Starstruck is a rom-com carrying the torch for the classics. Now in its third season on Max, it follows the foibles of Jessie, a 20-something New Zealander in London who hooks up with a random man on New Year’s Eve and later discovers he’s a movie star with Tom Cruise-level fame. Created and directed by Rose Matafeo, who also stars, it hits all the most perfect notes of the Nora Ephron classics of the 1990s, heartwarming and beautifully witty. And a large part of its tone is shaped by its soundtrack—boppy and bright piano jazz that sometimes bursts into electronic drums and blasts of synths, like a rom-com from the future.
The music is made by Matthew Simpson, aka Segal, whose film and TV scores double as fascinating electronic albums that can stand alone in a playlist. Perhaps best known to a certain cohort for making the music for Skins, the quintessential UK teen series from the late 2000s, or perhaps providing the synthesizer ambience for the Zac Efron rave movie We Are Your Friends, Segal’s Starstruck soundtrack is a study in his own versatility, traversing jazz, techno, ambient, and more. “At first, I was wondering why they called me in honestly, because they told me they wanted a sort of jazz soundtrack,” he says. “I almost was like, ‘Have you heard my previous work? Because I’m not musically trained at all.’”
Yet part of Segal’s brilliance is his try-things-and-break-stuff mentality; he brings a contemporary club sensibility to television and imbues his cinematic sense to his beats, though he is still somewhat obscure (he says he’s still looking for an agent, publisher, and other representation). Ahead of the Starstruck soundtrack’s release (sometime later this year or early next), Segal spoke with Pitchfork over Zoom from his home to the southwest of London, in a town old and quaint enough to have been written about by Dickens.
Segal: When I first met Rose [Matafeo], she was actually lying horizontally on a sofa. They were filming, and she was so tired, she didn’t even get up. I make fun of her about this all the time, but she just lay literally on a sofa the whole time. After the interview, I thought, Well, she didn’t even get up, so this is not going to happen. I’ll just try to write something like this and send them some demos. Listening to them now, it’s quite funny because they’re very somber for a romantic comedy. They were like, “We really liked the sound you’ve got, but it’s kind of sad. Do you know When Harry Met Sally? That kind of score.” Which is amazing, and made it more intimidating.
It’s gotten easier working with Rose because we’ve become good friends. For series one, I limited myself intentionally to just piano and a bit of drums and upright bass, but all on the computer. For the second series, I started buying stuff—Starstruck has turned me into an analog guy. We have this really organic piano, and then I fed it through all sorts of stuff. I had this really warm sound that I was happy with. Then I was like, What if I started putting in the cheapest synth sound I could make? I always liked aggressively digital, almost horrible-sounding synths [laughs]. For series three, I was getting obsessed with Vangelis. I think all producers my age are obsessed with Blade Runner and watching videos on how he did soundtracks.
One thing I should mention is that normally with a TV show, you respond to the picture. On Starstruck, I didn’t do that, and I think it has worked really well for the show. I wrote loads of stuff beforehand, and then we took that and put it to picture. The editor had it and the picture evolved at the same time. I’ve done a lot of scoring to picture and it’s fine, but it makes me quite conservative in terms of how I write. You don’t want to interrupt anything good. But for series three of Starstruck, there’s a lot of flourishes in there, like a Vangelis solo on top of a jazz piano piece. I’m an album recording artist masquerading as a composer. I like that approach of having the shackles off before the picture arrives.
That track is called “Imaginary Starstruck Episode in Space.” I would always joke to Rose in series two, “I think you should set an episode in space.” That track is kind of tongue in cheek: ooh, look, Blade Runner on top of jazz score! But actually it’s my favorite track in the whole series. And even though it started as a joke, it’s the one they used on the trailer in the UK, so everyone asks me about it. I’m glad to be releasing it, because I’ve been so bad with releasing stuff, it’s kind of embarrassing.
When I was a kid, I was drumming in bands and I ended up singing in bands because I was one of the more confident boys. Around the time I went to university, about 2006, it became viable to make music on a laptop to a decent standard. You had Logic coming out, Reason. Reason was the software I started on. I wish I could use Reason now. I was an English student—obviously not a music student. I started making tracks—I remember the first one I made was literally three notes repeating. After four repetitions, I changed one of the notes and I was like, I can’t believe this. It was so rudimentary, but I couldn’t believe that I could export this track, and it was mine.
I went to university and started making tracks with some of the people that were on my course. One of those people was a young writer called Jamie Brittain, who had had this idea for this show called Skins. I was so cynical as a kid. I was just like, “What are you talking about? Come to your lectures, stop pretending you’re writing a TV series.” But the idea got picked up, and he started saying to me, “I really like your recent tracks, you should come and meet the producers of this TV show.” I said no for a long time, because I was worried. I wasn’t a musician. [The producers] wanted the Streets.
Yeah, that's at least what they told me. But I had a demo CD—it was literally a CD, burnt on my computer. When I came to meet them, they liked it, and they said do you want to try and write the theme? That was the first gig I had.
It’s so weird for me to hear that bit of music. I did it for six years. Around the fifth and sixth series, it starts to sound like me—I can still recognize that music as me now. But I had this saboteur attitude towards it. I would make these tracks and then I would intentionally compress them wrong. It was bad in hindsight, but I had this punk attitude. I really tried to trash the track at the end. And that’s probably down to a little bit of impostor syndrome. But yeah, Skins was a big hit here.
Honestly, I would not have believed you, but I met a girl in my local pub, and someone told her that I did the Skins music. She was like, “I love your music, my mate used to have it as a ringtone.” I’m not used to that. That’s the thing with Skins: It had such a reach. There were lots of people watching that show that should not have been watching it.
Totally. There was a backlash against that. There was a comedian, Stewart Lee, and I remember him saying Skins just made me feel so alienated that all these kids were having so much fun. The thing I love about Skins—I think people don’t quite appreciate this—it really was made by kids. I mean, I was 20 years old when I started working on that show. The writers—[Oscar-winning actor] Daniel Kaluuya, he was a child. He was writing scripts at 16 years old, or maybe younger. Obviously there were grownups doing a bit of graft behind the scenes, but it was kids doing the soundtrack and writing the scripts, for good or for bad. If you look at the legacy and how many of those actors and writers have gone on to do great things? It was such a great opportunity. I didn’t even realize at the time, it was such a good school to learn how to do the craft.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I was listening to one of the tracks the other day and I am quite proud, actually, that some of those tracks that I made for the club scenes were good. I honestly did every club scene, pretty much, because they could afford some good music, but they couldn’t afford to do club scenes. When I go back to listen to some of those tracks, I’m thinking, This is really experimental music to have been on the TV.
I honestly didn’t think that I was going to be able to do the jazz stuff. I’m a metalhead. I was a Deftones, Tool kid. Ambient music is an interesting one—I was obsessed with Future Sound of London, the mystery of them. That they never gave straight interviews, all that stuff that teenagers love, and from FSOL I got into Drexciya. I saw Dopplereffekt live once and it was almost tearful for me. I love Steve Reich, I listen to him all the time, and I love Mastodon. I don’t really think about the genre.
Yeah, a lot of the tracks in Skins are kind of jungly tracks—me and Jamie Brittain love Venetian Snares, like the Hungarian album, Born Under a Bad Star [Rossz Csillag Alatt Született], where he takes Elgar and Bartók and puts the Amen break underneath. It’s the angriest album I’ve ever heard in my life and I love it. I was trying to do that probably for one whole series of Skins. I love Surgeon, the UK producer, as well. He does improvised modular techno live.
I suppose I’ve never really thought about it in terms of genre. I feel like I was an electronic music producer who got sidetracked into doing soundtracks. I’d really like to do an electronic album, or a doobie jazz album.
[Director] Max Joseph was a Skins fan, basically. That score was made in two weeks, start to finish. It was really intense. At the time, I was like, I’ve just scored a Hollywood film, I’ve made it. But you know what happened when that came out? I had friends of mine texting me going, I’m so sorry to hear about that film. It was front page news in the UK, how badly the film did at the box office, because people love hearing about that stuff. So it was kind of weird, but I do think it’s very unfair that that film got that reputation. It genuinely comes from a place of love. Max is a huge electronic music head, and he just loves that kind of music and wanted to make a movie about it.
I think the reason you and I liked it was one of the reasons that the bro EDM community was like, “That’s not how you do it.” Dude, it’s not for you, just go on Reddit and leave me alone.
