Musician Niraj Chag has composed music for everything from documentary soundtracks to West End musicals. His recent credits include the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of The Buddha Of Suburbia - adapted by Emma Rice and Hanif Kureishi from the latter’s 1990 novel - and Rifco Theatre Company’s musical, Frankie Goes To Bollywood. Niraj stepped out of the recording studio to tell What’s On about his creative practice and his journey to success...

How did you get involved in the RSC’s The Buddha Of Suburbia, Niraj?
Emma Rice contacted me - I worked with her on a musical called Wah! Wah! Girls. I remember The Buddha Of Suburbia on TV growing up, so I was really excited about the project. 

You've worked across multimedia: film, TV, radio and dance... Do you have a favourite medium to work in?
Every medium gives me something different, but I think if I were to choose, I really like documentary films. In things like natural history programmes for the BBC, your music is basically telling the story... The music is also mixed much louder than in any other medium, which is always quite nice!  

How do you approach composing for theatre, in contrast with your other work?
It’s interesting - I'm taking more from film and TV composition into how I work in theatre and dance. What I'm doing more and more in the early stages is, if I have early rehearsal video or footage, I can actually score it like a film. Directors love it as well, because they can watch the scene and the music in situ. 
When you're in rehearsals, things come out - it's a more dynamic, changing beast. Instead of being a scene, it could turn into a dance segment or become a song, so it's a lot more changeable. I find if I have early rehearsal footage or some sort of visual - especially in things like dance - I can score it in time with the movement, and that really helps. 

Rifco Theatre Company’s Frankie Goes To Bollywood is coming to the Midlands in June and July - how do you park one project and move on to the next?
That's what I'm recording now - I'm doing some of the backing tracks. It’s a case of time management and having a clear schedule in terms of what you're doing, when and how you're working... Time and space management - such a boring answer, isn't it!

What’s the most challenging project you've worked on? 
They’re all so different… Wah! Wah! Girls was interesting because we were using a very unique technology which hadn't been used before. We were working in a totally new way, using stems and dynamic vamping - basically trying to have a live band without the live band! It was quite an interesting challenge. When I first started in the early to mid-90s, I had a sampler which could only record 10 seconds of audio. It’s what you do with that - amazing forms of music have come out of those limitations. Drum and bass came out of limited sampling, and that crunchy sound was because they had to reduce the quality, to get a longer sample time.
For me, limitation has become a part of my process as well, because now there's so much power - just having a laptop enables you to have power, which is so different to the power that was available in the 80s and 90s, or even the noughties. When you have a million sounds at your disposal, a part of the art becomes distilling that to what you want to use. The world's your oyster - limitation is a massive part of my process now.

What's your musical background?
I have no musical training - I'm self-taught. I was lucky enough to get into technology very early. I got kicked out of A-level music because I couldn’t read and write music. I applied for four music degrees, and all four rejected me. I grew up in Southampton, and I moved to London just to get a record deal. That was my only mission - I got into any old course, just to get to London. That was the dream. Within a year, I had a record deal, and that gave me a little bit of confidence. That's my story in a nutshell.

You clearly had the drive and knew what you wanted to be...
That was the only thing that I had. Growing up, I knew that I wanted to be a musician. My dad was passionate about music, but it was never thought of as a career path for us. My dad came from East Africa in the early 70s. My parents didn't have any education, and my dad worked on the buses and then in a factory. Those are the two jobs he had, so it was unfathomable. The idea of the arts as a career was so esoteric to my family - but there was also this dichotomy that they both loved music.

What were your musical influences?
My brother was a big influence. It's probably because of my brother that I got into music, because he had a band. His band would do Bollywood covers. Growing up in the 80s, I had a lot of Bollywood influences, because my dad was an old-school Bollywood-head. 
My mum was into very devotional music, so that was a big influence. Devotional music has this visceral power which strikes you, so it’s one of the things that always resonated with me. Then 80s pop, growing up with Prince, Michael Jackson, Jean-Michel Jarre - because that was the cutting edge of technology - to early hip-hop as well.

You've earned many accolades throughout your career - which one means the most?
I wanted to be a musician, but I didn't have any training. I didn't have the opportunity to take piano lessons; I just had to learn through osmosis how to play piano. I had to learn music theory from books in my own time. I had to learn how synthesisers work, just through reading manuals for keyboards. 
For me, the greatest accolade is that I'm able to work in this industry. 
I'm so happy and grateful that I get to do what I love every day, despite not having any technical qualifications - and probably massive imposter syndrome…
Sadly my father passed away a couple of years ago, and he loved 1940s and 50s Bollywood music - that was his thing. I never got to write anything like that for him. Doing Buddha, one of the themes is a 1940s piece of Bollywood. I got to compose what he would have been the proudest of. Part of me feels really gutted that I can't play this for him.
It was emotional, but there's a bitter-sweet quality, because it's such an upbeat, happy track. A lot of that 1940s stuff was quite optimistic and joyful, and that's what my dad liked - he liked happy music. 

What music do you turn to, when you have to unwind and get away from work?
The problem is, because I'm self-taught, I've learned through listening to music, and then deconstructing it, distilling it down. What's the harmonic component? What's the mix doing? What's the dynamic range? What's the mastering? So now if I listen to something, it's either nothing musical, or something so simple and innocuous that it doesn't trigger that response from me… It's like if you're a doctor, the last thing you want to do after eight joyful hours in the office is write prescriptions or do some diagnoses!

The Buddha Of Suburbia shows at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday 1 June