted by a Lift Music library in Brighton

And last but not least, I scored my first feature film. Burn It Down! which premiered at the London Film Festival last week.

I will do a separate post for a couple of those events so there is a bit of a chronological logbook for them and a couple of pics to boot.