The British composer broke into Hollywood as Yorgos Lanthimos’s go-to guy on Poor Things and more. But his heart remains in Shropshire – the backdrop to his ambitious, grief-stricken latest record
T
he sun is shining, birds are tweeting and a river gently flows just yards away as Jerskin Fendrix tells me about his love of growing up in Shropshire. “It was so gorgeous and majestic,” he says, sitting in the garden of a friend’s house where he spent a lot of time in his youth. “It was nature, forests and hills and then just normal teenage life. The combination of this numinous, big landscape and getting wasted in a cornfield with your mates listening to Kanye West on a Bluetooth speaker while seeing a massive sunset.”
Such vivid scenes fill his latest album, Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire. The opening track, Beth’s Farm, captures an idyllic scene where animals roam and rural teens party. “I thought it was a really nice symbol of this naive innocence,” he says. “Trying to get across how bucolic and heavenly this was before it starts to get corrupted.”
The corruption he speaks of is some recent personal turmoil that has at once intensified, sharpened and darkened the reflective lens he’s looking back through. “A close friend of mine killed himself,” he says. “Then more stuff happened, and more people died.” He wrote about it as a means of dealing with it, along with exploring the complexities and contradictions of grief. “We’re taught by songs or Hollywood films that someone dies and then there’s very slow strings and you cry for six months and it gradually gets better,” he says. “That’s not how it works. Sometimes it’s not as bad as you think, sometimes it’s way worse. It can be trivial, funny or sometimes it’s these massively different combinations at the same time. Death is the same thing as life – it’s as complicated and kaleidoscopically beautiful.”
