Murray Gold: "Doctor Who is the hardest job I've ever done"

Now 55, Murray lives in north London with his wife Gemma (an actor and dancer) and their two daughters.

This summer, Radio Times caught up with him to talk about his life and career and his imminent Doctor Who Prom at the Royal Albert Hall.

Murray invited us to his home recording studio – his attic where all the magic happens…

RT: Talk me through the actual process – from the music coming from your imagination all the way up to being realised as an orchestral score. What steps do you go through?

MG: A lot of the music arises just from watching episodes of whatever I'm working on, be it Doctor Who or anything else. There's a mutually flattering, symbiotic relationship between music and film. A good picture can make the most humdrum music memorable and, vice versa, a piece of music can absolutely elevate the picture.

I always feel like the music is invented just by watching and listening to the story. I block out any sense that I'm composing and just put my hands on the piano, like an old-fashioned, theatrical organist. I play along and record it. There's a good function called "retrospective record", which buffers it all as you play.

RT: And do you work every day?

MG: Yeah. This stretch, coming back to do Doctor Who again is, I swear, the hardest job I've ever done. I don't really know why. Maybe because the expectations are so high, the intensity of the music is unrelenting. I realised that, until a few months ago, I'd only had three days off – one for Christmas Day and a couple around my birthday. Otherwise, I've been working every day.

RT: You're finding it more difficult than before, when you did it for many years?

MG: The last time it was this difficult was in 2005 when Doctor Who was getting off the ground. You don't have any library to fall back on. And every episode now is wall-to-wall music. It’s virtually continuous.

RT: Your decision or somebody else’s?

MG: It's a branding decision. It's sort of, "This is the product we're making, where music really powers the episode." Music is on the front foot all the way. It's elevated.

RT: So, what we largely hear is that what you've created here in your studio. When does the orchestral element come in?

MG: There's a bit of a misunderstanding about that. We had four or five sessions with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales across last year, which covered the three 60th anniversary specials, the Christmas special and the eight episodes [of the 2024 season]. What we can record with the orchestra is about 40 minutes [per session], so that’s 200 minutes, about three hours’ worth. So seven hours of the music has to be manufactured by me here.

RT: You’ve used choirs and vocalists before – are you using them again now?

MG: Yes, there are quite a few songs, or moments of singing, but that's often just woven into the music. A lot of the time, really, the choir is just another instrument that happens along in the last 10 minutes of an episode.

RT: How does the collaboration with the orchestra work? Do you do the orchestrations?

MG: [Conductor] Alastair King does them, and I think he's been doing that since probably the second series of Peter Capaldi. The National Orchestra dropped off when Segun came in. [Segun Akinola was the composer for all the Jodie Whittaker episodes.] I guess he wanted to source his music elsewhere, understandably. A different approach, the more approaches the better.

We did our first recordings in January 2023 for what's now known as series one, and it was really nice to see them all again. I know the section leaders and some individuals I have a particular relationship with. About 25 per cent have been there across the whole thing since 2005.

[Murray is no stranger to the BBC Proms. There have been three previous Doctor Who Proms – in 2008, 2010 and 2013. His score for BBC One’s natural history series Life Story was heard at a special concert in 2015 and reprised in the 2022 Earth Prom.]

RT: What can you tell us about your fourth Doctor Who Prom? It’s being performed twice on Monday 26th August.

MG: We’re making a choice about what the concert repertoire is going to be. We’re at the beginning of a cycle. I suppose there may be future concerts in the next 10 years, judging by the speed at which tickets sold. Both concerts sold out after an hour.

But a lot of the music has never been played, other than the first time when we recorded it for the show. It's not available on CD because none of those have been released yet. It mostly hasn't been titled, so we're botching together titles for the suites of music.

RT: Yes, years back some pieces became very familiar because you could then get them on CD or hear them in other forms. So they were drummed into people's minds.

MG: Yes, so this Prom isn't going to be a jukebox musical because people aren't necessarily going in already humming and knowing the pieces. There's a lot of new stuff, and there were a couple of things that we just had to slice out. It’s a shame because there's this really great climax to the [forthcoming 2024] Christmas episode – moving, heartfelt scenes.

RT: Is that just instrumental, or singing as well?

MG: It’s choral. I want the Prom to be as choral as possible, so they'll sing and ululate in other pieces where previously there might not have been a choir.

RT: So you’re not previewing any tracks from the next Christmas special or the 2025 season?

MG: That was the first thing that went. We have a hard 'out' for all sorts of legal, union and logistical reasons. We've got to be off the stage and have the lorries loaded up at a certain time. When we did all the calculations, something had to go. It's about a two-hour window. We've also got little films, specially made inserts, video inserts with Ncuti [Gatwa]...

We've got a suite from the specials around David Tennant's reappearance as the Doctor. We have a suite from some of the lighter episodes and another from some of my favourites like 73 Yards and Boom, so slightly darker. And then we've got one from the finale, which will be the horror one, plus the melodrama of the ending. All of them have an eye towards the staging as well, so for each one there's something interesting in the theatrics. It's definitely a visual thing as well.

We’ve got a Segun Akinola suite. And then we've got a few of the old favourites. We've tried to balance it out so that the fans aren’t disappointed by the band coming on and only playing stuff from their latest album which no one ever wants to hear. Hopefully it all fits together quite nicely.

And we’ve got this really wonderful Russian soprano who lives here and she's busy at the Royal Opera House. I think that's a bit of a coup, actually. She's quite a star of her world. She’s going to be singing Vale Decem and Abigail’s Song [Doctor Who tracks from 2010]. So they are callbacks to another era. We sent her those two and that was our audition, really, for her to see if she’d be interested and she loved the songs. And that will give her an opportunity to be heard by a younger audience.

RT: Has it been decided who's hosting it?

MG: It's Catherine Tate. I'm really happy it's her because she's an icon of the show. She actually dropped me a note after the specials aired, saying nice things about what I'd done. Oh God, she's great!

RT: What were your early influences in music?

MG: When I started playing the piano, I used to love Haydn. He has lots of folk influences. I always loved the harmonic minor. I found major key stuff incredibly boring in the classical repertoire, but as soon as it went minor or was playing a little bit with chromatics, I loved it.

I like vivid colours. It's hard to get away from Bach because everything modern and everything ancient is in there all at once, because it's got the shape of Philip Glass and house music, it’s atomic and it unwinds and it's spiritual and it goes looking for a kind of trippy druggy place as you ascend the mountain seeking God!

RT: Were you into house and dance music? I'm thinking about when we first got to know you with Queer as Folk, which was very dance-y and upbeat.

MG: Yeah, but I really loved funk more and early hip hop, which had its roots in funk. I also loved acid house because that felt intellectual to me, because you would just take one baseline on a TB-303 [synthesizer], it was very minimal, and then the filter would open up and then it would mutate across time. I loved the obsessiveness of it and it's a very odd idea of music.

This is a grand reduction, but it comes from an eastern tradition more than probably the western idea of melody and harmony. Just an awareness of time. Philip Glass has that and Ravi Shankar has that, and it makes you aware of the present and the infinite at the same time.

RT: Can you remember when you first met Russell T Davies for Queer as Folk in the late '90s?

MG: Yeah, sure. They’d just parted company with a very eminent composer and were looking for somebody else. There was a meeting of the great and the good at Red production company, which included Russell and Nicola Shindler and Paul Abbott. Vanity Fair had just been on BBC One, the 1998 version with Natasha Little, and I'd done this mad score for it. Everyone was quite taken by it, so my name came up.

Russell rang me up. We met in a hotel in Swiss Cottage and just started talking about Vanity Fair, Queer as Folk and Doctor Who. I didn't know Doctor Who still existed. I'd loved it when I was a kid but I hadn't thought about it much since. I said, "Ark in Space was my favourite episode. I always remember the moment when the man takes his hand out of his pocket and it's parasitic and green." Russell said, "He's Noah." And I thought, "How does he remember the names of these characters?"

Another time, Russell and Nicola were meeting me at my flat to spot cues [choose music] for Queer as Folk. I saw them coming and put some toast on in case they were hungry. When I answered the door, they said, "Let's go for a pizza," so we went straight out. The toaster was malfunctioning and when we got back there was quite a spectacle. There were three fire engines and all the windows were gone. I’d burnt down the flat.

I’ve been lucky. I was doing Vanity Fair when I was 28, and haven't ever been unemployed since then. There was Shameless, so many legendary shows. I've always been the composer of the northern poets, whether it's Sally Wainwright or Paul Abbott or Russell.

RT: You took an unconventional path into making music and composing.

MG: I went to Cambridge to study history. At Corpus Christi. Lovely college, absolutely wonderful place. I still dream about how I f***ed up there. I just did music and theatre and didn’t focus.

I remember lying in bed surrounded by broken glass the day the results came out. People came in shouting about their results and I shouted, "What did I get?" They said, "You got a 2-2, Murray." And I was like, "Oh…" and carried on sleeping, surrounded by the broken mirrors that had fallen off the wall around me. A fitting end to my academic career. Now I sponsor one or two students a year at Corpus Christi.

RT: Was music something that you felt was a drive within you?

MG: No more than being in a band and dying at 30 seemed quite an attractive option. Luckily that didn't happen. I mean, David Bowie was my idol, and from an early age I started dressing like Bowie. My relatives used to say, "Oh, here comes little Bowie!" I had the big baggy trousers and jacket cut off here. I was really into all the early Bowie stuff when I was 13, so I was listening to Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs.

[We pause for Murray’s 11am toast break. Then, back in the studio, attention turns to his array of computers, keyboards and other gadgetry that dominates the attic.]

RT: Talk me through the various machines.

MG: The main thing you need to worry about are these Apple Macs, and they all contain rows and rows of instruments. There's five in total and I can access all of them up here on this screen. There’s an analogue reverb unit – some things are irreplaceable and the digital domain just doesn't do them as well. And speakers. I do nearly all my mixing on headphones anyway. The rest is just disc drives. There are synthesizers over there and my Moog.

RT: Did you have an Apple genius to help set it all up?

MG: No, I did it all myself because nobody comes here and nobody helps me.

[In one corner there’s a cosy little spot for Murray’s daughters (aged five and seven) to sit and play.]

RT: When they're up here, do you let them hear what you're doing?

MG: Yeah, I let them hear it and sometimes they say, "That's really good, Dad." But they're not allowed to watch Doctor Who yet – or anything I do. It's too scary. I feel that the current sensibility is somewhat delicate.

So, unlike me, who was able to watch Doctor Who at three, one of my daughters is seven and the sensibilities of a seven-year-old are, I think, way too delicate now to watch Doctor Who. To have those scary monsters in her head. She just wouldn't sleep.

RT: What was it like working with both Russell and Steven Moffat?

MG: They're just like brothers with slightly different temperaments. Steven’s brilliant and Russell is such an optimistic person. He obviously has a dark side he can access, but he is a force for good. But I like the work of misanthropes as well.

RT: Are there any episodes that have presented more of a challenge than others?

MG: Bad episodes of any drama are the hardest to do. I was thinking the BAFTAs should have an award for special achievement in the world of bad drama. And I don't mean that ironically or to humiliate anyone, but just because it's so much easier to write a good score to a good picture, and a lot of the time you are making really good stuff but other times you're the last line of defence. You're in a completely defensive role and trying to save the team.

I mean, Steven always very kindly would say, "Oh, you’ve saved us so many times." And I would never ask him which he was talking about or if it was in any way true, but I work away until it's really good, or at least I feel like it's as good as it can be, and obviously that is going to take a lot longer when what arrives is disappointing.

Are you interested in hearing some music? I'll open up these templates. I'll just show you something. I have my family of instruments here, so there's strings, another set of strings, effects strings, arpeggios, just every instrument under the sun…

[He starts a composition, fades in a full range of strings, adds a metronomic beat, plays notes on the keyboard and adds some reverb.]

Then I’ll play a nice lyrical legato, and let's put in some of these pulses. So, you see you've already got an orchestral backdrop with a modern contemporary cinematic pulse going through it. All I need now is a picture!

RT: I loved that. It started off sounding a bit Scandi noir and then it was coming closer to something from Doctor Who.

MG: Trying to pull back is always a good thing. Well, I'm not going to do anything with that. [He hits delete.] That's all now been destroyed. It no longer exists. It was just for that tiny moment.

RT: Well, it's recorded on my device, so that will be a Murray rarity.

[Suddenly, on impulse, he plays the jaunty theme for Matt Smith’s Doctor from 2010. It’s thrilling to hear the composer play it in his creative space.]

MG: I haven't played that for a while… Whisper it quietly to Russell, but the chord sequences behind Doctor Who are very 1950s melodrama-ish, but orchestrated in a way that gives them motive power.

RT: I wonder what music Russell listens to when he's writing.

MG: He always says he just listens to me – but I don't know how much to believe that.

[To round off the morning, Murray plays – and sings – a few opening bars of David Bowie’s Changes. Gold, indeed.]

Read more in Radio Times magazine.

The Doctor Who Prom will take place twice on Monday 26th August at 2.30pm and 7pm in the Royal Albert Hall. The 7pm Prom will be live on BBC Radio 3, and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days afterwards. It will be televised on BBC TV later in the year.

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