Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss. It’s where the shapers of business join the shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guests today I am very pleased to say, are Christian Henson and Paul Thomson, Co-Founders of Spitfire Audio, a music technology company working with the world’s best composers, producers, engineers and studios to produce high quality virtual instruments and sample libraries. And unlike you, I can see into their studios right now and pretty cool they are too. With music and performance having played a huge part in their youth and education, Christian and Paul were each award-winning composers for film and television when in a Soho pub, they share a dissatisfaction, the string sample libraries on offer to them simply weren’t good enough. They decided to take a leap of faith, as they say, and set out to record their own. “Our approach,” as Christian says, “was to do what we feel other libraries were failing on, to record performances, not samples, to record the room and in a live room to record and include imperfection and character but most importantly, to record the best musicians playing the best instruments in London.” Spitfire Audio was born in 2007 with samples initially shared only with friends but within a year, some of the most renowned composers in film and television had signed up and Paul and Christian made the samples publicly available. Now, Spitfire sounds are heard in everything, from major Hollywood film scores to recordings by Radiohead and U2; I’ve heard of them and they have the best backdrop yet here on the 2021 Jazz Shapers series because they are in studios, kind of, lots of stuff going on in the background. Hello to both of you. How are you?
Paul Thomson
Hi, very good thank you, Elliot. Yes, we are indeed in our home studios, our sheds.
Christian Henson
Yep, we both work from sheds at the bottom of our garden.
Elliot Moss
Which sounds like heaven to me because at the moment I am working from a room at the top of the house and it’s just not distant enough from what else is going on in the world. They are fabulous studios and normally with our guests as well in this virtual world, we send microphones and things but of course what I am looking at, enviously, are two incredible microphones and two incredible poppers but that’s all of course just for show, I know that you don’t actually use those usually, you are just doing it for the programme. When I do my research and I find out that two people get together in business, my first question is so, how do they know each other and why did they think that was a good idea because, for some people, that’s a definition of lunacy? Let me ask Christian, from your perspective, and we’ll see if it matches up, this is like sort of Mr and Mrs back in the seventies. So, from your point of view, Christian, how did it come about and why this man called Paul Thomson?
Christian Henson
I was barred and publicly humiliated on a music tech forum so, Paul, who actually shared the same point of view from which barred me from this forum, reached out to me on Myspace of all places, if I remember that correctly, Paul?
Paul Thomson
That’s correct. Yep. I thought it was hilarious what was going on and I knew of Christian. We actually, although we hadn’t met, we shared an agent as well in London, Air-Edel, and so I found Christian’s Myspace page and it had an hilarious story about a period of 24 hours in which he scored an entire film with a string quartet and I just thought he sounded very fun so I need to drop him a line and see what we can cook up together.
Elliot Moss
And then how long was the cooking before you decided to deliver the beautiful dish called Spitfire Audio?
Christian Henson
Well, Paul is someone you wouldn’t want to go on a fishing trip with because if you don’t get your waders on quickly, he’ll be out in the middle of the lake without you. So, we went to the pub called The Endurance, had a few pints, and I think in many Soho pubs, all sorts of ideas and schemes had been hatched over beer and never carried out and that was pretty much the norm for me. Little did I know with Paul is if you suggest something, it gets done and so Paul just jumped on it the next day, rang up my accountant, said we’re going halves in on this experiment.
Elliot Moss
And that experiment was back in 2007, as I mentioned earlier, Paul. So, the man of action, Paul Thomson says we’re going to do it. Christian is like well, he seems confident so I’m in. Just in your own words at that point, what is that you were creating that you thought needed to be created? Why did the world need something called Spitfire Audio? What was it doing?
Paul Thomson
Well, there were two problems that we had. So, the first problem was that the sounds that we were using to demonstrate pieces of music to directors and producers before they would entrust us with the money to go and record them in the studio, were just not very good and didn’t really sound kind of close enough to the end result what you’d hope to achieve. The second problem was that by coincidence we were both working on TV or film work which required a small chamber group of strings and the one thing that you did have with the sounds that were available then was that if you had string sounds, they were huge, sounded you know like an enormous string orchestra. So to be able to convince a director that okay, the demo sounds enormous and epic but actually when we go down to fifteen players, it’s going to sound really beautiful and much, much better, is a really strange and unfamiliar direction to go. I think most directors are used to going up in scale rather than down in scale. So, we had that specific problem and we decided to go in, in the evening to Air Studios in Hampstead and record a small group of string players and just put those patches together and see how they sounded when we started playing them.
Elliot Moss
Christian, musicians and business, to me always, it’s not a contradiction at all because many people make great money in the world of music but generally you have the business side of music and it isn’t musicians, and then you have the musicians who you would call the talent and yet here what I see in front of me fourteen years after you came together, is a two people, two musicians, who are essentially now making a business work. That’s a tricky thing to do. When you set up then, did you think, you know what, I’m just doing this for the music or this is more of a business? For you, where did the balance lie?
Christian Henson
We didn’t set this up to start a business at all. In fact, I was pretty adamant to Paul that we didn’t set it up as a business and I think with hindsight, if I had any recommendation for entrepreneurs, is to think about the idea first and to execute that as brilliantly as you, not to think how you can make money out of it because that I think immediately puts you in a conflict of interest with your end user or your customer so to speak, and I think that you’ve touched on something that’s very important, something that Paul and I do a lot of is go round the country doing seminars and something I am very disturbed by is asking, you know these people in their final graduate year, how many of them have been taught to do business plans and no hands ever go up and I think that this is one of the problems with musicians, is they don’t see themselves as businesses which is why I think that it’s a very exploitative business.
Elliot Moss
And I think that’s probably right, actually, and it’s very similar for many professions where people aren’t really taught what it’s like to actually make money, they’re just taught to do the technical thing and a lot of musicians obviously, they’re passionate, they do it because they love it. Paul, how early on did you realise you would need to work harder actually making it work as a business? Was it almost immediately?
Paul Thomson
So we financed it initially by going out to some of the much more successful and famous composers but that we had contact with either because Christian had done programming for a couple of Hollywood composers and so we had kind of friends of friends and we knew that composers are always searching for new sounds but composers fall into two categories; there are composers who just look at a group of sounds and say I’ll have this one, this one and this one, and then there are composers who make sounds and those are much fewer. So, what we knew was that if we could come up with some good sounds then we could get a little group of people together and they would put up some money as a licence fee and that would enable us to kind of keep recording stuff and making the stuff that we needed to do our composing jobs. So, it was really just that and the Spitfire name came about because Christian lived round the corner from the Imperial War Museum, my Degree is in Aeronautical Engineering so we’re both kind of plane aficionados and it was just, we need to put a name on it, let’s call it Spitfire Audio. And as Christian said, it absolutely wasn’t supposed to be a business at the beginning, it was just a way of recording and getting some good quality sounds for this little group of people.
Christian Henson
I think if we were honest as well, Paul, we didn’t best understand the term ‘depreciation’ and we simply thought that the money going out would be taken off our tax bill and we got a really nasty shock and that prompted us to make it more of a serious commercial venture, through necessity.
Paul Thomson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, you thought depreciation, well that just sounds like the opposite of appreciation, I mean, seriously and I just want to be appreciated, I’m a musician and then you get your tax bill. And then you work out, actually maybe we need to structure this properly. Stay with me for much more and some really good insight and some truths about the creative world and the importance of business understanding to make you actually achieve all the things you want to achieve creatively. Much more coming up from Christian and Paul, my Business Shapers, in a couple of minutes but right now, it’s time to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Tom Grogan and Alastair Moore discuss artificial intelligence and machine learning, their possible application and the key things organisations to consider when seeking to implement them.
All our former Jazz Shapers, and indeed this very programme with Christian and Paul, can be enjoyed again by popping Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice, or if you’ve got a smart speaker you can whisper play Jazz Shapers into its ear and there you will find many of our recent shows, it’s a trick I do quite a lot with my eight year old, she likes whispering to Alexa. But back to today’s programme, Christian Henson and Paul Thomson are my Business Shapers, Co-Founders of Spitfire Audio, music technology company producing high quality virtual instruments and sample libraries which are now used I read in everything from Dr Who to Dunkirk. I went on and did my play and the nice thing about researching you two is of course you can listen and it’s fun, and there was a specific, and I say fun it’s also brilliant, there was a contemporary drama toolkit, I went online and had a listen to that and I urge anyone listening to just go and I think you can put it into YouTube and you will find it there, it’s ‘An eerie trailer’ it says here, ‘for Spitfire Audio’s latest product, a broadcast ready sound set for drama productions’. Paul, you mentioned that some people want to make stuff, some people also want to pick it up a bit like a, you know, a magpie and stick it back over there in their nest. Where do these ideas come from for new sounds because when you hear something new, it’s extraordinary, it blows you away because your senses aren’t used to it, it’s the first time you touch something, the first time you eat something you haven’t… it’s incredibly sensory. Where does that happen? Where does the creativity happen, mostly?
Christian Henson
For me, and Paul, I think that what makes our company kind of interesting, is we are working composers. So, we’re both the kind of Founders and the end user and I’ll give you an example, I was working on a TV adaptation of The Go-Between and part of the character of that piece, is the heat. Now, when you show British landscape, you don’t really associate it with heat and there was this scene with this barley swaying in the wind and the director said, “It doesn’t feel hot enough” so I looked at that and I thought I want to have something that’s absolutely arid sounding so I decided to get twenty mandolin players and get them playing these kind of tremolandi which are just repeated notes, in Air Studios and that kind of created a sound that was useful and it created a creative thread I guess for Spitfire and we’ve done the same with harps and marimbas. So for me it’s these little problems that get thrown up within your profession and the solutions are often sonic and therefore provide opportunities for our business.
Elliot Moss
And Paul, the reference points to be able to do that must be enormous because to get to the point that Christian said where you take the place and the feeling of dryness and of being arid and then translate that into an instrument that will deliver it and then make sure the instruments are played in the appropriate way, that means you have to know quite a lot about music, that range, I mean you are composers but you are producers.
Paul Thomson
Yeah, there’s a huge amount of production work that goes into this and part of being a good producer, of anything really, is imagination. As Christian just said, it’s trying to imagine what something might sound like and then investigate and see if that’s something that will genuinely be different and new and one of the examples that… we’ve often worked with Hans Zimmer who is a sound smith, he’s one of those people who loves to make sounds, a brilliant engineer as well, he can hear things in a certain way and we made a library of stringed instruments with him, a string orchestra which has 344 players in it and so we recorded the largest group who recorded at any one time was 60 cellos and then 60 violins but we got them to play really, really quietly as well and that sound of something that you would, I mean I had certainly never heard that before, 60 cellos all playing these really interesting sounds but just very quietly becomes this sea of human emotion, it’s a really strange sensation but that’s where we love to investigate things that have never been done before and try and imagine sound worlds that don’t exist.
Elliot Moss
When you are in a studio or when you are thinking about a project and you are collaborating with extraordinary people and young, old, experienced, famous, not famous, and you’ve got a brief and then you hear something which is off brief but brilliant, is there a way of squaring that circle or do you manage to still focus on the brief or do you change the brief because you just know it’s going to be better if?
Christian Henson
I think the latter is correct. I think that, certainly with our business, experimentation and the act of collaboration is where we find these seams of creativity. It’s amazing how many ways a violin can be played and say for example, with our work with Olafur Arnalds who is an Icelandic composer, he will get exactly the same group of players on exactly the same instruments and the way he directs them to play will create an entirely different sonic canopy, if you will. Working as a media composer, which means I write music for film and TV, I think it’s just very important to keep looking at the picture and if it makes the picture better, then I’m all up for it. I had a bassist the other day do an extraordinary thing on his base and I said you’re foreshadowing the danger so we can’t go with that but I always welcome suggestions from people I am collaborating with.
Elliot Moss
And Paul, on that point about collaboration, you know that certain words ping and buzz at certain times in business cycles and it’s, you know, whether it’s Jeff Bezos stepping down from his Day 1 company or whether it’s the Good to Great and it’s another book that people reference, collaboration is one of those words that comes back into fashion. At the heart of what you do is collaboration so from your point of view, Paul, what makes it work? When is it at its heightened best?
Paul Thomson
Well, I think it’s very hard to be a musician on your own, sitting in a room, it’s what composers do but the real joy of our job is when you are able to collaborate and that can take many forms, it can be writing with somebody and there may even be two of you in the room while you are creating a piece of music and that’s fantastic fun as well, but the key moment is when you put some parts in front of these incredible musicians that we have in London that we are so lucky to be able to work with, and when you hear them bring your piece to life, the one thing that unites all composers, we’re all desperate to have as many live players on our music as possible, even if you can only afford two or three live players, you will still book them because it will elevate the sound of the music and for me, that’s the real joy of the collaborative process.
Elliot Moss
Just thinking about the live process, Christian, briefly before we go into our final chat with both of you. We’ve all missed the ability to be in the room with musicians, on the whole, and obviously there’ll be some socially distant exceptions to that when people are producing and so on but generally, the public, us, me, we haven’t been able to go to a gig, we haven’t been able to step anywhere near the sound and the crackle and the feeling that is just wonderful and, as I mentioned earlier, you can’t help but react to it. What do you think that’s doing to us? Because obviously this is something that must be dear to your hearts?
Christian Henson
Absolutely. I think there are many things that could be a product of this but I think one of the most important things, someone was recently talking to me about the eradication of music education in our education system and they pointed out to me that one of the most valuable things that people get from playing music together is a deeper sense of empathy and I always maintain that you get rid of empathy at your own risk, it’s like getting rid of the bees and I think that… I fear for mankind with any erosion of empathy. Sorry, was that too deep?
Elliot Moss
No, it’s not too deep, it’s absolutely right and I think it’s at the heart of kindness and it’s at the heart of putting yourself in other people’s shoes and that’s a big thing right now. Final chat coming up with my guests Christian Henson and Paul Thomson plus we’ll be playing a track from Billie Holiday, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Billie Holiday there with I Get a Kick Out of You. Some proper Jazz Shapers here on Jazz Shapers which is lucky because that’s what it’s called. My Business Shapers, Christian Henson and Paul Thomson have been with me, they are the Co-Founders of Spitfire Audio and we’ve been talking about the role of music, the role of business in music, collaboration and all sorts of things. You are a double act and I like it because you don’t seem to talk over each other, you both smile when each other speaks, you still listen, there’s a lot of empathy going on, you obviously still like each other and believe in each other. In terms of your leadership styles, are there roles that you play naturally in the business that differ and if so, who plays which role?
Paul Thomson
We’re incredibly lucky, we do really like each other, we’re good friends and also, from the very beginning, we discovered that we had very complementary skills. At the very beginning of Spitfire when there weren’t really any employees, it was just Christian and me, we would split the work up so, Christian dealt with a lot of the putting together the packaging of the stuff and dealing with the website and the kind of pros, how products were described and all that kind of thing, all of the marketing side and the kind of PR side of things and I’m terrible at that, I have no visual sense, aesthetic sense at all really, all my skillset is in my ears so I don’t have any complementary visual sense so, I would just concentrate on the production side of things and a bit of programming and, you know, nerding out on the recordings and things like that. So, we did kind of complement each other quite well, I think. Do you… how would you describe it, Christian?
Christian Henson
Absolutely, and that’s, there’s now just over a hundred people who work at Spitfire and I would say that we divvied up the business so Paul really, most of the time, really concentrates on the production and technical side of things. We do cross over and I am a little bit more responsible for the brand and marketing. I mean, if I had one view, and I hope I don’t embarrass you by saying this Paul, I think that the key to a successful relationship, whether that be in a business partnership or indeed in a say a marriage, is the ability to let each other be themselves and I think that’s something that Paul and I do with each other and Paul has certain quirks that I may roll my eyes at about and I know that I have certain quirks and behaviour patterns that Paul goes, “Ugh, my lord” but we let each other be ourselves and I think that’s absolutely crucial to the success of a partnership. Paul, you and I had had business partners in the past and it hadn’t worked out so we wanted to make sure this worked.
Paul Thomson
We both had terrible, terrible business partners in the past but, yeah, so we were actually prepared, we’d done all the kind of you know really hard, painful failure work before we actually met each other so…
Christian Henson
One of the real key things is, the first time out in a business partnership there’s this feeling, a need that you have to be doing an equal amount of work and that is a fool’s errand, it ebbs and flows and I think being comfortable and happy with that is absolutely crucial.
Elliot Moss
That’s a really good point, I think there’s an inherent guilt isn’t there, in that sense where you think it absolutely must be divvied up properly and it just doesn’t work like that. It strikes me also that your values are similar and I’m thinking about the charitable donations that you make, the causes that you identify, that is also to me, externally, a really important thing and Christian, you’ve mentioned the education piece both from a business point of view but also just, I believe you give money also to education around music itself and these things, they feel super important and it, again, it doesn’t seem like you are doing it for effect, it feels like that comes from both of you as human beings who happen to be talented musicians.
Christian Henson
Yeah, I mean the very first thing I remember saying to Paul when we went in for that first session was that we must give the musicians royalties, we are not obliged to by musician union rules but we do that voluntarily and I said to Paul, I’m from a showbusiness background, my parents are actors and in fact my grandfather set up Actors’ Equity which is the actors’ union and I said, Paul you are going into business with a union lad so we have to look after them. The thing is, music is about feeling and if, I think for anyone who has recorded a vocalist, if they are unhappy, you are not going to get a good performance out of them and I think that you’ve got to keep the people around you happy to get the best out of them. You hear it in the playing, in the emotion that they pour into their instruments, so they’ve got to be happy.
Elliot Moss
I wasn’t going to mention your acting, the family acting, but I’ve got to say because Christian’s mum is Una, and Una for me, when Worzel Gummidge was big, a man of a certain age just went, “Ah, there’s Una Stubbs.” So there you go, I know she’s probably in her eighties now but you can say, ah she’s got at least one fan and probably a lot more of a gentleman of a certain age. It’s been great talking to you both. Thank you, I’ve really enjoyed it. You’ve put a smile on my face, you obviously love what you do and you’ve built a really fantastic business so, congratulations on all of those things. Just before I let you disappear back to those very, very beautiful studios of yours, quietly, and do your other things, what’s your song choice between you and why have you chosen it?
Paul Thomson
It’s Donny Hathaway, Everything is Everything. For me it just feels very positive for a less than positive time and I think it’s quite interesting because it was recorded in 1969, released in ’70, and if you listen to it, it sounds that it’s maybe a lot further down the line so I think that this album and this track is a real kind of antecedent to the work say of Stevie Wonder in the mid-seventies and stuff so I think it’s quite interesting in that respect.
Elliot Moss
That was Voice Inside (Everything is Everything) by Donny Hathaway, the song choice of my Business Shapers today, Christian Henson and Paul Thomson. Great advice for entrepreneurs, firstly, think about the idea first, the money will come, we’ve heard that before and it’s an important point to remember. Secondly, it’s about imagination when you are in the music business, absolutely critical. Really important also that music plays a role of ensuring that people have a deeper sense of empathy and that connection with other people, really, really important. And finally, those people in partnership think about this one, it’s really good advice, let your partner be themselves. Really great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers. Have a lovely happy and safe weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You will find hundreds of more guests available to listen to in our archive, just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.