Sound & Vision

When bands are asked to cite their influences, they'll often start working their way through a rather predictable list of the musical great and good of the last half century. Ask Sheffield electronic pioneers In The Nursery who their influences are however, and you'll receive a somewhat different response. Since they started making music in the early 1980s, twin brothers Nigel and Klive Humberstone have been as much inspired by film-makers like Jean Cocteau and Fritz Lang as they have been by the music of their contemporaries.

The band first started to explore cinematic territory with their 1987 album Stormhorse. "We'd always been interested in the association between film and music," says Nigel, "so as a means of inspiration, we treated the album as a soundtrack to an imaginary film."

Subsequent releases continued this cinematic theme, and in 1993 In The Nursery composed their first soundtrack proper, for the film An Ambush of Ghosts. In 1996, they were offered the chance to write the score for a one-off screening of German expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the Metro Cinema in Derby. The response to this was so good that a tour of cinemas followed, and further offers flooded in.

Since then, the brothers have scored an eclectic selection of silent classics, from Dziga Vertov's Soviet documentary Man With a Movie Camera (1929) to the Japanese melodrama A Page of Madness (1926). "We pick films that we're inspired by," says Nigel, "although at the same time, we have to do films that people are aware of already in some way."

Their latest score, for Carl Theodor Dreyer's masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, was premièred with the film at Sheffield Cathedral as part of April's Sensoria Festival. It has since taken the band on a tour of Europe, providing live accompaniment to screenings in London, Leipzig and Kosovo. The film, released in 1928, tells the story of the trial and martyrdom of the eponymous French saint in 1431. Based on original transcripts of the court proceedings, it features a stunning, emotionally-charged performance by the actress Maria Falconetti as Joan. "It may be the finest performance ever recorded on film", wrote the critic Pauline Kael.

"There's no hamming or no melodrama or anything like that, which is unusual for a film of that period. It's just a very vivid piece," says Nigel. "You get so drawn into the character and the storyline that you really feel her anguish."

He admits that until 18 months ago, the band knew very little about Dreyer's film. The process of composition involved watching the footage once or twice to get an idea of where the visual cue points were going to be, then going away and working on the music independently. "We write music with the images in our heads. When we've got a few different pieces, we go back to the film and start marrying them up to the images."

In The Nursery's tour with The Passion of Joan of Arc took them last month to the Dokufest Festival in the town of Prizren in newly-independent Kosovo. The musicians had visited the festival before, in 2006, with Man With a Movie Camera. "We were constantly asked if we thought that things had changed in the two years since we were last there," remembers Nigel. "But very little has changed. The people are still very friendly; the KFOR (international peacekeeping) troops are still there."

Perhaps because of their country's troubled history though, the Kosovan audience responded particularly strongly to the screening. "I think that they really related to the persecution of Joan by the Church. It's a very intense film."

So which other silent classics would In The Nursery like to score in future? "I'd like to do one for Metropolis one day," says Nigel, "but we're conscious that lots of other musicians have done it already." One thing that he can definitely rule out is silent comedy, which wouldn't fit with the band's orchestral sound. "I don't think we could ever do a score for a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin film. Our approach to music just isn't right."

Kieron Clark

In The Nursery's soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc is released on iTunes on 15th September and on CD on 29th September.

www.inthenursery.com