Aaron May & David Ridley On Scoring Parallels Between Jamie and Eddie for ‘Adolescence’

The score for Adolescence growls and unfurls. There is an unpredictable quality to it, but it’s also paired with these gentle, youthful vocals that indicate how we, when we are young, are not fully in control of our emotions. We haven’t lingered enough with them yet. The score by Aaron May and David Ridley has a dangerous, electronically propulsive quality that reinforces the theme of not knowing what might be lurking through the devices we are so attached to.

What kind of music did you listen to when you were fourteen? For some of us, especially as we experience growing pains, we turn to music to help us cope or amp us up. Like Ridley admits, I don’t think my aural cocktail of Ace of Bass, The Living End, and David Bowie would exist together in my personal Spotify. What kind of music did May and Ridley listen to whenthey were Jamie’s age?

“I was at music specialist school playing a lot of violin,” Ridley says. “I was listening to a lot of Bach, Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, but I was also really into Radiohead. Weirdly, “Hailf to the Thief” is the album that really got me into Radio, which is kind of glitchy and propulsive and dark and about the system of bullying. The track “Wolf at the Door” is fantastic.”

“I would say that when I was 13 was probably the age of me listening to music that didn’t carry into me being older,” May says. “It was the early 2000s, and I was listening to a lot of Slipknot, black metal and death metal. Then I went off into more of a UK hip hop phase and then into electronic music.”

There is a connection between father and son if you listen to the entirety of May and Ridley’s score. At only four episodes, Adolescence hits the ground running by dragging Owen Cooper’s Jamie out of bed for his arrest and questioning at the station. The ride there, though, is scored by an energetic, frantic section accompanied by the sound of a ticking clock. In this case, I couldn’t help but imagine a time bomb about to be set off.

“We worked with Philip [Barantini] on, I think, eight projects now, and we’ve scored every one of them,” Ridley says. “Before we really started the music, he had seen Jamie in the van scene, and he wanted to have a propulsion through that passage because the intensity is so high in the house. They pull Jamie out of his bed, and his family is traumatized by the SWAT team barging in. The sound designer, James Drake, had already started working on that scene, and they put a ticking clock in. That helped Phil and the sound team give that scene some momentum, and Phil asked us if we could incorporate it into our score. We used it as a starting off point to build the track around it, and it got a bit difficult since at that early stage we were thinking about putting sounds together.

We realized, though, that the van scene allowed us to split that whole passage into two tracks. The first hald, you get this throbbing, pulsing, droney section, but the van is also very present when you watch the series: the revving engine. Halfway through, at a specific moment in the dialogue, all that sound and throbbing-ness just drops away and you get this weightlessness.”

In episode four, we follow Jamie’s parents, Eddie and Manda, to Wainwright’s so his father can find something to remove graffiti off the side of his van. The track starts off with a repeating, heavy thudding sound before the ticking sound returns, sounding, somehow, more mature. It’s almost as if Ridley and May are scoring towards both men’s heartbeats.

“With that cue, our approach to scoring the series came with the word ‘tears,’ and we played with the level of that during the entire show,” May says. “There’s a more functional level that the music played, at times, which was to roll with the tension of the scenes and also help transitional points. But then there was a second point which happens once or twice each episode where the music really comments and reflects the emotionality of the struggle. It’s a bit more impressionistic and abstract. With that cue, it interestingly ties in with a moment with the ticking clock. When Eddie is walking through Wainwright’s and people are coming up to him, and he’s really having an internal emotional moment. We built that whole sequence on a tempo of 60 BPM, and it matched the same tempo as the clock. You get this parallel between the two worse, most extreme moments in these characters’ lives and they happen to be father and son.”

If you listen to the tracks ‘Come Here You Little’ and ‘Eddie Breaks’ together, the haunting, innocently strained vocals will gnaw at you. Stephen Graham, as Eddie, is masculine and tough (“He’s a bloke!” Ridley says, smiling), but the vocals in the latter track grow in intensity as the father’s emotions become more outward. May reveals that a particular person helped make that singing even more intense.

“We made the arrangement for “Fragile” that comes at the end of episode two, and we had two days with this choir from the school from where the episode was shot,” May says. “There’s about fifteen kids in this choir, and then they sent a note out asking if any of the kids wanted a few days off school. After we recorded “Fragile,” we had a bit more time, and we recorded a series of textures, scales and exercises. We peppered them throughout the score, and they blended really well with the textures. With “Eddie Breaks,” that was because it was such a climactic point, and we thought that that would be the most appropriate time to bring the choir forward.

Alongside those sounds is the voice of Emilia Holliday, the actress who plays Katie Leonard, and she is accompanied by the choir at that point. It shows the enormity of the moment as it sounds different from the rest of the school, and I think it helps that we used the recordings of the choir a little bit more subliminally prior to that breaking point.”

Adolescence is streaming now on Netflix.