Musical excellence and comic sensibility combined with wit and panache in the TV and film scores of Jonathan Whitehead, who has died of a sudden heart attack aged 59. In a career spanning more than 30 years, often credited as “Trellis”, he wrote and recorded soundtracks, theme music and songs for TV shows including Black Books, Nathan Barley, Smack the Pony, the Graham Norton Show and Rev.
His score for the Channel 4 hospital comedy Green Wing (2004-06) was a foundation for the show’s identity and won him the RTS award in 2005. In our regular collaborations he created the sublimely bombastic themes for Brass Eye and The Day Today, and more recently the soundtrack to the film The Day Shall Come (2019), with the musician and bandleader Seb Rochford.
Born to Barbara (nee Atkinson), an office administrator, and Ralph Whitehead, a mechanical engineer, in Denton, Lancashire, Jonathan grew up in a house full of music, and influenced by what his sister Jane describes as “Dad’s technical quest for the perfect listening experience”. Anyone who knew Jonathan could see the continuity from his father’s profession to his own life of precise constructions.
His fascination with the way things were made, be they viaducts, car engines, kayaks or songs, not only made him a stimulating friend and later a great father too, but informed his huge facility for parody. Victoria Pile, who made Smack the Pony and Green Wing, says “he gave us an almighty fusion of styles – jazz, classical, electronica. You’d say ‘we need something thrashy but lyrical, Radiohead but uplifting, gravelly but sort of pink in the middle?’ and 24 hours later that’s exactly what he’d give you.”
Jonathan could evoke desolation and loss, too, scoring the denouement of The Day Shall Come (2019) with harmonium, steel pans and vaksin horns he made by sticking mouthpieces on to drain pipes. Nothing seemed beyond his reach.
At Bredbury comprehensive in Stockport, he learned the flute, piano and euphonium, practising in the bathroom because it “sounded better”. His teacher, Bob Davies, recalls Jonathan’s drive to compose and his sense of sonic detail, writing music that required the player to “flatten the flute until slightly out of tune” or adding directions such as “applause as if at a cricket match”. He studied music at Bristol University where on the first day his tutor, Derek Bourgeois, is said to have announced: “Music is dead – there’s nothing after Stravinsky.” Jonathan was both appalled and, characteristically, amused.
After graduating, he worked on a host of projects, writing and playing music for theatre, scoring music for short films, and touring and recording piano for the Adventures. He used the proceeds from session work to start a studio which became his endlessly expanding base. His unique skill was to combine technical excellence with an easy sense of play and experimentation. The fun of a session with him was doubled by the knowledge that he would turn the results into something remarkable.
His sense of the absurd was a gift to friends and colleagues alike. Conversations would derail and spiral into delicious silliness. You could lose a whole morning weeping with laughter at the abrupt acoustics of an orchestra playing Mozart outdoors. He loved nonsense and preposterous body language and you can hear it in his work, at its most extreme perhaps in the music he wrote to evoke the experience of taking the fictional drug Cake in Brass Eye. It is a brilliantly ridiculous piece of music for which he naturally invented an idiotic dance.
He wore his many talents with modesty and generosity. “He knew he was good,” says the screenwriter Gary Parker, who played in a band with Jonathan in the 80s, “but he was the opposite of superior, supporting everyone else’s ideas and making us all play better as a result”. University friends recall him as stylishly rumpled, a beautifully engineered person who could make the worst clothes look suddenly fashionable.
His detailed perceptions were relaxed in a way that belied his discipline, but his opinion was never forced and always genuine. I would show him early cuts of an edit, and when it didn’t work he never made it feel like failure. His description of what was wrong would be the start of the solution.
Jonathan made films, musical instruments, bunk beds, tree houses and untold volumes of music. He had a photographer’s eye and could whittle a flute that played in perfect tune. His response to the pandemic lockdown was to set up a camera in his studio and stream live improvised “Trellis loops” which revealed a glimpse of his technical and multi-instrumental process, and flashes of the humour he brought so effortlessly to his work. The last session was posted the day he died.
In 2006 he married Clare Scurfield. She survives him, along with his children, Oskar, Lucy and Frank, and his sisters, Jane and Libby.
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