Grant Kirkhope is an interviewer's dream, and not just because he's responsible for some all-time great video game soundtracks. He’s great company — frank, funny, and loquacious.
We spoke to him most recently for our Nintendo Life VGM Fest back in 2021 and only ended up publishing a small fraction of our chat in our Quick Beats series. Since then, we've been waiting for the right time to publish more of our conversation, and the arrival of the 25th anniversary of Banjo-Kazooie — a game that means an awful lot to many a Nintendo fan, and this writer in particular — seems like the perfect occasion to finally delve into the story of our favourite 'big noise maker'.
In fact, we've decided to split this substantial, career-spanning interview across two parts. In Part One, he discusses his musical journey, from playing a recorder at school through tours with some of the biggest names of metal and rock in the ‘80s and ‘90s — and beyond all that trivial success into the wonderful world of video games, up to his decision to leave Rare.
So, grab a tasty beverage and sit back as we delve into the stories and influences that led to some of our most treasured musical memories in gaming. Please enjoy the company of Mr. Grant 'Clanker' Kirkhope…
Nintendo Life: To start, I wanted to go over how you began composing music in general. You started playing the trumpet. Is that correct?
Grant Kirkhope: I did recorder when I was four. I went to junior school in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire. They brought around recorders and said, ‘Anyone want to play recorder?’. I bought my recorder for 15 shillings and played that for a few years. I went to the next school and someone brought a cornet in a shopping bag. They said, ‘Who wants to play this?’ I put my hand up first, so I got the cornet. I did the proper Associated Board exams in the UK, did that right the way through school.
I started playing guitar about 12. A mate of mine [who] had a crappy little band said, ‘Do you want to come up play guitar?’ and taught me a couple of chords. I started getting better than them because I practised really hard. That was my school years, really. I did the recorder. I stopped playing that after a while, then just did trumpet. Joined the local Harrogate and Skipton Schools Symphony Orchestra on a Saturday morning. Then I got into the North Yorkshire School Symphony Orchestra, which, to me, was like the LSO. We did two courses, one week each, at Scarborough. One at Easter, one in the Summer. You stayed away for a whole week and just did the orchestra. I really couldn’t believe how fantastic it was, you know, playing music all day long, and then you used to go and tit about down Scarborough on the amusements in the afternoons, which was brilliant.
I was good at music. It was all I was good at really. I did all [UK school exams] O Levels and A Levels, and [when it got to] college time my teacher said to me, ‘You should really try going to music college.’ So, I went off to the Royal College of Music and did a four-year course there – classical trumpet and you had to do piano as well. All the time I had long hair, playing in metal bands. I didn’t want to play trumpet really, but I just went because it was four more years of not getting a job, right?
It was a means to an end then, the trumpet.
Absolutely. I just wanted to be in Judas Priest or Iron Maiden – that’s what I wanted to do. I had no interest in doing trumpet at all really.
But you had ability.
Yeah, I was good at it. I had a natural ability for trumpet, bizarrely enough. So, I finished that and went round to Knaresborough to live with my mother and just signed on the dole straight away. I ended up playing in lots of local bands over the next 11 years, until about 32. Some of the bands did well. Some of the bands did crap. I played in a band called Zoot and the Roots, who were quite a popular sort of uni band on trumpet. They were like a soul-funk sort of band. We did some quite cool stuff, like we played Saturday Live when Ben Elton was doing it and stuff like that. We played the Palladium when Ben E. King was number one with Stand by Me; we were his backing band for the night. We played Europe quite a lot. You know, they were very popular.
You’re kind of [self-deprecating and] ‘Oh yeah, it was alright’, but those seem like quite big things.
They were. Zoot were the kind of band that everybody liked. We were playing three or four nights a week forever — six, seven years — a proper working band. Lots of times bands would turn up to support us who became famous later. Like Curiosity Killed the Cat supported us a couple of times. Record companies knew we’d pull the crowd, so they put the new bands out with us that no one had heard of, so they could learn to play in front of a crowd without anybody knowing who they are. There are a few bands like that who turned up. Deacon Blue, I think, were another one. The La’s, remember There She Goes? They’d have loads of new gear and [we would think], ‘Oh yeah, record company band’.
Zoot really never ‘made it’. Great live band, we did lots of massive gigs all over the place. We got offered a deal once from IRS Records. That’s Miles Copeland, Stewart Copeland’s brother. And they’d just done a hit, Doctor and the Medics had a number one hit with Spirit in the Sky. They wanted to sign us, but the people that ran the band – two main guys – didn’t want to do it so they never got signed.
I was trapped playing [with] bands all the time. I kept thinking that it’s all very well being in a working band making money, because I was, but I wanted to be in a metal band. That’s all I wanted to do. I tried with my own metal bands, but never really got anywhere. I had a band called Syar. We had an album out called Death Before Dishonour on a little Belgium label. That did alright. Then I joined a band called Maineeaxe – a proper ‘80s metal band. We had a couple of albums out that did alright. We did a tour with a band called Magnum. That was it.
But then I joined a band called Little Angels, who were quite a big UK rock band in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. A friend of mine managed the band. I knew the band from years before, I used to play trumpet for them. They had proper success. They [had a] number-one album in the UK, so we did some pretty gigantic tours. We opened up for Bon Jovi on the I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead tour six weeks around Europe. That was fantastic. Played open air, like 90,000 people, crazy stuff.
How old were you when this was happening?
I must have been 30-ish. It was us, Billy Idol, and Bon Jovi. Can you believe that? Unbelievable. Incredible. Then we also got a Van Halen tour. We did six weeks with Van Halen around Europe. That was the Right Here, Right Now tour. Obviously, as a guitar player Eddie Van Halen was my hero. He was absolutely the nicest man in the world. Honestly, six weeks with him, I talked to him every day and I just thought, ‘I might never ever, ever meet him ever again in my life.’ He gave me this [points to a guitar]. His signature guitar that he designed at the time. That’s the one he played. Absolutely unbelievable to get to do that with them!
We did the Bryan Adams tour when he was number one with Everything I Do (I Do it for You), when that was number one for 16 weeks. We played Wembley Stadium, the old Wembley Stadium to 77,000 people. It was us, Squeeze, Extreme, and Bryan Adams. We did, I think, six football stadiums in the UK. Cardiff Arms Park, Ipswich, Man City, Wembley, and the Glasgow one. Milton Keynes Bowl for two nights with Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi. Two days with Bon Jovi at the Milton Keynes Bowl sold out 80,000 people! These are proper massive gigs, so to do that was just fantastic. I couldn’t believe it. We had a great laugh because I knew the band, we were mates. To tit about Europe for six weeks in a rock band playing those gigantic shows was pretty spectacular.
You could’ve quite happily just stopped there and gone, ‘Yeah okay, now I’ll go and work on a [construction] site’ or do anything and you’d have already ‘made it’, but you’ve gone on much beyond that.
That came to an end. Little Angels split up, so I was back to playing in pubs again, punk rock-like covers bands. I was doing it all the time in between going on tour with them anyway. I’d sign on the dole, go on tour, come back, sign on the dole. It was always like that over that 11-year period from 22 to 33.
I had a mate called Robin Beanland, who played in one of the local bands that I played for. He’s a keyboard player and one day he announced he’d got a job. No one that I knew had got a job. He said, “Yeah I’m going to look at a place called Rare and write music for video games.” I was like, ‘Wow!’, couldn’t believe it.
Were you a big gamer at that time?
I was. I’d played a lot of games at that point. I played the SNES a lot, so I was just astonished. We stayed in touch. He’d been there about a year and a half and he said, “You know, Grant, if you’ve been on and off the dole for 11 years. Don’t you think it’s time you got a job?” I said Robin, what the bloody hell can I do? All I can do is play this bloody guitar and play this trumpet, and that was about it.
And playing with Bon Jovi and all the...
Well, I know but it’s not a career. It’s not going to last the rest of your life. It’s great fun, but it’s not massively well-paid or anything like that. He said, “Why don’t you try what I’m doing, writing music for video games?" I was like, “Well, I don’t think I could do it.” Because when I was at college we had to pass the harmony exam at some point. I failed it three years out of four and I only just scraped by in the last year by the skin of my teeth. I was terrible at harmony. Understanding music, I was terrible at it. I just didn’t get it at all. I wrote songs for the metal band that I played for. But that was it, so thinking about being a composer never once entered my head. Not once. It was like a mystic art.
So I said, “Alright I’ll have a go. I’ve got bugger all else to do.” He recommended I buy an Atari ST and probably Cubase, which is a sequencing program. I bought a little synth module that had sounds in it and I sat in my bedroom in my mum’s house in Knaresborough writing some tunes that I thought were appropriate for video games.
I sent Rare five cassette tapes over the course of that year. Never got a reply. That must have been 1994. Then out of the blue I got a letter saying, ‘Please come and interview’ and I couldn’t believe it. So, I went down to Rare in the Midlands, in Twycross, middle of nowhere. Dave Wise and Simon Farmer, who was the general manager, interviewed me on the Friday. And I got a letter saying I got the job on the Monday. I couldn’t believe it, absolutely astonished. So, off I went. I started with Rare October 15th, 1995. Complete fluke.
So you didn’t go there full of confidence going, ‘Okay, well I’ve played those stadiums, I’ve done this, I’ve done that — I can do this.’?
No way. None of that matters at all. I think you’re only as good as the next thing you do. You might have done a great gig yesterday, but you might do a s**t gig from now on until the day you die and you’re rubbish. It’s got to sustain a career. You’ve got to be consistently good. I’d done all these big gigs and played in bands for years, and so I was a good musician, but a billion people do that.
I had to write three tracks to take down on cassette. I had to get a Batman-style orchestral piece, a guitar-based fighting piece because they were doing Killer Instinct at the time, and a platform-y Mario-style piece — I wrote those in the week between getting the letter and the interview. But I was in touch with Robin all the time he was there, so I knew they were working on Killer Instinct 2 because they’d done the arcade machine. And they’d made the news at Rare, because the Donkey Kong had done amazingly well, like 10 million sales and Nintendo bought it. I remember that made the News at 10 in the UK. It was a spectacular thing. I felt like I was going to royalty. I really felt like, ‘What chance do I stand? Really none at all.’ And I really didn’t know who Dave Wise was. I knew he was the boss, he was the head of music at the time, but I didn’t know much about him. And I just sat there not really knowing what’s going on in this mad farmhouse where Rare were at the time in Twycross.
And I got the job on the Monday. Couldn’t believe it. So I packed my stuff, went to live in Coalville just off the M1, and started working at Rare. If Robin had not done it, I’d never have done it. If he hadn’t had the forethought to think I could do that and say to me, ‘Why don’t you have a go?’, I would never have done it. It would never have entered my head. It was an absolute fluke.