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When Stourbridge grebo rock outfit Pop Will Eat Itself split up after ten years, singer and keyboard player Clint Mansell found himself in New York with no real idea what to do next. He certainly had no notion that within five years he'd be one of the most in- demand new film music composers in the business.
He'd always been into films -heaven knows the Poppies had sampled enough of them -and they'd often talked about trying to get into doing soundtracks, but he'd never really considered it as a serious option. But then serendipity stepped in.
'My then girlfriend was a friend of Darren Aronofsky's producer,' he explains on the phone from LA. 'He told her they were going to make this film called Pi and they needed someone to do the music. She said they should meet me.'
Meet they did and found they shared a common taste in music and a common opinion on the generally poor quality of modern soundtracks compared to something like Halloween. They hit it off and Mansell was commissioned to write some music for the opening titles. The plan was to licence various electronic music tracks for the rest of the film, but every time one proved too costly for their limited budget Clint would be asked to come up with a replacement. At the end of the day he'd written about 70 minutes worth of music. And he got to appear in the film.
Now a soundtrack composer by default, he says it was particularly fortunate that Aronofsky's limited funds meant that Pi took ages to edit.
'It must have taken about eight months which was very convenient because it gave me time to write and I could mess around to see what worked and what didn't,' he admits.
'It was a fundamental part of learning the craft. If I'd been told I had six weeks to do a score I couldn't have done it, because I simply didn't...