Music Supervisors
The Craft
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OUR MISSION
The UK & European Guild of Music Supervisors is dedicated to raising awareness and understanding of the role of a music supervisor within the entertainment and media industries including film, television, gaming, advertising, trailers, interactive media and theatre.
In promoting the craft of music supervision, our aim is to aid the wider business through the education of the value of music, the advocacy of best practice, and support for the protection of music copyright across all mediums.
The Guild is a resource for both emerging and established professionals, as well as the wider industry, providing knowledge of the craft and the evolving media landscape. The Guild will instill a sense of community through networking opportunities and mentorship of aspiring professionals regardless of social or economic background.
Whilst operating as an independent organisation, the UK & European Guild will collaborate with its equivalent counterparts in North America to address issues relevant to music supervisors worldwide and to safeguard the credibility of the craft.
Senior Board
Maggie Rodford
President
Maggie Rodford is Managing Director of the independently owned Air-Edel Group, incorporating one of the world’s leading music publishing and production companies, representing composers and music supervisors worldwide. The company has offices in London and Los Angeles. Maggie studied music, playing pIaino and cello and singing in choirs including the BBC Chorus. Maggie trained as a music engineer and prior to joining Air-Edel worked at both the BBC and EMI.
Maggie works closely with composers, negotiating contracts, producing, music supervising and co-ordinating music recordings. She has worked as music producer, co-ordinator and supervisor on many high profile films scores including ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’, ‘A United Kingdom’, ‘Denial’, ‘Everest’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Boxtrolls’, ‘Belle’, JulIain Temple’s London ‘A Modern Babylon’, ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’, ‘Third Person’, ‘Anna Karenina’, ‘Brave’, ‘Cabin in the Woods’, ‘Thor’, ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘My Week with Marilyn’, ‘W.E.’, ‘The King’s Speech’, ‘The First Grader’, ‘Atonement’, ‘Gosford Park’, ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’, ‘Beyond the Sea’, ‘Pride & Prejudice’, ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’, ‘Miss Potter’, ‘Igor’, ‘The Soloist’ and ‘Agora’.
Maggie served as a PRS Director for many years and was an active member of the PRS Executive Board. Maggie was a member of the BAFTA Film committee for six years and is currently the Chairman of the BAFTA Archive, Heritage & Exhibition Committee.
Maggie is President for the UK & European Guild of Music Supervisors.
Duncan Smith
Vice-President
Duncan spent most of his teenage years drumming in an indie band before realising DJ’ing and throwing parties was more fun whilst studying for a Philosophy degree at Middlesex University.
He went on to work in A&R and artist management, where he signed and developed Kosheen, who’s debut album went on to sell over half a million copies worldwide.
Duncan then became Promotions Manager at ZZonked PR – playing a key role in launching the likes of Gorillaz, Mark Ronson, Kanye West and Amy Winehouse in the UK.
In 2007 he joined Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe as Music Supervisor and now heads up the team that licenses commercial music and commissions bespoke composed music for games produced by PlayStation Worldwide Studios, such as Gran Turismo, Dreams, WipEout and Little Big Planet. He also works on PlayStation’s global advertising campaigns.
Duncan also runs the popular sync industry networking event, Sync Drinks, founded Synced In, the portal for advertising job opportunities within the UK sync world, and speaks regularly at events and conferences worldwide.
Duncan is Vice President as well as being in charge of co-ordinating panels and guest speakers on behalf of the UK & European Guild Of Music Supervisors.
Iain Cooke
Co-Head of Education & Events
Iain Cooke is an award-winning and EMMY nominated freelance music supervisor for film & TV and has supervised over 20 feature films including Asif Kapadia’s Oscar and BAFTA-winning feature documentary AMY about the life and untimely death of Amy Winehouse as well as Asif’s documentary feature on Diego Maradona; Eran Creevy’s Collide starring Anthony Hopkins & Ben Kingsley; Desert Dancer starring Freida Pinto; Debbie Tucker Green’s Second Coming with Idris Elba for Film4; Funny Cow starring Maxine Peake; and Oasis: Supersonic about the Gallagher brother’s rise to fame from unsigned band to their monumental Knebworth gigs.
Iain also supervised the TV adaptation of Hanna for Amazon (series 1 & 2); Gangs of London, a 10 part thriller written and directed by Gareth Evans for Sky Atlantic & HBOMax; Informer, a six-part thriller for BBC/Amazon; the four-part animated adaptation of Watership Down for BBC/Netflix; and the 8 part adaptation the Alex Rider books for Amazon.
Iain’s other TV supervision credits include John le Carré’s multi-EMMY nominated The Night Manager, series 3 & 4 of Golden Globe & EMMY nominated Luther starring
Abi Leland
Co-Head of Education & Events
Abi is the founder and managing director of Leland Music and Leland Originals.
Starting out in her teenage years working as a runner in film production and compiling albums for record labels, Abi progressed into music supervision at the age of nineteen. She quickly established herself as one of the UK’s leading feature film music supervisors working with renowned directors including Kevin Macdonald on the award-winning films “Touching The Void”, “The Last King of Scotland” and “How I Live Now”.
Branching out into commercials and brands, in 2005 Abi set up Leland Music. The early days saw her establish the company working on celebrated campaigns for Sony, Nike, Lloyds and Honda. She has also supervised every John Lewis Christmas campaign since 2010, with the music being a key part of their highly anticipated launch each year.
Fast forward to today and Abi has built a unique and highly-esteemed music supervision team working closely with some of the world’s most successful filmmakers. Sister company Leland Originals sits alongside Leland Music, representing a roster of established and emerging Film & TV composers.
Recent credits include Nike ‘You’re It’, Netflix docuseries ‘Formula 1: Drive To Survive’, Netflix drama series ‘Top Boy’, and the forthcoming Steve McQueen directed BBC series ‘Small Axe’.
Ruth Simmons
Head of Membership
For nearly 40 years, Ruth has been looking at ways to make music work better in the branding and marketing arena.
In traditional music supervision terms, she is often described as an outlier, always pushing the boundaries to understand how and why music is selected. Soundlounge was one of the first companies in the music industry to address the complexities of licensing copyright music for advertising and is proud of a list of firsts- the first company to license artists like The Beatles, Madonna, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and many many more. These were artists who in synch history said no before they had read the script! Her alumni of people in the industry that she has trained reads like a who’s who in sync. In 2015 she was awarded “Outstanding Contribution to Synch” by Music Week.
All these years later, Ruth is still continuously reviewing the whole process of music acquisition and the rationales for the choice. Today whilst creative is still and should be king, brands are also asking will this music help me sell the product? It took Ruth until 2002 to publicly pose, what seems now to be an obvious question, you know what your brand looks like, but do you know what it sounds like? It was John Bartle OBE, former Chairman of BBH, who said.” That’s all very interesting Ruth, but can you measure it? It took a while, but now Ruth leads a team at Soundlounge that can. Today, every playlist presented by the company is measured for the effectiveness of the music with brand fit in relation to consumer response, to give clients insight as to how all this impacts on ROI.
Ruth is still passionate about what she does. “The day that I am not excited about coming into work, is the day that I retire” is still her mantra.
Specialties: Creative Music Research, Negotiation and Licensing of Music and Artist Rights, Sonic Strategy, Music Production and Sound Evaluation.
Ruth is Head of Membership for the UK & European Guild of Music Supervisors.
Matt Biffa
Head of European Outreach
Matt is a Music Supervisor, specialising in source music research and copyright clearance.
After buying T-Rex’s “Ride A White Swan”, Matt began stealing from his parents’ record collection and watched taped episodes of “The Old Grey Whistle Test” more times than was strictly healthy for an impressionable young mind. He spent his seventeenth year listening to nothing but Tom Waits’ “Rain Dogs” and “Swordfishtrombones”, something he is convinced is responsible for his belief that Radiohead’s “Kid A” is a nice pop record.
Matt joined Air-Edel in 1996. He was quickly recognised as something of an anorak / musical know-all, and cut his creative teeth sourcing music for commercials, such as Jonathan Glazer’s “Guinness – Swimblack” campaign. During this time he began cultivating relationships with key members of the music industry, an activity also known as “ligging”. This stood him in good stead when he began clearing songs for feature films, but did nothing for his health. As well as having a disturbingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of popular music, he has garnered a reputation for being a canny negotiator.
He considers one of the high points of his career to be “Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire”, for which he put together a wizarding rock group consisting of Jarvis Cocker from Pulp, and Jonny Greenwood and Philip Selway from Radiohead. He’s also very quietly proud of being the man responsible for putting Nick Cave’s “O Children” in a Harry Potter film.
Rupert Hollier
Co-head of Sponsorship
Rupert Hollier is the Creative Director of Atlantic Screen Music, and supervision agency, Redfive. Ru started life in music Publishing at MCS in 1999, moving on to Kingstreet Media in 2002 where he worked on brands and advertising for clients such as Desmond Childs and Fleetwood Mac. Ru left Kingstreet in 2004 to become a freelance music supervisor, working on many high level advertising campaigns with brands including Marks & Spencer, Nike, as well as the Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
In 2009 joined Imagem Music, specialising in film & TV synchronisation. During his time at Imagem, he represented the Rodgers & Hammerstein and Boosey & Hawkes catalogues, as well as numerous artists and bands on the contemporary roster including Daft punk, Mark Ronson, Pink Floyd, Vampire Weekend, Genesis and The Stone Roses. During his five-year tenure Rupert worked with brands such as Reebok, Skoda, Next, Iceland, Hyundai and Tesco amongst others, and several successful US, UK and European based films.
He joined Metropolis Group in 2014 as Creative Director and founded the publishing division (Metropolis Music Publishing) and quickly secured an impressive repertoire of artists, bands and composers, racking up multiple synchronisation placements and campaigns. In 2016 he won both Best TV Advert and Overall Sync of the Year,as music supervisor, at the MusicWeek Sync Awards.
Since co-founding music supervision agency Redfive, Ru has supervised films such as “The wife”, “McQueen”, “Greed”, “Worth”, and “The Silencing”, to name a few.
He has recently produced his first film based on the 50th Anniversary of the release of Sgt.Pepper, and is following that up with the soon to be released western drama, “Dry River”.
Rupert also sits as a co-founder and senior board member of The UK & European Guild of Music Supervisors.
Kate Young
Co-Head of Sponsorship
Classically trained Kate Young started her career as an in house music supervisor for Saatchi & Saatchi before setting up Soho Music in 2005.
It is her years of expertise and access to high-profile artists within the music industry, that has lead her to work on highly successful campaigns such as 02, AXE, Guinness, Nike, McLaren, Honda, Audi and Land Rover across leading advertising agencies worldwide.
Soho Music has won various awards for best use of existing music and composed music for TV advertising and online campaigns for Cannes Lions, Music & Sound Awards and the Music Week Awards.
Soho Music has recently developed a 7000 sq foot recording studio complex in a converted gin distillery. Today, along with Soho Music, The Gin Factory Studios is residence to a number of high profile recording artists and record producers. Young has also been responsible for setting up Soho Music Publishing last year.
Advisory Board
Nick Angel
Independent
Nick Angel was director of A&R for Island Records from 1990-99 where he signed PJ Harvey, Elbow, Pulp, Vic Reeves, Talvin Singh, The Orb, Jah Wobble, Apache Indian and Lewis Taylor.
He also organised music for films including Young Americans, In the Name of the Father, Face and Notting Hill. From 1999, he became head of music for Working Title, supervising everything from Billy Elliot, Atonement, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Outside projects included The Take, Attack the Block and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Recent projects include Paddington, Yardie (Idris Elba’s first film as a director), Bridget Jones Baby, Eye In The Sky and Grace Jones Documentary.
Nick has a publishing company, Salvation Music, and is a founder of Raindog Films, the new production company set up by Colin Firth.
Ed Bailie
Leland Music & Head of the Unions Committee
Ed Bailie is a music supervisor & director at Leland Music and Leland Originals.
With a background in music publishing, Ed previously headed up the UK sync teams at both Blue Mountain Music (U2, Bob Marley, Toots & The Maytals, Kano, John Martyn etc) and Bug Music (Johnny Cash, Bruno Mars, Kings of Leon, The National, Grizzly Bear etc).
In 2016 + 2017 Ed was awarded Advertising Music Supervisor of the year at the Music Week Sync Awards.
Music supervision highlights include television series Top Boy (Netflix), Formula 1: Drive To Survive (Netflix), Small Axe (dir. Steve McQueen), multi-awarding winning advertising campaigns John Lewis ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ & ’The Bear & The Hare’, Paralympics ‘We’re The Superhumans’ and feature films ‘Ronaldo’ (dir. Anthony Wonke) and Christmas In A Day (dir. Kevin Macdonald).
Ed is Head of the Unions Committee at The UK and European Guild of Music Supervisors.
Jacquie Perryman
Periscope Music & Media Ltd
Jacquie is a bilingual (French) creative and business music executive with experience in production, creative, sync, branding and marketing in worldwide creative industries spanning Film, Television, Music, Theatre, Music Publishing and Digital Media. She lived for many years in Europe and the U.S. working with record labels (EMI, Virgin, Arista and Universal), producing and signing soundtracks and working in sync and music supervision. Pro-active, responsible, enthusiastic team player with recognised leadership. communication and negotiating skills, great contacts, and an excellent reputation in the industry.
She has experience at all levels from running a music division at 20th Century Fox (in L.A) to start-up companies, and working with indie films and artists.
Jacquie is an active member of BAFTA and, following a 7 year supervision position at Fox Music, and a couple of years consulting for various companies, she formed Periscope Music & Media in 2011 which consults, supervises, manages writers and represents a major U.S. publishing rights holder.
Jacquie is a highly regarded music industry veteran who’s knowledge in supervision is only matched by the very best in the business.
Jacquie also manages European outreach with Matt Biffa.
Dominic Bastyra
Wake The Town
Dom has worked in the music industry for over fifteen years. He began working for independent Labels Ultimate Dilemma, & Talkin Loud, and then Sony Music’s college department as the regional scout for the South Coast Of England where he was responsible for promoting Sony artists to student radio and press across the region. He then moved to Universal Island records in the A&R department, as a scout tasked with finding new acts/ bands and developing them, at the same time he also set up the Island records college initiative overseeing 26 student reps over the country.
After leaving Island records he moved in the world of Sync & Brands joining TBWA/stream, Omnicom’s brands entertainment arm as a music supervisor, he then went to BBDO to set up the stream/AMV division in 2005. In 2007 he left to join Platinum Rye Entertainment and run its UK division working with clients all across Europe, including overseeing all of P&G music buying and music activations for western Europe across all the P&G portfolio.
In 2016 he left PRE with all his colleagues to set up their own shops called Wake the Town & Theodore. They have a team of 10 people and specialise in any and all aspects of Brands engagement with music.
Sarah Bridge
Independent
Sarah is an independent music supervisor for film & TV.
She studied at the University of Arts London focusing on the history of cinema, script writing, music in film and the development of popular culture through both art forms and has since enjoyed a portfolio career that has evolved from music journalism to music supervision via A&R management.
Her credits include Oscar and multi award winning “The Theory of Everything” (Director: James Marsh) “X+Y/Brilliant Young Mind” (Director: Morgan Matthews), “Ab Fab, The Movie” (Director: Mandie Fletcher) and 8-Part TV drama “Glue” for which she was awarded both UK and International Music + Sound awards for best use of existing music in a TV show.
Sarah’s latest projects include:
– 6-part Sky Atlantic/Showtime drama entitled “Guerrilla” created and directed by Academy award winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) starring Idris Elba, Freida Pinto, Babou Ceesay, Nathaniel Martello-White and Denise Gough
– Feature film adaptation of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker prize winning novel “The Sense of an Ending” (Director: Ritesh Batra) starring Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling and Emily Mortimer
– Feature film “Goodbye Christopher Robin” (Director: Simon Curtis) starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald
– Feature film “Fighting with my Family” (Director: Stephen Merchant) starring Dwayne Johnson, Vince Vaughn, Nick Frost, Florence Pugh
Karen Elliott
Warner Bros.
Karen is the co-owner and founder of HotHouse Music formed in 2002, alongside her business partner Becky Bentham.
The HotHouse team are equally at home working with large American crews on Hollywood scores as taking care of smaller British productions and recording in Eastern Europe. They are able to place teams of any nationality to work in any country.
HotHouse provide requirements common to most score recordings (studio, engineer, equipment hire, musicIains, arrangers, music editors, conductors, programmers, copyists, writing rooms) and much more besides. They also supply experienced PAs and runners and take care of all the day to day requirements of the crew including accommodation, transport and entertainment.
HotHouse’s vast list of contacts allow ease of song clearance worldwide and its creative team can provide you with endless ideas for your film soundtrack. HotHouse can also work to secure a soundtrack deal for your film. There are numerous other services HotHouse provide which fall into the music supervision category. Not least is the organisation of any pre-records your film may need. As well as putting together the recording team and musicIains we can provide musical coaching for members of your cast, find appropriate musicIains and established artists for on camera work, supervise any music teams required on set and monitor on camera sync issues. HotHouse can also assist with the sourcing of specialist musical instruments for on camera use.
Matt Kaleda
Independent
Matt cut his sync teeth working at BBC Television in the Music Copyright department during the late 90’s, he was the closest thing BBC Drama had to an in-house music supervisor back then, responsible for the music licensing in all of BBC TV Drama programming, including household-name shows such as EastEnders, Dr Who and Holby City.
He then had the opportunity to run the sync licensing department at cutting-edge record label Ninja Tune, where he had a very successful few years placing the label’s catalogue in numerous advertising campaigns, films, TV shows and video games around the world. Warner Music prized him away to try and replicate that success, employing Matt as Head of Creative Sync, and after a stint there he then went on to set up the music supervision company Sync Inc (working on TV series such as Luther series 1 and 2, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Ricky Gervais’ Life’s Too Short, ad campaigns for brands such as Nike, Nokia, Fiat and Toyota and the feature films Blitz (starring Jason Statham and Paddy Considine) and Dummy (starring Aaron Taylor Johnson)).
After a stint at long-running Soho-based music supervision company FELT MUSIC, Matt finally went off on his own and is currently working on a handful of high profile TV series.
Dan Neale
Native Music
Dan is Managing Director of Native Music, he has worked in or around the advertising and music industries for nearly twenty years. Dan’s background as an agency TV Producer and then advertising composer led to him bringing the skills together and spending just over six years as Head of Music at RKCR/Y&R. While there he brought a focus to the role of music in many of their campaigns.
In 2013 he set up Native and in that time has supervised projects of all sizes for clients such as M&S, Lloyds Bank, BBC Sport, Honda, Virgin Atlantic and many more. Some of Native’s recent and most well known work includes BBC Rio Olympics campaign featuring Jamie N Commons, M&S Food’s use of “Rather Be” by Clean Bandit, and M&S Christmas 2016 “With Love” – with a score composed by Rachel Portman.
Ian Neil
Sony Music
Ian’s extensive knowledge and experience of music and the industry is vast. His expertise in researching tracks and handling music clearances and problems solving budgetary issues, in addition to his strong ties with all the major and independent record labels and publishers has inevitably has made him one of the the first ports of call for all the a number of film directors and producers. Before becoming an independent Film Music Supervisor Ian built his strong reputation through his work as Head of Film and TV for Polygram Records; Head of Film, TV and Advertising and ultimately Director of the department at Warner/Chappell Music Ltd. With many successes in the world of music for advertising.
On the film side, Ian’s first film as supervisor was Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, which resulted in a double platinum soundtrack and a strong collaboration with Brit director Guy Ritchie and producer Matthew Vaughn. Ian was therefore Ritchie’s and Vaughn’s first choice for the follow up feature Snatch and Ian has worked together on all other subsequent films they have both made. From 2004 he went freelance and has enjoyed huge success as a Music Supervisor with credits from Control (Anton Corbin) Joe Strummer: The Future Is Written (Julien Temple) Kidulthood & Adulthood (Noel Clarke) Kick Ass (Matthew Vaughn) & 127 Hours (Danny Boyle) and included TV shows such as Red Riding for Revolution Films and Skins for Company Pictures.
Ian is now at Sony Music as Director of Film & TV and has continued to see success in the world of advertising, TV, films and computer games. He also continues to run a freelance music supervision consultancy and works on few carefully chosen projects each year.
Most recently; Kingsman 1 & 2 (Matthew Vaughn) Eddie The Eagle (Dexter Fletcher) , High Rise & Free Fire (Ben Wheatley) Sunset Song & Quiet Passion (Terence Davies).
Gary Welch
Independent
Gary is an independent film music supervisor specialising in feature films and documentaries.
He won Film Music Supervisor of the Year at the Music Week Sync Awards in 2016 and has been nominated for Best Music Supervision for a Documentary at the 2017, 2018 and 2019 Guild of Music Supervisors Awards.
His work has seen collaborations with leading directors such as Werner Herzog, Kevin Macdonald, Edgar Wright and Sophie Fiennes. Film credits include ‘Northern Soul’ (winner of Best Film at 2015 NME Awards), Oscar-nominated short film ‘Pear Cider and Cigarettes’, and ‘The More You Ignore Me’ an adaptation of Jo Brand’s novel set in the 1980s. Gary has worked on many music documentaries including ‘Whitney’ and ‘Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars’ both of which were shortlisted for Grammy Awards in 2019.
Starting out in the music industry in 1994 via record distribution, he went on to work in club promotion and label management. Eventually joining PRS for Music in 2008 and then into sync licensing within music publishing. In the past Gary has also been an active DJ, club promoter and radio presenter.
THE ROLE & CRAFT
A professional music supervisor is employed to oversee various aspects of music related elements of a project or production, such as film, television, gaming, advertising, trailers, interactive media or theatre. Their responsibilities include but are not limited to; coming up with and developing creative ideas to enhance the visual media; collaborating with directors / producers / editors / music editors / executive producers / writers etc; negotiating and securing all legal rights of the music, prior to it being used; managing all financial aspects and budgets of the music line; delivering to deadlines; managing and coordinating music related talent including composers and on-camera performances; assisting in the composer selection process, negotiating composer agreements on behalf of production, communicating with, and keeping the composer updated on source related matters and assisting in the process through to scoring and mixing; finalising of all paperwork for delivery including cue sheets, musician / singer agreements and fully executed music licences.
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