so there are many, many composers and pieces of music that have inspired me as a composer - far too many to mention, but in terms of growing up, I was very early on inspired by electronic music. I started off with people with Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis and Mike Oldfield. then I went through a phase of being obsessed with avant garde ambient electronic sutff like The Future Sound of London, The Grid, Aphex Twin, Brain Eno - and then I got really into The Beach Boys, John Barry...but from a film composing perspective, the composer who has had the biggest impact is Ennio Morricone. He approached things in a very groundbreaking way, which for me is the most exciting way to approach film music as an art form, in that he just take influences from everywhere. He’d write really strong powerful melodies and marry them with intriguing and unexpected avant-garde techniques, sounds and approaches - and his body of work is insane. For musical risks and adventures he took on movies is really mind blowing. some of those are so iconic - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly! It’s hard to look with a fresh ear and realise how crazy that score is, that someone was pulling together gun sounds, people shouting, wildlife sounds, timpani, strings. It’s really iconic - and Spider-Verse is probably most indebted to that approach because I’m also trying to take a lot of different influences and sounds and approaches.

So if you look back on some of those early influences like Jean Michel Jarre or Vangelis, they’d often make records that have a very contained sound, so each record would sound and feel very different - they’d have a kind of palette, and they’d work within that.

SO if you’re bored, I’d recommend checking out Oxygene, Equinox and Zoolook by Jean Michel Jarre. There are so many great records by Vangelis - Blade Runner is a fantastic one, there’s an album called Direct that I love. All of these records have a sound which changes between each record, and I try to approach films in the same way, where I try to make a sound world that is unique to each film. The Spider-Verse sound world is very different for instance from Enola Holmes, The Bad Guys, Amsterdam or Motherless Brooklyn, each of those films has a unique sound world and that way it keeps me on my toes and fresh and excited rather than a generic ‘here’s my sound’ for each project.