Fighting With My Family Composer Vik Sharma Discusses Collaborating With Stephen Merchant and the Style He Used for the Film

– WrestlingInc.com and Nick Hausman recently interviewed Fighting With My Family composer Vik Sharma. Below are some highlights from the interview, courtesy of WrestlingInc.

Sharma on director Stephen Merchant being very hands-on:“Yeah, Stephen’s a very hands-on guy, so he executive produced An Idiot Abroad, but was kind of very hands-on in the edit suite, so he had an opportunity to work with my music firsthand, and we actually knew each other socially, and he was already immensely successful, so I didn’t ever bug him for work. But he fed back saying, ‘this stuff really works – I really like it.’ And then, when he had the opportunity to work on the Hello Ladies, which was his comedy series for HBO, he approached me to write the music for that, to write the music for the pilot. So yeah, we’ve worked together on a number of occasions, and, yeah, he’s fantastic to work with. He’s a complete joy.”

Vik Sharma on the style he used for the film: “I am king of the comedy tuba, man and there’s nobody who can touch me! But, Fighting With My Family, there are loads of jokes and it’s funny, but it’s also serious and quite moving. And so, this was sort of like an opportunity to dip into a sort of a more serious style as well. That’s what I was doing, sort of the more comedic stuff. The thing about Stephen Merchant is that it’s character driven. His comedies are more character driven, so it’s not comedy music per se. Like the stuff we did for Hello Ladies was more blue-eyed soul, which was loads of fun to do, but it was all kind of like electric keyboards and kind of like had a real groove to it and a soulfulness to it because that’s kind of like what you want to evoke in the character. But similarly, doing Fighting With My Family, which is obviously about Paige and we wanted an edge and an attitude. And that’s why we went to the guitar and kind of a British punk sound and that’s the kind of sensibility we landed on for that, so it’s not comedic per se, but I do tend to do a lot of comedy work.”

Sharma on working with Blur’s Graham Coxon for the score: “Stephen was sort of fascinated by this idea about working with an A-list guitar player, so the number of people that were kind of expert in kind of punk music and were well known started to reduce. But coincidentally, I kind of live… he’s not a neighbor, but I live kind of close to Graham and I’d seen him around and had an opportunity to go out and have a cup of coffee with him and I pitched the movie to him and he was kind of into it immediately.”

Sharma on recording with Graham Coxon: “I’ve got a little writer’s studio and he came into the studio and kind of picked up a guitar and started kind of jamming. And there was a kind of instant chemistry and thankfully he liked the stuff that I’d been writing. And he would kind of come in and he vapes like a complete champion, so he kind of came in with huge plumes of kind of custard tart vape, and would just pull out these extraordinary hand-built guitars that he had made, and he would just go for it. I would sort of lay out all of the pieces, play the demos, and literally within seconds he would pick it up and start thrashing out, and I would sort of grab 20 or 30 takes of his guitar and it was obviously an absolute joy. I, like [Hausman], I was around in the 90s and if you grew up in the UK, the DNA of the [Rolling] Stones in the 60s and [Led] Zeppelin, and then The Clash, and then bands like The Cure, it leads to Blur, and so it was a complete thrill that he decided to come on board to the project.”