Composer Luke Richards writes in the margins, dealing in the silences, the unease, and the spaces where emotion curdles into tension. From ITV’s I Fought the Law, which tells the story of Ann Ming’s 17-year fight to repeal the double jeopardy law in the UK after her daughter Julie’s murder in 1989, to Netflix’s Run Away, an edge-of-your-seat thriller about a desperate father hunting for his missing daughter while stumbling into a murder case that threatens to tear his family apart, Luke’s work soundtracks both shows. I caught up with Richards to talk about instinct, his creative process, and how to make music that doesn’t explain the story, but rather deepens it.
JG: Your scores for I Fought the Law and Run Away live in very different emotional registers. One leans gritty and procedural, the other tense and psychological. How do you decide what to score and what not to score, so the music doesn’t over-explain the drama?
Luke Richards: That’s always a key thing that I try to avoid. On I Fought the Law in particular, because that’s based on a real-life story, like, all of this happened to a real person. The mother of this woman, who was brutally murdered in the story, is still alive. She was quite involved in the show. And I think when I first had meetings with Erik Richter Strand, who’s the director, and Charlotte Webber, who’s one of the producers, we were all quite keen that because the story is so intense, you don’t need or want to have the music making itself overly known or like trying to pull emotional strings in the audience.
Audiences are quite smart, and they’ll pick up on that. They’ll start to feel a bit like, “Oh, I’m just getting manipulated to cry here.” With that show, it was all about conveying the emotions we wanted and finding the essence of what that was. If it could be achieved with just a solo cello and some very sparse piano chords, that felt a lot more authentic to the story versus, you know, let’s fire up an entire orchestra to get people’s eyes welling up.
Run Away is a very different show. With those Harlan Coben shows, there’s so much plot and propulsion. They’re almost like a Swiss watch where there are all these interlinking pieces. So the music for that, I think it was trying to find a way to keep the momentum running and tie over a lot of different scenes. You’ve often got four or five storylines happening simultaneously. The music is there to draw a narrative throughline between all of these seemingly disparate stories that by the end of episode eight, they all perfectly come together, and it’s very satisfying.
JG: When you first come onto a project, what’s the real starting point for you: the script, early edits, conversations with the director, or a gut reaction?
Luke Richards: On both of those shows, the first things that I would get were the scripts. And actually, on I Fought the Law, when I was pitching to get the job, they sent me all the scripts. I remember just sitting down and reading them in one session and being like, “Okay, I need to do this show because these scripts are amazing. This story is unbelievable.” That was the starting point. And then again, before they finished editing any of the episodes, I went in to meet the director, a couple of the producers and the editor. We all just sat in a room and watched some of the rough cuts and had a conversation about exact instrumentation, but it was about feeling and scale and kind of grander themes of what the score was gonna try and do, and I love that.
I love coming in on a project that early because I had a bit of time to just go away. I had some of the dailies to look at. I’d read all the scripts, and it meant that I could set myself a few weeks aside to play and go into the studio. You’re not putting any pressure on yourself. There are no immediate deadlines. It’s almost like going off and mixing your paints and just fiddling around with ideas, working with synths or recording bits and bobs.
Just having that freedom and permission to explore when you’re not under the gun is really lovely because you end up maybe going down a rabbit hole, exploring an idea, or finding an interesting sound that you might not have done if someone’s coming in and saying, “You’ve got to write five minutes of music in one day.” So I like to do that. Then usually by the end of that few weeks, I’ve got a little folder on my computer that’s got various little ideas or sounds, or motifs. I’ve often sent them to the directors and the editors as well, so they’re kind of playing with them in the early cuts. And it helps everybody get on the same page. Then once we’re to the point of like, “Okay, it’s locked, we’ve gotta go, hit the ground running,” you’ve already got the texture of the music, and hopefully the sound is already there. That’s the luxury of that approach.
And similarly, on Run Away, it was that sort of process. I spent a few weeks, ’cause a lot of that show is about propulsion and rhythm. It was just going and being like, “Right, let’s find some interesting percussive rhythms or synth loops,” or just whatever. Just odd, interesting sounds that I haven’t used in a score before. And again, just whack them all in a big folder, and then once it starts, you can start implementing that stuff.
JG: Both series deal with moral ambiguity and fractured truth. Do you think of your music as taking a side, or is it there to destabilize the viewer even further?
Luke Richards: In Run Away, it’s there to destabilize the viewer because that is how those shows work with Harlan. I think the ideal scenario is the audience is sitting there looking at pretty much every character on screen and being like, “Could that be the murderer?” or “Maybe it’s that person.” So I think with the score, it was fun to just always be seeding little bits of doubt into scenes with characters, just to help the viewer be like, “Oh! Maybe, maybe they are kind of dodgy. I thought that person was a good guy, and no, I’m not sure now.” That’s part of the fun.
I think in I Fought the Law, that was maybe not so much because we find out relatively quickly in the first episode that Ann’s daughter has been killed. It’s not like a traditional procedural. We find out what happens to the daughter, and then the remaining three episodes are trying to find who the killer is and then navigate all of the legal stuff. That show was more about capturing the fragility of Ann Ming, who was played by Sheridan Smith. Then, matching that inner fragility that she has as this grieving mother with this incredible drive and momentum.
Those were the two parts that I think the score would be navigating between, these tender emotions, but we also wanted to keep this sense of Ann going like “Okay, what’s next? Okay, I’ve hit this obstacle. This person has told me no,” or, “This government official tells me it can’t be done. How am I gonna get past that? Who do I talk to next?” That’s where the score landed on that show, rather than like moral ambiguity. I think we were all pretty much on Ann’s side. We were like, “Yeah, come on.” We want her to win and get justice.
JG: Was there a moment in either show where you felt like you got to do something particularly unique or different that you’d never done before with the score?
Luke Richards: In I Fought the Law, early on, the director told me that at the funeral for Julie Ming, who is the woman who was killed at her funeral, her mother knew that this “Ave Maria” Schubert piece of music was Julie’s favourite and apparently just played that piece of music on repeat throughout the entire funeral. We thought, especially once Julie’s character was gone on the show, there might have been an opportunity to have little hints of that piece of Schubert in the score. So even though Julie, as a character, has left the stage, in the show, there was a way to keep her spirit alive. That was quite fun and a fairly niche idea to do.
I’m not sure how many people were there, going “Oh, that sounds like a quote from ‘Ave Maria,’ and I think that’s Julie’s favourite piece of music.” But it was kind of fun to just thread that in and hope that people who do know that fact, or perhaps Ann herself when she watched the show, might have noticed that. I hadn’t done that before, kind of having that little theme and variations, quotations on a, on a piece of classical music.
In Run Away, because we go over multiple time periods, I was taking bits of musical ideas that were written for present-day scenes and then slowing them down a lot, so that when we’re in the past. Perhaps like quite an energetic, rhythmic, percussive sound that I’d written for a more upbeat present-day scene, then it’s slowed down like 70%, and you drop it into a slightly eerie, creepy scene from some point in the past. That was fun because it was perhaps a subconscious way to link those two scenes thematically. I hadn’t done that before, just playing with time stretching, basically as a way to explore different time periods in the show.
JG: Lastly, are there any sounds or structures or even genres that you’re itching to bring to a score that you haven’t yet?
Luke Richards: I would love to do a proper period drama. Maybe something that was not a traditional Downton Abbey type of thing, but like a more gothic period drama, where you could play with a mixture of modern orchestral instruments played in weird and wonderful ways. Finding various period-appropriate instruments from that era and recording them and then integrating that into the score, that would be quite fun.
In Run Away, there’s a lot of synths, and there’s a lot of percussion. It’s a very modern score. Usually, when I finish a score of a certain genre, I want to take an absolute left turn and do something completely different. And I think doing some sort of weird and wonderful period drama where you could just really go in deep and just mess around and make some odd and interesting sounds, that’s what I’d be drawn to right now.
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