“I can’t afford to risk damaging the hands,” Jones told his now ex-boss, but agreed to play the company’s 2012 Christmas function anyway. Blinder’s executive producer Scott Didier was present at the event and began to book Jones for corporate functions, and when Jones heard about the film and offered to pitch a song for the soundtrack, Didier was all for it, even sending him the script. “The original idea, I was going to write a big epic football song, because I thought it was a big stadium sort of football movie,” Jones says. “But it’s actually a grassroots movie and it’s based on a local club in Torquay.” Inspiration struck quickly.
“Within an hour I had pretty much 90 percent of the song structured, and the words. The word ‘rise’ came up and I thought, ‘Yep, this is about redemption, about the guy trying to redeem himself.’ It must have settled in my mind, the script. It all just made sense.”
Didier then asked Jones to play at the shooting wrap function, and to bring along the song if he’d finished it. Jones scrambled to demo his material, using local producer Michael Zammit with whom he’d never worked before, and even managed to get Didier to send him some rushes (rushes or dailies are the first prints made of a day’s filming), so that he could put a clip together.
“There was three and a half minutes of rushes, so I cut up a clip, made a little montage, but then I started running out of footage,” Jones says. “I thought, ‘What do I do?’ Okay, I’ll just make the song shorter,” he laughs broadly. “Surprising enough, that tightened the song up and made it the way it’s supposed to be; it sounds stronger.”
Needless to say, Didier and his associates loved the track. Earlier in the process a friend of Didier’s, Alan Bennett, had played Jones a song which was submitted by another musician in a bid for the film’s theme spot. “The song was a good song, but it was very football and it was very literal,” explains Jones. “And I thought, ‘No, I don’t think that’s where it has to come from’. The movie’s more than football. It’s actually a life story, it’s a scandal, it’s melancholy. I wanted it to be, someone could take it as [specifically applying to the 90 minutes of a football match] if they wanted to, literally, or they could take the song completely out of that context and use it for anything they want.
“It was sort of a learning curve for me. I’d never written to a script before, I’d never written to demand, I’d never written to a deadline before either. But it actually made it easier in a way because I couldn’t stray. I had to always go back – it’s a bit like writing an essay – and refer back to that core.”
BY ZOË RADAS
