Rafferty Adeyemi does not look like a man who has written the year's most inescapable piece of television music. He is soft-spoken, dressed in a faded fisherman's jumper, and he arrives at our meeting in a north London café apologising for being early. The main theme from Low Tide Kingdom, the coastal family saga that became an unexpected global hit this summer, has been streamed several hundred million times and whistled on more train platforms than anyone could count. He seems faintly baffled by all of it.
I ask where the theme came from. He laughs and says it came from a broken piano. The production had rented a cottage in Cornwall for the writers, and in the corner stood an upright ruined by sea air, half its keys sticking and every string slightly out of tune. He sat down on the first evening and played the melody almost exactly as it sounds now. He recorded it on his phone, and that rough recording, he says, remained the reference for everything that followed.
Water in the walls
The finished score was recorded in a deconsecrated church on the Somerset Levels that floods most winters. Adeyemi chose it for the reverb, which he describes as wet and slightly unreliable, like memory. The session players worked in wellington boots. Several cues feature the sound of water dripping from the roof, captured by accident and kept on purpose. When I suggest this sounds like a nightmare for the sound engineers, he nods cheerfully and says it very nearly was.
We talk about restraint. Television composers are often asked to tell viewers what to feel, he says, underlining every revelation with strings. He resisted this from the start and persuaded the showrunner, Delphine Achterberg, to let long scenes play in silence. Some episodes contain less than ten minutes of music. The effect, he argues, is that when the theme finally returns, it lands with the weight of something the audience has been waiting for.
The best score is the one you only notice when it stops. I would rather be missed than heard. — Rafferty Adeyemi
Adeyemi grew up in Leeds, the son of a Nigerian church organist and an English primary school teacher, and learned to play on the organ in his father's chapel. He studied composition briefly before leaving to play keyboards in touring bands, and spent most of his twenties scoring short films for almost nothing. Low Tide Kingdom was his first major commission. He admits he nearly turned it down because he did not think he was ready.
What is next? He is writing a chamber piece for a string quartet in Glasgow and has agreed to score the second season, though he is nervous about repeating himself. Before we part, I ask whether he kept the broken piano. He says the production gave it to him as a gift when filming wrapped, and that it now stands in his flat, still out of tune. He has resisted every temptation to have it repaired.
