From The Social Singing Choir to the soundtrack of True Detective, and WWF to Billie Eilish, Margate’s Hughie Gavin has got his hands full, but you’d never know

@jaklmusic @institute.collective @socialsingingchoir

Wow. Where to begin? Hughie Gavin seems far from stressed as he takes a break from work at his Institute Studios in Margate. I don’t know how, given the resultant chat, but he absolutely projects calm.

“I literally just got an email, about 10 minutes ago, saying that the advert for WWF is all signed off and it comes out at the end of this month,” he says. Hughie is referring to a piece of work that he and The Social Singing Choir have been putting together for the Christmas advertising campaign for the World Wide Fund for Nature.

It’s a community choir version of a Billie Eilish song - recorded at Big Jelly in Ramsgate - which has been forwarded to Eilish, somewhere in LA, to sign off for use as the backing track.

“With adverts, they’ll have an idea of what they want and they might mock something up really roughly and send you a rough cut of the video,” he explains.

“So the track had been signed off, but there was just the last bit of mapping. I was just hovering on the WeTransfer button to send it and I got a call saying they’ve moved the ending time by one second, and it meant that everything had to move. So it’s like two more days of work.”

Perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad if Hughie’s work with the Institute Collective on the soundtrack to True Detective series four wasn’t also in the offing. Meanwhile, the launch of Seaward Part 1, an EP inspired by the shoreline of east Kent, is also going live.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Having grown up around music, his father being renowned Australian opera singer Julian Gavin, Hughie’s life in the music industry has seen him fulfil numerous roles.

Attending the London Oratory School, he honed both his voice and also multiple instruments, while his experience of operating within a group of singers was refined constantly, with the school’s Schola performing and recording music for the likes of The Lord of The Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter movies.

“We did a lot of soundtracks,” he says. “It was a really high-level choir and I was just a kid at the time. From a really young age, being involved in that sort of world, it was just something that you did. It was exciting to do it, but you just don’t realise [the scale] at the time.”

While he continued to train with his father, it took his sister’s introduction to the likes of Jeff Buckley and Nick Drake to start him on his way into contemporary music.

“She was like ‘You might like this guy’ and I thought ‘All right, that’s it, I’m not doing classical music, I want to do this!’. It just blew my mind. And then I started writing my own songs and playing in bands.”

While continuing to ‘dep’ in choirs, Hughie and his band got signed only for things to go slightly awry.

“It just sort of went a bit wrong, they shelved the band, and we were sort of stuck on the label for about a year and a half. And then the label asked me to start writing for other people, and that’s when I started writing for other musicians.”

For four or five years, Hughie continued working with such names as Ellie Golding to create music and collaborated with labels like Universal Records, Ninja Tune, City Slang, Sub Pop and Moshi Moshi Records. However, it was his move to the Kent coast almost seven years ago that changed everything.

STARTING SOCIAL

“When we moved to Margate, we didn’t know anyone,” recalls Hughie. “I was doing a lot of songwriting by myself in the studio.

“That’s when I started The Social Singing Choir (TSSC) and I thought it’d be nice way to meet people in the town. I thought maybe 15 people would turn out, but we started with about 40. And now it’s 125 in the choir!”

Made up from people in the community, there’s no barrier to entry, just whoever wants to join, when there’s space.

“I’ve kind of kept it at a certain size now,” says Hughie. “Some people leave and some people join, but we keep it the same size, otherwise it just wouldn’t be manageable.”

It wasn’t long before the choir was called into action, with Hughie’s friends in the industry calling on TSSC to feature on tracks and perform live.

“It just snowballed from there. We’ve been going for six years now - there’s some opportunities that are perfect for the community choir where you can say ‘Right, four weeks for rehearsals and we can get that perfect’. And, actually, it’s the sound people want the most, you know, a wall of sound. Sometimes I’m standing in front and we do a gig or a recording, there’s an insane amount of emotion and joy and sort of energy that just radiates from the choir. It’s amazing.”

In fact, TSSC has supported SELF ESTEEM, sung at the opening of The Turner Prize ceremony and will soon be providing the backing track to the WWF’s new campaign.

However, as the jobs started to come in, Hughie began to realise that things needed to be turned around quickly and decided to create a contemporary vocal ensemble that included professional singers - many of who were already part of TSSC - and so the Institute Collective was born.

“It’s more kind of audition-based,” says Hughie. “A way to describe it is, a group of professional musicians.”

Some of the members include Will Rees formerly of Mystery Jets, Anna Kristoferson of Roleplay, Robbie Redway of United Freedom Collective,contemporary classical singer Lauren Alonso and jazz singer Meg Bird.

“It’s like a pool of musicians that people can come and use. I just thought there were all these amazing musicians in Margate.”

The smaller group size and professional standard of the singers meant that the Institute Collective could react quickly to work.

“It needed to be people who can have one rehearsal and then go. And that’s really how it started about two years ago. We did a few live sessions with some like Naima Bock and created a few tastemaker sessions to get something that we could use as a kind of calling card. And then someone must have seen that and an agent got in contact to represent us and now we do lots of film and TV stuff.”
While creating music for Silent Witness and You & Me on ITV is one thing, getting the call for the True Detective comeback on HBO is something else.

“It was quite scary, to be honest,” says Hughie. “You think, especially that first series, it’s just one of the best things I’ve ever seen. And I was just, like, I just didn’t want to f*ck it up, basically!”

Starring Jodie Foster, Kali Reis and Christopher Ecclestone, the show is set in snowy Alaska and the show’s composer, Vince Pope, was looking for an ethereal sound to match.

“We’ve been doing it since March, we’ve done quite a lot of the soundtrack. The composer, who I’ve worked with before, has given me a bit more of a leash - he would send over everything and I would suggest singers and then I would record everything and send it to him.

“By the end I was doing the arrangements. In episode five, there was a three- or four-minute scene where he was, like, ‘You know what, you just score it and then I’ll send you some notes. So I did the strings and all the percussion and all the sound effects, as well as the choral stuff, which was amazing.

“One of the Institute Collective is an artist called Anna Kristoferson [also known as Roleplay]. She’s from Sweden and sang in choirs all her childhood. So she’s got this amazing sort of pure Nordic, high-sounding voice and she’s been quite a big prominent part of the soundtrack because there’s something in it that feels wintery in some ways, like, you have to have been born in Sweden and lived there [to get that sound].”

Hughie, who also releases music under the name Jakl (yeah, there’s even more we could talk about), says his family’s decision to move to the Kent coast has been the best they’ve ever made and they have used what he calls “the extra time and space” to make connections and work with the community.

“I think living somewhere like this allows you to have a little bit more time to build passion projects, as well as obviously working and doing all the regular job sort of stuff,” he says.

“There is something really special about the energy in Margate and from people who are arriving in and people who have been here forever - you know, there’s a real want to collaborate and do stuff. You need that spirit of wanting to build something that is more than the sum of its parts.”

That desire to get involved has also seen Hughie work at Canterbury Christ Church University in Canterbury, lecturing as part of the music course.

“I loved it. I absolutely loved it. Just working with the singers who are really keen to progress,” he says. “They have that energy. You see that improvement. There’s a great mix of performance and production, which sits very similar in what I do.

“Robert Stillman, who got me into it, runs the department and he’s on tour with The Smile [the side project of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke] at the moment, which is really cool.”

No, Hughie, you’re really cool. I’d be f*cking stressed out.