Michael John McCARTHY from the Glasgow band talks about the soundtrack to Dolls.
How does the music you're doing for Dolls differ from what Zoey Van Goey normally plays? "There are three separate storylines, and one of them requires a sort of indie pop band and then a singer who goes on from that band to become much more of a conventional celebrity pop star. Some of those songs are not a million miles away from the type of stuff we do in Zoey Van Goey but, on the other hand, we're trying to make something that feels a lot more produced."
And the other storylines? "They all require underscoring to various extents, which is obviously quite different from what the band is used to doing. For those storylines in particular we're working with an Edinburgh-based composer called David Paul Jones, who has been able to bring his knowledge to bear."
What does the music bring to the theatrical experience? "I've done work with an Irish theatre group and we played the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh a couple of years ago; so for me, it's not that different from what I do anyway. The main way that it's different from what we usually do in Zoey Van Goey is that a lot of it is instrumental, and there's an emphasis on texture and rhythm."
What do you think of Takeshi Kitano's original film? "I really liked it. I saw it when it came out, about five or six years ago, so when we were contacted in regard to a play based on the film, I was really excited."
How did the film inform your music? "I guess part of what the project is trying to do is use scenes and storylines from the film, and use the film as a touchstone, but at the same time leaving a lot of the Japanese cultural context behind. In the original movie, the song the singer-character does is more of a J-Pop thing, and was actually pretty well known outwith the film in Japan. So one of things we thought about briefly was doing a cover in a western manner, but we decided we'd rather write something original."
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