Arthur Sharpe

The often quirky, occasionally eerie, and sometimes somber music of Arthur Sharpe -- an Ivor Novello Award-winning Japanese-English composer for film and TV -- regularly graces the directed work of his brother, Will. Their collaborative projects include the acclaimed 2016 black comedy series Flowers and the 2021 feature-length film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. Although his career is primarily soundtrack-based, he has punctuated it with the release of low-key indie folk material both as a solo artist and as part of the group Arthur in Colour. Sharpe spent some of his early life in Tokyo before his family moved back to London. He later attended Edinburgh University, composing music for numerous shows performed by Cambridge Footlights, the amateur dramatic society of which his brother, Will, was president. Among those which reached the Edinburgh Fringe festival was the sketch show Grow Up. Next, Sharpe provided music for the 2009 short film Gokiburi, co-directed by his brother and Tom Kingsley, before co-scoring the same pair's BAFTA-winning debut feature, 2011's Black Pond, alongside Ralegh Long. In May 2012, Sharpe self-released a melancholy but playful solo album, ...and then I lost my voice, before November brought the Malatrophy EP, the debut release by Arthur in Colour. Fronted by Sharpe, this indie quintet also featured his brother alongside Lewis Bremner, the actress Helen Cripps, and costume designer Lizzie Owens. Kingsley and Will's next feature film, April 2016's The Darkest Universe, was also co-scored by Sharpe and Long and featured performances by the Navarra String Quartet. Flowers debuted that same month, delivering Sharpe's music to the widest audience to that point and bringing him two key awards: an RTS Craft & Design Award for Best Original Music for the first series, and the Best Television Soundtrack Ivor Novello Award for its second. Amongst this acclaim, to comparatively no fanfare, Arthur in Colour released their debut LP, 2017's Nocturnalism. The following year, Sharpe scored The Lost Films of Bloody Nora, a short film written and directed by actress Sophia Di Martino (also his brother's partner). Prestigious TV work ensued, beginning with the score to Lorna Martin and Sharon Horgan's 2018 Dublin-set sitcom Women on the Verge before he contributed music to the first series of Kingsley's popular BBC comedy Ghosts. Sharpe's next project, the scoring of Neil Forsyth's inaugural BBC Scotland drama Guilt, overlapped with time spent composing for his brother's next feature film, 2021's The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. Before the end of the year, another collaborative effort between the siblings had aired, the darkly comic TV miniseries Landscapers.
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