‘Bad Sisters:’ Co-Composer Tim Phillips On Partnering with PJ Harvey for the Acclaimed AppleTV+ Series

Tim Phillips, the co-composer for the AppleTV+ show Bad Sisters, talks about his work with PJ Harvey in capturing her voice to use throughout the score. He also reveals the many inspirations in making the series’s distinct sound, including Bulgarian chants, and the strange coincidence that made it that much easier than expected to capture.

Awards Daily: How did you and PJ Harvey come together for the show?

Tim Phillips: That’s easy. I had just come off a pilot with Sharon Horgan and Dearbhla Walsh, who directed the first few episodes of Bad Sisters, for a show called Shining Vale that is on Starz. We had a really good time making that so they asked me if I would score the thing they were working on next, which was Bad Sisters and I said absolutely, sounds great. Then they asked, how do you feel about working with PJ Harvey on it, and I said it sounds great. Kind of that simple. I think there was some finagling to be done. I don’t think they had asked her yet or just made a gentle inquiry. Then of course we had to meet and that was still during the COVID lockdown, so it was entirely done for the first couple of months over Zoom.

Awards Daily: So were you and PJ Harvey the ones who chose “Who By Fire” for the opening title song?

Tim Phillips: I would love to say yes but it was Sharon’s idea. She said to me, ‘What do you think of the idea of Who By Fire?’ I put that together with Polly’s voice in my head and I just went, ‘That’s amazing, that’s going to sound great.’ That was that pretty much.

Awards Daily: What was it like singing it with her?

Tim Phillips: It was an amazing session. We got together for a day in London and we were done in 30 minutes or something. She did three takes–she never does more than three takes–and we used the first one. It was that simple, she just nailed it.

Awards Daily: I’m almost ashamed to admit it but I’ve re-listened to that song so much on YouTube that the algorithm is now always suggesting it for me.

Tim Phillips: [Laughes] Excellent! Glad to hear it! I was just happy, because I had to come in with the background track all ready for her to sing. I think it was just nice to [make the] track for someone whose voice I know and who I knew a little bit at that point. I had to imagine what it would sound like with her singing it. There was no chance to get together and demo it, there was no back and forth. It was just like, here is the backing, what do you think? She goes, ”Sounds great!” Then we went into the studio and we did it and it was done. It was so fast it was kind of crazy. We are really happy with it.

Awards Daily: I noticed for the overall theme of the scores and even the song “Who By Fire” there is a creepy almost mysterious vibe matching the tone of the show. How did you go about finding that tone?

Tim Phillips: I mean really, the usual composition procedure is trial and error. I do not like to start with a million options. I make a bespoke tray of tools for every project that I work on. So in putting together stuff for this show I had in mind scheming, mystery. I actually didn’t know where the story went when I started it. I had seen the first three episodes so I didn’t know about the real twist towards the end. So I had to keep introducing new colors as the series went along to go along with that. A lot of it was because Polly and I couldn’t be together very much because I’m in Vancouver and she is in London. So we had to get together and basically bottle her voice so I could use it in my studio. We spent a day really putting her through hell recording every single note of the scale that she could sing in her range, every single quarter note, and all these different Bulgarian-inspired whoops and chants and screeches. which was really just fun to do .We captured a lot of stuff that we thought might be handy but we weren’t sure. From my point of view I just wanted to get as much of her as I could in the can and then took it back home and turned it into keyboard instruments. I had a rule of thumb that if I was doing a cue her sound needed to be in it. The instrument was called the Pollytron with all the different tones of PJ Harvey. It was starting with that, the mystique of the score might have something to do with her natural kind of vibe or sound. But also it was something I was shooting for–kind of warm and folksy but also a little bit off kilter and conspiratorial.

Awards Daily: What was behind getting all those clips of PJ Harvey on the Pollytron?

Tim Phillips: Because she had a book coming out at the time, and was about two weeks away from going into months of recording her new album, which is just coming out. So she called me and said, “I really want to make this work but how can we do it in the time I have?” So that was the solution we came up with, to bank her as an instrument so that I could access her voice as it went. Then it just became the convention that this kind of strange Pollytron thing would come into the show in almost every cue. But whether or not she’s in there depends on the cue I guess. Some of it she needs to be more present, sometimes she’s just hidden in the background. It was really fun. I had never done something like that with somebody’s voice who is so well known. There are a lot of sample libraries available but I can’t think of many rock stars who would trust you to take their voice away and do what you will with it. Of course you could say I hate it all and throw it out, but it would probably be too late in the process. Thankfully it never happened.

Awards Daily: I re-listened to the score. When I heard that you had done that, I realized she is here in almost every part of the score.

Tim Phillips: I think Sharon had her in mind just because she’s a fan of her sound. There’s a confidence about her as an artist that I think comes across in her sound. So it just reflected well on the sisters.

Awards Daily: You mentioned the Bulgarian chants and that you used Irish poetry in the score as well. How were those choices decided?

Tim Phillips: The Bulgarian chants were something Sharon Horgan suggested. She said, I heard this amazing chant and was looking into it a bit. When you’re starting a score everyone comes in with suggestions for how it could go and then it’s my job to go in and make that into something. That was very much her, and when she brought that up in one of our Zoom meetings Polly Harvey said, “That’s a strange coincidence because I’ve actually been studying that kind of singing for a while.” So, knowing that, it just went down on the list of things to capture when we were together. The Irish stuff was my idea. I needed some text and it wasn’t right to take things out of the script so we picked stuff that was in the public domain, and I just rooted through a whole bunch of themed poetry about death or murder or love, things like that. Took out little snippets of that and then Polly and I went and just improvised them. She improvised a vocal line and we sat in the studio and I had a keyboard setup. I would just say okay next one’s B flat. Then I would start playing something or she would start singing something and we would just come together and the tape would be rolling. We made a couple of dozen little strange Irish songlets that way. Then I took them home and cut them up and used them as Easter eggs throughout the score. Some of them came out really well. Like there is one at the very end–I forget the exact wording but it is something like, “through the light of all our sacrifice”–and it’s the very last cue when they’re back at the forty feet at the very end.

Awards Daily: Did you choose Irish poetry because of where the story takes place as well?

Tim Phillips: Yes, it felt to me like I needed to reflect the Irishness of the show somehow but I am Canadian, not Irish. I didn’t want it to sound like a Dublin tourist video with a big Celtic fiddle and such. So it was like inventing a folk language that felt Irish enough for the show. But like a family folk language, that’s how I justified it to myself. Like a weird little language that’s for that group of women.

Awards Daily: So, there is a second season. Can you give us any hints for what the music will be like in the next season?

Tim Phillips: I haven’t seen a script yet, so I could not possibly say. But I would imagine it’s a bit like the first season. I would definitely like to push it forward and Polly wants to too. We will have to put our heads together when we next see each other and find out how we’re going to do that. It is going to be an interesting challenge. I’m sure they’ve got an amazing story up their sleeve.

Awards Daily: I am specially curious, with the way they ended it, what a second season could be like.

Tim Phillips: I’m sure you watched it closely, but yeah, nobody’s given anything away to me yet to be honest. It does feel like there are a couple of story openings, but I’m not writing it and I don’t think I could. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

Awards Daily: As a more general question, what got you interested in scoring music for movies and television?

Tim Phillips: Well, I was a musician first, just a pure classical musician. Then, because the college I attended in England was a music and drama school, I found myself kind of drawn to creating music for the theater shows they were doing at the school. When I finished around the year 2000 I started writing scores for theater. Then through fringe theater shows in London, and I started working at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the national and bigger theaters around the country. At that point I was working in advertising trying to pay the bills, because theater is famously not the best way to pay your rent, especially London rent. So that’s how I learned to do music for pictures. At a certain point it came together. I was assisting in another composer’s studio who is doing television, a guy called Murray Gold who was doing Doctor Who. So it was through that. I was around people who were doing it and it seemed like the next logical step given the skills I had been developing–writing music in the theater and the other skills from doing media work. Then I had a lucky break and I’ve been doing it ever since.