Will write for music: Interview with Margate musician Xav Clarke
Musician and composer Xav Clarke talks Itchy Teeth, international cartoons and Red Herring
For fans of long-running Cartoon Network show The Amazing World of Gumball, and there’s a lot of them, Xav Clarke is one of the key composers behind the BAFTA-winning show.
For fans of psychedelic pop band Itchy Teeth, Xav and fellow Margatian Charlie Hannah are key members of the quartet that is approaching 20 years as a group.
For fans of… OK, that’s enough. Xav is a composer, musician, bandmate and solo artist that, as far as I can tell, is a one-man music factory.
He has worked for cartoon royalty on Hanna-Barbera’s The Heroic Quest of the Valiant Prince Ivandoe and, most recently, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-produced Wolfboy and The Everything Factory for Apple TV+.
As a guitarist he has appeared in Danny Boyle’s film Yesterday, performed on soundtracks and worked with acclaimed composers Daniel Pemberton and Michael Giacchino. Plus, he’s a very nice chap with funky hair. And while Itchy Teeth are still doing bits – supporting The Libertines at the Albion Rooms back in December and continuing to play live – a brand-new project is about to launch.
The Amazing World of Gumball
From his studio in Thanet, Xav has scored and written original songs for the intimate feature documentary Red Herring.
“I’m releasing a soundtrack album alongside it,” explains Xav. “The album contains my original songs and score and, in the same way that About a Boy combined the two, this album is also an interesting place where songs inform the score and the score informed the songs.”
The documentary film features director and lead Kit Vincent, who is diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour. The 24-year-old enlists his family for an intimate and darkly humorous journey to help them come to terms with his illness. Kit’s mum, a community nurse who spends much of her time caring for dying patients, was traumatised by the thought that her son would be one of them.
Meanwhile, his dad, Lawrence, threw himself into a series of obscure diversion tactics – from growing cannabis in his spare room to relinquishing his lifelong atheism and secretly attending a local synagogue.
“If music is at the centre of something, it’s always a damn good reason to do it”
What Kit captures with his camera traverses the fine line between humour and grief, detailing his family’s acceptance of his fate and celebrating the relationships that keep us going, particularly in life’s darker moments.
“It’s one of those projects where everything about it felt right,” says Xav. “From a personal point of view, I had lost my dad a couple of years before, so I was already looking at exploring those themes of life and death in music and stuff. And then I got approached by Red Herring. I think there’s something that they really related to in the music and the songs that I had.
“Kit and I got together for a meeting and within the first minute had worked out that we grew up literally down the road from each other in Dorset. So that was a really weird coincidence. Lots of the film was shot in Dorset, so it was nice to connect in that way as well, to realise that we’re from the same place.
“I went for a drink at the pub with Kit and his dad, because a lot of the documentary centres on the relationship between those two, and it was so nice to see that relationship between the two people, to be there and try to feel this special bond and what instrumentation and what kind of melodies I was going to pick for that.”
While the emotional nature of the documentary was very different to a lot of the other work Xav is involved with, the light-hearted nature and dark humour of its approach lifted the pressure on the work.
“You’re absolutely right to expect it to be [pressurised], but I think the nature of the documentary is that it’s darkly funny as well,” he says. “The blurb immediately takes you to, you know, think about themes of death and stuff. But I think for me, when I started watching some of the footage, the immediate thing that jumped out was that thought of ‘OK, so I guess by thinking that life could be taken away from us, what we’re looking at here is just what it is actually like to be alive’.
“And so it’s really just about having these amazing relationships with people and the transitory nature of them.
“For the music, I wanted to approach it from a really positive place. Although you know death is a tough subject to talk about, approaching it from a different side really gave me this freedom for it to find its own voice.”
Prior to the cinema release of the film, which has already won the Raindance Maverick Award at the British Institute Film Awards, Xav released two singles from the album.
The first, Growing Up Is For Losers, features a video directed by Kit himself that was shot on 16mm film, following two kids with heads full of dreams and adventure who eventually grow up to be a very disillusioned Kit and Xav.
This will then be followed by the film’s title song, Being Alive, released as a single on 3rd May, ahead of the full album release on 17th May and a release celebration at Margate’s Where Else? on May 22nd.
THE CREATIVE ITCH
Four years after moving to Margate, Xav continues to be entrenched in all areas of music, from composing scores to writing and playing live with various outfits, including Itchy Teeth.
“I’ve realised over the years, I’m the kind of musician who needs every side of music taken care of,” says Xav. “I really need to play live. I really need to play with other musicians and I need to release music that’s just like a random song I’ve written. It just feels great to write, and I need to do that.”
It was during a break in touring across Europe with Itchy Teeth that Xav fell into the world of composing for TV and film.
“I used to work part-time in this post-production studio in London called Fitzrovia Post and used to help out with little bits like sound effects and also just being a runner, making coffees and things like that,” explains Xav. “I was just mucking about with a ukulele one day and one of the producers of a cartoon said ‘Oh, we need a song for one of the cartoons, would you be up for giving it a go?’.
“And they paid me a fee, which at the time was ‘Wow, I can’t believe I got paid money to do some music’. Luckily, that song just kind of went down really well in the world of cartoons.”
It turned out that the song was for the cult show The Amazing World of Gumball.
“I wasn’t aware of it at the time,” says Xav. “After that, I just kind of gradually got asked to do more and more little bits in that show. And being a touring musician at that time, with no record label or anything, whatever we sold in merch would be our earnings that night. We were paying rent and then suddenly there was this other trickle of money every now and then. I thought ‘Maybe this is a good avenue to pursue’.”
Of course, the process of composing for TV and film is different to that of writing music to release as an artist.
“It’s cool because, in a way, it’s a bit more egoless. A director has had this amazing vision for the show, which they really want to get across, and you’re this cog, with all these other amazing cogs that are trying to make this great thing.
“So it’s really being part of a team. And it’s trying to get their vision across, rather than your own. When they align, it’s the best feeling.”
But Xav, who will also be playing festivals this summer as part of indie pop group Mozart Estate, continues to scratch his itch for being in bands focused on playing live music.
“The camaraderie of being four best buds getting into loads of capers and things going wrong on tours, sharing a goal and a dream together, and just making lots of music, it’s like a holistic thing,” he says. “If music is at the centre of something, it’s always a damn good reason to do it.”
