Andrew Skeet

I would love to say that it was a stroke of genius thinking on my part, but in fact it was a combination of my wonderful researcher, Joss Campbell (who is rather fond of his old SNES) suggesting it and I had noticed when I sometimes read feedback on the last album on websites that Metroid came up quite often – usually in this form “Wtf, no Metroid?!! Dude that sucks …”.

This is usually the form the feedback takes on game websites!! Anyway, I loved the music so much straight away although I had sort of forgotten about the game itself – I remember playing it at someone’s house years ago, but clearly I was insane and it didn’t strike such a chord then.

I was afraid you would ask this!! I must confess not a lot of experience, a brief play on the old SNES Super Metroid to check it out and lots of YouTubing. But for this one, I just wanted to choose a few themes and mainly not worry too much about how faithful it was and all that. But I want to do some more from it because there are loads of themes I would like to try and it would be good to immerse myself in the game more because it has such a unique atmosphere – so claustrophobic.

It’s not easy, but I see it as a journey of discovery for us all. The big challenges are a mixture of the practical and the more artistic, I suppose. Big challenges are making sure we have tracks that are going to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, but without being dumb or all too obvious.

Also, a big challenge was the sheer size of the arranging and although I had some sterling help from Ben Foskett with the orchestration, I liked to do as much of that and the programming myself because I knew what I wanted. Very time-consuming. Rewarding moments are mainly when I first hear the orchestra playing the pieces and then maybe at the end a listen to the finished mixes.

Hard to say – you’re right really, I was playing the game the other day and I thought “why didn’t I put that in?” The important thing for me this time round (and it could well be different next time) was just to write a sort of homage piece not necessarily referencing everything.

Really important and hard because I think considering the limitations, it’s a genius bit of work. Really amazingly well-suited and intrinsic to the game. I think we could capture it better, but this is a start.

Basically, I’d written this one (and Dragon Roost Island and Luigi’s Mansion) and they all had to go off to Nintendo – a demo and a score. So, they were finished already and between them probably represented, I don’t know, maybe 90 hours work? Or more. Something like that …. so when they came back with a few minor changes to the melodies and approved them, I was mainly relieved to be honest.

Well, it was cool. I mean, we didn’t exactly hang out and shoot the breeze but he sent me a very helpful annotated bits of score to tell me where he thought I’d got his melodies wrong – ha!

Well, I want to be positive, so I am happy – we did manage to capture something of the atmosphere of a game that I think is hard to capture orchestrally; I think the score is dark but rather beautiful, which is always where I prefer to be given the choice, but I would in an ideal world have liked to have got a better performance.

I feel now I understand the piece better I would do it differently in places but, you know, that’s often the case. Even when you’ve written it, it’s really hard doing a first performance – you hear it in the room, it’s rather overwhelming at first, then puzzling, then things come at you in rush and then an hour later you have to say it’s done. So yeah, there are a load of tiny things I might do differently next time we play it, but that’s cool.

Actually, I wouldn’t really change anything with the arrangement – I’d love to do a part two which included more themes and developed it a bit, but I think as it stands it works a piece.

A lot of the music has some of the game in it and some of me – that’s part of what makes it different to other versions. I think the Metroid arrangement has quite a bit of me in it, although obviously inspired by and based on the music from the game, so it feels more personal than some of the other more literal translations from other games.

All the pieces end up feeling like your children to be honest in that you care about them all, invest time and energy and belief in them all and so there is affection in different ways for them all. Metroid and Castlevania suite are probably the two I cared about most because they were difficult and I desperately wanted them to be right.

Don’t really have a view on this. People are quite resistant to being herded, so I think it’s great there are high quality concerts dedicated to it and specialist radio stations and all that, but equally I quite enjoyed finding a couple of Japanese people on Youtube doing a cool version of Dragon Roost Island with piano and guitar

I think there is room for more. So many pieces on our list that haven’t been done and great suggestions (like Prime!) coming in all the time.

Thanks so much for your interest and I hope any of you who get it really enjoy the album. Despite the title, it’s really just a personal response from me to what I hear and it will be different of course to how anyone else would do it … but hopefully you’ll find it an exciting and moving journey. I’ll tell you one thing: the London Philharmonic are almost without equal in the world and whether you like what I’ve done with the arrangements or not, you are going to love their playing!