Ian Williams Talks New Soundtrack Albums, Musical Memories And More

As previously revealed via classified intel from our man in the know, London-based musician/composer Ian Williams has today issued a companion piece to his recent soundtrack album of music for the fascinating 2023 French documentary ‘Le Mystère Lucie (Des Espions Contre Le Nazisme)’ / Codename Lucy (Spies Against Nazism). We were very fortunate to talk with him about his new soundtrack albums, musical memories and more: 

When did you begin writing music?

In the late 1970s. I had a piano teacher that encouraged improvisation, which I enjoyed since I wasn’t a very good pianist, technically-speaking, and I could pretend that all the wrong notes I played were deliberate.

What is your earliest musical memory?

Getting my first WH Smith record tokens for my birthday and buying Sweet’s ‘Teenage Rampage’, Wizzard’s ‘Angel Fingers’ and Wings’ ‘Helen Wheels’ singles. Still got them and still play them!

Your new soundtrack album for the 2023 French documentary ‘Le Mystère Lucie (Des Espions Contre Le Nazisme)’ | Codename Lucy (Spies Against Nazism) is out now. How did you want to approach the making of the album?

Luckily, the director gave me lots of unedited clips, just to get an idea of the mood and visuals before getting stuck into the edit, and just let me fire off a load of ideas. He has similarly wide-ranging tastes to me, and as we’d already done another film before this one, he knew he would just get stuff he could try out alongside his edit-in-progress, which meant no need for a temp track either.

Where did you record the album and who produced it?

Produced and recorded by me at Studio Slaughterback, apart from the director recording his partner playing the cello part at home on an iPhone!

Do you have any favoured stage instruments, effects, pedals, microphones etc?

My Blüthner upright piano is my pride and joy! Made in 1899, sounds much more mellow than modern pianos. Been loving the Arturia Minifreak since I got it, and I recently got a Taishogoto, a kind of Japanese table-top guitar with typewriter keys which is a lot of fun, especially when you put it through a few groovy pedals – I can see it figuring in quite a few new things…

Where is your hometown and could you please describe it in five words?

Canterbury. Permanently gridlocked heritage shopping-mall.

How did the opportunity to write the film soundtrack arise?

I’ve known Eric Michel, the director, for ages. I did the music for his previous film, a documentary called ‘Les Blessures Invisibles’ about a town in Gabon called Mounana, which was the site of the uranium mine which supplied the French nuclear industry for 50 years until it closed down in 1999, when the Europeans pulled out, abandoning the town to its own devices. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks after the film was released, Covid lockdowns shut everything down, so very few people have seen it. I put the soundtrack on Bandcamp though, and made a couple of videos from unused film footage, so they’re still around.

Who are some of your musical influences? Do you have any recommendations?

I’ve always soaked up everything since the mid-1970s, but the main period which defined my musical direction was the post-punk, industrial and synth pop era of the late 1970s – early 1980s, allied to soundtracks and all sorts of classical and experimental music. Millions of influences, but Kraftwerk, Magazine, Associates, DAF, Yello, Scott Walker, Philip Glass, and Ryuichi Sakamoto (the B-2 Unit album in particular) all rate a particular mention. My recommendation is not to stick to the anglophone musical world you see in all those “100 greatest albums of all time” lists (as chosen mainly by Americans who seem to think Europe is a small town near China).

Do you have any live dates planned in the UK/Europe in 2024?

Not planned, but I am trying to figure out how to translate material that is very studio-bound into a live possibility…

Was it a difficult album to write?

No. Piece of cake! Always wanted to write spy film music, and since I never got the call from the James Bond people (and seriously, after the generic tunelessness post David Arnold, they could do with me), this was a fun alternative, and the fact that I was given the freedom to do whatever I wanted was an absolute joy!

Have you seen the full documentary yet and if so, what are your thoughts on the piece?

Yes, it’s a shame it wasn’t picked up in the UK. I think people would be interested in how intelligence was passed to a Swiss-based network, probably from disaffected officers in Hitler’s high command (although nobody seems to know definitively who they were exactly), and transmitted to Stalin to foil the Nazi Soviet invasion plans. Sadly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meant that some of the interesting archive material they originally wanted to use was suddenly off-limits, but it didn’t affect the end result too much.

Do you have any further music releases planned?

Originally the documentary was going to be feature length, before it was cut down to 52 minutes for TV, so there was a lot of unused music, which I decided to release as a companion album called ‘Le Mystère Lucie (Dossier Secret)’, and this will be out in a few weeks, also on Bandcamp.

Then there is a new project I am doing called Dallas Kent, with a San-Francisco based female singer, and our first single, ‘Ghost Highway’ will be out in August, accompanied by a fairly psychedelic video. It’s got more of a Portishead / Massive Attack vibe…

And at the moment I’m just putting the finishing touches to a video for ‘After We’re Gone’ from my last solo album, ‘Slow-Motion Apocalypse’. This will be out in the autumn sometime…

What makes Ian Williams happy and what makes you unhappy?

Happy: little fluffy bunnies, random acts of kindness, Liverpool winning trophies, going out on my bike with a camera or two…

Unhappy: the imminent destruction of the planet and all life on it due to the climate crisis / the rise of fascism / AI realising that humans are actually the cause of most of the problems; lying / gaslighting (especially by politicians, institutions, including fake everything on social media); the ever-growing gap between rich and poor – let’s face it, we don’t actually need billionaires do we; Daniel Ek / Spotify – the fact that he’s four times richer than the richest musician ever – Paul McCartney – says it all. Parasite.